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The concept of literary posture, defined as "the unique way of occupying a 'position' in the literary field" (Meizoz 2007, 18), proves to be a valuable tool for observing the different strategies that translingual writers adopt in the French literary space, while facing some common constraints. Proposing the hypothesis of a correlation between translingual French writers' posture and linguistic imaginary, this paper distinguishes four frequent configurations, admitting of course border zones and intersections: the "defector" posture, often correlated with the critique of the country of origin; the "facilitator" posture, by which the author poses as a mediator and often a translator between the culture of origin and French; the "wandering" posture, one of reciprocal questioning of the two linguistic and national spaces, that of origin and that of arrival; finally, the posture of the "uprooted," including the refusal of a role of "ambassador" of the country of origin, advocating an "absolute" literature, free from any political constraint. The study of a few emblematic cases—Chahdortt Djavann, Simonetta Greggio, Michela Marzano, Velibor Čolić, Akira Mizubayashi—will also show that a posture can be constant or change over time and that reception plays an important role in the implementation of a postural strategy and its modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two French graphic novels which reconstruct the Transpyrenean memory of the Spanish civil war: Le Convoi by D. Lapière and E. Torrents (2013), Dolorès by B. Loth (2016). Both works reshape the narrative model of war testimony created by A. Spiegelman in Maus, where the memory of a traumatic past is transmitted between generations within the family circle (postmemory), combining both personal life story and collective History. Focusing on the narratological device of the voice, three major changes are highlighted: the non-actorialization of the author-narrator (unmaking of the autobiographical identity), the feminization of the recipient of the testimony (not a son but a daughter who listens on behalf of a silent mother), and the extension of the family circle beyond a particular family through condensation or displacement. The paper discusses these points studying the stories as well as the paratexts and argues that the specific combination of the three major changes in each graphic novel produces different ways of disjunction between the subjective and the political dimensions of trauma, in other words, between the intimate and the collective sides of History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1980s, an era in the wake of opening-up policy after the cultural revolution, witnessed an unprecedented passion for Chinese critics to read, embrace and import Western theories, among which French narrative theory deserves a particular mention. To a large extent, it is French narrative theory that has led to the upsurge and explosion of Chinese narrative studies, which prevails in the 21st century. This paper, first of all, connects the boom of Chinese narrative studies with French narrative theory which was translated and warmly received in Chinese academia in the 1980s. Second, it attempts to examine the travelling, the impact and the after-life of French narrative theory in China, arguing that inspired by their French predecessors, Chinese narrative theorists have cultivated their increasing interest in the narrative form of literary works and developed Chinese narratology with special reference to Chinese narrative traditions. Third, it investigates how Chinese narratologists foster theoretical dialogues with their French colleagues by challenging and revising some narratological concepts. Finally, it calls for a narratology beyond French structuralism by proposing comparative and transcultural perspectives on narrative studies with the aim to draw scholarly attention to those neglected and peripheral narratives and to subvert the hegemony of Anglo-American narrative theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gilles Deleuze spends his whole life exploring the question of what philosophy is by unconventional approaches to establish the ontology of Becoming and he collaborates with Félix Guattari, integrating Chinese thought into his philosophical discourse directly to support the Becoming theory. Different from the tendency to associate Deleuze's references to Tao with the philosophy of arts or body aesthetics, this paper argues Tao is introduced because of the consistency with the multiplicity of immanence raised by Deleuze who has updated the connotation of Western philosophical concepts with the help of Tao. Therefore, Tao is no longer defined as the ultimate Being claimed by some French sinologists and philosophers, but as an internal field or the Plane. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the immanence without any certainty (the multiplicity of immanence) itself is a kind of nomadic life, which is also the real meaning of Tao. In this way, Chinese philosophy's function has far more significant than footnotes and evidence in the construction of Deleuze's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of French translations of Mao's canonical works in the 1950s and 1960s sparked interest among French-left intellectuals. This paper investigates Rancière's appropriation and reinvention of Mao's thinking as an illustration of the exchange between Maoism and contemporary French left-wing theories on literature and art. First, drawing on Mao's "mass line," Rancière values the autonomy of the people rather than the leadership of the Althusserian intellectual elites. Second, Rancière's "part of those that have no part" differs from Mao's "the people" in the concept's scope and in how they are transformed into political subjects. Third, deeply indebted to Mao's "the people's literature and art" that underscores the centrality of ordinary people and their lives, Rancière's theory of politics of literature unleashes the liberating force of art and literature for the sensible of ordinary people, and calls for overthrowing the hierarchy of class politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Lacan's infamous provocation in Seminar XVIII—"peut-être, je ne suis lacanien que parce que j'ai fait du chinois autrefois"—this paper examines the stakes of his long but fragmented engagement with Chinese writing, specifying his concerns by distinguishing them from the political dreams of his contemporaries. How does this engagement differ from the comparison or application of knowledge? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marie Darrieussecq's Notre vie dans les forêts (2017) is a science-fiction novel about cloning. Alternatively, it could be described as a notebook composed by a fugitive clone named Viviane writing before her imminent death in the tunnels constructed beneath a forest on the ghostly fringes of an unnamed city. Viviane has unplugged from this socially engineered illusion by following one of her former patients and a member of a fugitive group of scavengers and hackers who free their anesthetized clones. But, the fugitives comically struggle to prepare their clones—who just want to play—for the egalitarian, just, and liberatory future in which they hope. In this paper, I first provide a close reading of the narrative of Darrieussecq's novel, focusing on how it teaches us to read it subjunctively and contingently. I then argue that the clones' playfulness expresses an energy source resistant to exploitation. I conclude with a hypothesis: the book itself could be understood as an instance of artificial intelligence that resists exploitation because it teaches us to read subjunctively, contingently, and playfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On a piece of paper, stored in one of the two suitcases that Jean Genet gave to his lawyer two weeks before his death—a testament to what he will not have published, and which will nevertheless be published by Albert Dichy thirty-four years after his death—Genet writes: "I committed the crime of escaping crime, of escaping prosecution and its risks. I said who I was, instead of living who I was, and saying who I was, I was no longer." Through this gesture, Genet exposes a fundamental paradox: the act of writing consists of a betrayal; any medium remains at odds with the content it claims to summon. In the same way, Genet wrote that theater must be performed, not on stages, but in cemeteries and columbaria, to show how representation is above all a process of annihilation. This acute awareness of the deadly power of the medium eventually pushes Genet into an editorial—not a scriptorial—silence: he stops publishing but continues to write. This article examines the singular status of that writing and its relationship to death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henri Lopes's 1990 novel, Le Chercheur d'Afriques, embraces the post-colonial reality of multiple roots (Glissant). Much like Jazz music itself, the novel embodies the principles of la créolité outlined by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant in their 1989 work, Éloge de la Créolité. This paper will explore the rhythms, musical composition, and musical intersections that enrich and shape the novel paying particular attention to jazz music, lyrics, rhythm, and sounds embedded in the novel's structure, language, and imagery, and examine ways in which the layering music and musical references throughout the text has the power to create soundscapes, evoke emotions and memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, Agnes Varda laid bare the realities of homeless and vagrant women on screen. With its quasi-documentary style, Sans toi ni loi recounts a vagabond woman's sad, if not tragic, demise. More recently, the films Les Invisibles (2018) and Sous les étoiles de Paris (2020) have explored the experiences of homeless women. They take center stage in these films and force the viewer to confront their plights, one in a fairytale-like fiction, the other in a dramedy. This paper first outlines Varda's itinerant main character and then introduces the more recent films as reflections of current social realities. Finally, the resonance of all three films with the recent Oscar winner Nomadland, in which members of the itinerant American subculture play themselves or versions of themselves, will be addressed. The impact of these performances and the presence of those with lived experience within the narrative merit further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes using Pauline Alexis Gumbs' re-definition of "Echolocation" in Undrowned (2020) as a means of re-thinking music intertextuality in the French Rap songs analyzed here. This process aims to identify discourses across transnational music by focusing on issues pertaining to race and environmental racism in the context of the French refusal to use the socially constructed term "race" to address racial discrimination in the country. This enables French rappers to inscribe their work within a discourse that embraces this vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Christine Montalbetti's most recent novel and drawing insight from a recent round-table conversation with the author, this paper briefly considers the ways in which Ce que c'est qu'une existence (2021) takes into account or addresses pandemic-related restrictions and some of the uncertainties that shape individual and collective life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the work of Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann) interrogates genre and convention in an uncompromising way that moves significantly beyond the generic interrogation conducted by most contemporary writers. It suggests that one productive way to think about his work is to think about it not in terms of traditional genres at all, but through the kind of cross- and multi-genre tonal corpora that recently have cropped up as an alternative to genre, such as Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's notion of the Weird. It goes on to think about the relationship Volodine's work does or does not have to science fantasy, a defunct subfield of science fiction which on paper seems to have a great deal in common with his work. I discuss the parameters of Volodine's work in relation to Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, and Cordwainer Smith. I speak in particular about his deformation of place names, his creation of new genres that only he uses (the narrat, etc.), and the significance of the fascination of a defunct light switch in Lutz Bassmann's Avec les Moines-Soldats, as a way of opening up a different sense of what Volodine's work accomplishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the power of online virtual monopolies (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and similar companies) to influence and nudge (or even control) our behavior for financial or political gain which goes beyond anything we could have imagined even less than ten years ago. The massive amount of personal data and real time tracking have moved the traditional advertising practices to another level. The power of these private, unregulated, unaccountable, opaque entities has been noticed by governments and, in some cases, they are trying to pair up with them, or to put some kind of regulation. I argue that the manipulations go way deeper than the so called "fake news" phenomenon which gained popularity after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The reality appears to be more sinister. These companies are using the latest research in human perception, and secretly doing experiments on their own, thus becoming capable of building highly effective psychological predictive models to find out what, how, and when to display (or not) some specific information to the user of their products. The actions seem to move us toward a worldwide surveillance society with unprecedented and unknown long-term consequences in terms of ethical, legal, and political issues. Finally, the paper speculates on what actions may be taken to tackle these dangerous trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nafissatou Dia Diouf situates her novel, La Maison des épices (2014), in a former slave and spice counter of the same name, located in Mbour, Senegal, which has been transformed into a modern mental health center. Séga, the twenty-year-old son of Docteur Yérim Tall, was brought to the Maison des épices by his father, a psychoanalyst in charge of his own son's treatment. Séga suffers from amnesia and is unbalanced and decentered following the death of his French mother Pauline in a plane crash which he survived. This paper examines Séga's journey as he navigates and negotiates plural identities (Serge T... Louis... Séga) in search of his true lost identity. The mix of modern and traditional therapies at the Maison des épices triggers Séga's re-centering and rebalancing. His plural identities take on a much bigger scope, becoming the sign of an enlarged and plural "Sénégalité," because in addition to his re-rooting in the Serer hinterland of central Senegal (thanks in part to the use of a traditional psychic Wolof healing ceremony, the ndëpp), he is re-anchored by extension in mother-earth (Africa). The epigraphs prefacing each of the novel's chapters anticipate the rehabilitation and return of the African part of Séga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of aesthetics, the expression formal constraint is most often used in non-problematic ways by critics, who tend to consider it as a convenient and even redundant category, whose constitution need not be questioned. On the contrary, this paper will closely examine the lexical and conceptual association of constraint and form, to try to understand under what conditions and modalities constraints can give rise to aesthetic forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If an author's influence can be measured by the number of quotations in a newspaper, then the Oulipo can now be considered rooted in the French cultural establishment. However, this sweeping statement hides a set of more fine-grained facts. Through the analysis of literary criticism as well as articles published in the weekly magazine Télérama, this paper highlights how much friction exists between the members of the group Oulipo and the Oulipo itself. Reviewers of collectively authored works prefer to highlight the names of well-known writers' such as Roubaud, Queneau and especially Perec, who, despite his death, remains an important member of the Oulipo. Some individual books (Le Tellier, Fournel, Jouet) are reviewed but most references concern the Oulipo's performances, public readings or writing workshops, valuing their comic verve and their skillful wordplay rather than their books. In the end, the Oulipo seems to serve as reservoir of constraints' that can be deployed elsewhere, in comics, radio or the visual arts. In recent years, referring to the group has become almost a lexicalized expression synonymous with constraint or an impossible exercise, even if at the same time, Perec's position as the most famous Oulipian is under challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the aesthetic representation and criticism of mass tourism in Violette Leduc's travel diary, Trésors à prendre (1960). By analyzing a complex network of metaphors, I demonstrate that the author not only denounces the violent capitalist logic of the tourist industry, but also invents a new relationship to space that allows her to reject both the heteronormative norm imposed on women and the tourist norm imposed on space. Ultimately, I also argue that despite the dysphoric ending, Trésors à prendre represents a freeing experience for the author and offers readers an alternative way of traveling, one that understands the fragility of both nature and cultural heritage and tries to preserve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature (art) and politics are often compared and brought together, inasmuch as they both engage with, transform, and renounce the human world as it is, and as they both share—in their key moments—a world disclosing power that allows them to generate a world that was not. The events of May '68 foster a further affinity with writing: the numerous slogans—whose echo, variations, and relevance are still sensed—bear witness to a complicit pact between words (in their artistic inscription as graffiti) and political upheaval. Yet, this paper attempts to revitalize the relationship of art and politics, by drawing on Maurice Blanchot's view of literature as a sovereign—insubordinate to worldly, and political, causes—realm. With particular reference to some of Blanchot's key texts, which preceded—and foretold the success/failure of—May '68, this paper explores how literature and literary criticism become radically political in their autonomy, that is, in their turning toward (against) themselves, as forces of opposition that contest their conditions of (im)possibility. Unfolding Blanchot's idiosyncratic account of literature as 'committed non-commitment' (dégagement engagé), this paper will contend that the essence of the political as a profound refusal, as put forth by the anti-authoritarian call of May 1968, is realized in and as the experience of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the imaginary and political engagement in two experimental Francophone African works: Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki and Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie. Rather than explicating the political motives for writing and filming imaginatively, this paper analyzes the effect that experimental postcolonial fictions have on their viewers and readers. It argues that the concept of as-if imagining offers new synthetic ground between aesthetic and political projects that are often perceived to be in tension with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referring to Senancour's Oberman, Hölderlin's Hyperion and Carl David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Mists, this paper attempts to figure out the romantic approach to sky and clouds as cultural, artistic, and philosophical symbols. Considered as an unlimited space, the sky is an endless matter of meditation regarding human finitude. In several European countries, the recent experience of lockdown has revived this meditation in new terms: notable changes in the sky's appearance suggest that our environment cannot only be regarded as our property, of which we are the guardians; it requests a poetic attention that helps us face the limitless world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robin Aubert's 2017 film Les Affamés is a zombie genre film, set in an unspecified region of rural Quebec. The first Quebecois addition of note to the zombie film genre, Les Affamés follows the few remaining humans who have avoided contamination from their infected, flesh-eating pursuers. The rustic setting provides a haunting backdrop as the protagonist, a bearded science-fiction devotee named Bonin, and his five companions, attempt to flee through the woods to safety, pursued by a screaming, blood-thirsty horde of their former friends and neighbors. Les Affamés functions in large part as an allegory for rural poverty and economic isolation. Decaying farmhouses, rusting tractors, and an abandoned mine are just a few of the iconic images that invoke the real-world struggles of once-healthy agricultural and mining communities in a twenty-first-century neo-liberal economy. This paper will focus in particular on the zombie as an avatar for Quebecois and, more broadly, North American rural decay, noting how Aubert uses a zombie virus as an allegory for depopulation and economic marginalization. Indeed, the Affamés of the film's title also suggest the ravenous appetites of a capitalist system which, like the film's titular flesh-eating monsters, appears insatiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international airport is the quintessence of globalized free-market capitalism: there, the conquering of distances, fluid circulation of people and goods, advertising and consumption of products, all come together in a continuous globalized spatial network covering the earth. It is the epitome of the built, contained, climatized, homogenized, and controlled environment: at antipodes, then, with 'nature,' in the form of organically established ecologies. When farmers and activists stopped the building of a new international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France last year, the slogan of their movement was "Against the airport and its world." In this paper, I will examine and compare recent representations of the 'counter-world' the ZAD proposes in place of the airport (world-)system—as we find them in essays published in the anthology Éloge des mauvaises herbes: ce que nous devons à la ZAD (2018, including essays by David Graeber, Bruno Latour, and Virginie Despentes) and graphic novels (Pignocchi, 2019; and Azuélos and Rochepeau, 2019)—in order to evaluate to what extent the experimental ecology of the ZAD can give rise to discourses and aesthetics articulating anything 'other' than the ubiquitously reproduced logics of the 'airport,' which is to say of globalized capitalism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Austrian physician, Anton Mesmer, posited the existence of a universal fluid that surrounds, penetrates, and connects all bodies, much like the interplanetary forces of attraction and repulsion. The correct flow of this fluid, he believed, was responsible for both physical and psychic health and he developed his practice of animal magnetism as a therapy for those who experienced the ranging symptoms of its blockage. Because the fluid's existence could not be proven, however, the practice was condemned and Mesmer was banished from Paris. In this paper, I argue that the conceptions behind this invisible fluid and the notions of human-animality and material sympathy it draws upon, are prescient for ecocriticism today. Mesmer and his followers posited the permeability of bodies to flows of affection and infection that put them in necessary communication with other bodies as with their environments. As we know from our own pandemic, such contact is risky. Animal magnetism shows that it is also necessary for healing and for life itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This joint paper briefly presents research directions for a collective undertaking to examine the documents and testimonies assembled on the sites of the Paris terror attacks of November 13, 2015. This approach is guided by the conviction that these documents, including the testimonies recorded and provided for public access at the borough hall of Paris' eleventh district in the weeks following the attacks, merit the attention of literary scholars, not only because they are resources for making sense of the phenomenon of terror and the mentality of our times, but also because they constitute poetically composed objects. This article summarizes the approaches adopted by four researchers who have been examining these documents in terms of conflictualities (Martin Mégevand), places (Xavier Garnier), rhythm (Elara Bertho), and ambivalence (Aline Marchand). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2004, under the aegis of UNESCO, the ship La Boudeuse set off to visit eight societies located between South America, the Pacific Ocean, Asia, and Africa. The project led to the creation of a new series by the Éditions du Seuil: "Peuples de l'eau," where the works of the writers that participated in the journey were published, i.e., Raga by J. M. G. Le Clézio and La Terre magnétique by Édouard Glissant. The project and the books may be considered as symbols of an international revival of intellectual and literary commitment, in particular for the critic of the degradation of the world environment. The paper relates these texts to the two rhetorical-poetical poles characterizing the "ecocritical commitment" that can be observed in contemporary literatures in a European language. Thus, it is possible to observe two complementary dynamics: one denouncing the past and present devastation of Pentecost island and of Easter island, the other proposing to associate the representation of these two islands to symbols of survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper shows how Stéphane Vanderhaeghe's work goes against the grain of a literary mainstream whose most prominent authors (and literary prizes) favor autofiction or narratives re-exploring a more or less recent historical past. Instead, Vanderhaeghe's radical writing seeks to challenge the formal potentialities of literature, thus inscribing his work in the experimental traditions of Oulipo and Nouveau Roman. Charøgnards, his first published novel, opens with a twenty-page prologue written in an invented, futuristic French language. The remainder of the text functions as an unpaginated journal whose chronology is constantly re-assessed in light of the numerous rewritings to which the unreliable narrator confesses. Graphemes gradually disappear from the page, figuring the slow disappearance of language as a result of the takeover of invasive crows. The color of pages veers from white to gray before turning into black, so that the book stands out in its unique materiality. Though À tous les airs presents itself as a more traditionally manufactured book, the text proves no less experimental, through the forgoing of characters and repetitions with minor mutations. These literary practices reveal the author's singular literary identity whose ambitious nature runs the risk of alienating readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging technologies (ET) are novel and relatively fast-growing technologies that can have massive socio-economic impact and bring new ethical and regulatory challenges. Although they cannot be considered as new technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and related data driven technologies are examples of ET. AI is advancing at a rapid pace, in both public and private sectors, and being more widely deployed in different domains, including healthcare and education. In today's digital age, our societies are facing rapid and massive technological transformations. It is important to ensure that the behavior of AI systems is beneficial to humanity. Policymakers and the research community need to identify the greatest barriers to AI adoption and related risks. In recent years, Google's plans and visions to use ET gained serious and intense criticism. This situation pushed Google in March 2019 to announce an AI ethics panel which is supposed to offer guidance on ethical issues relating to AI, machine learning, and related technologies. This AI ethics panel was shut down just days after it was launched. The episode illustrates how ethical debates relating to ET are often characterized by ambiguity, dishonesty, and demagoguery. In this paper, I discuss the ethics of ET, focusing on Google and its AI platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 1973 issue of Le Fléau Social, journal of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire, warns against the fetishization of group activism: "On ne vient pas rejoindre des camarades pour se réchauffer" (no. 3, 16). If May 68 has laid bare the "no longer bearable" of France's old secular order, this unraveling has also forced its most valorous soldiers to strip down their "tuniques de Nessus" as Hocquenghem put it, and to dis/uncover their bodies until so little of their very own flesh was left. In exhuming part of Hocquenghem's corpus, this paper will trace the emergence (and the critique) of the concept of transparency as it relates to political activism, the slippage between the public and the private and its impact on queer bodies. I will argue that as a leading light of contemporary forms of (queer) liberalism, transparency played a significant role in the gradual degeneration of emerging radical queer politics in the aftermaths of the events. Indeed, some "pavés" might have been better left unturned for a reason Hocquenghem expresses in his mémoires anticipées: "L'adéquation totale (faire ce qu'on dit et dire ce qu'on fait) est un rêve totalitaire" (L'Amphithéâtre 66). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abdelkébir Khatibi (Maroc) and Dany Laferrière (Haïti–Québec) belong to different cultural areas, but share the same linguistic practice in a postcolonial context. They are also similar in their conception of writing literature in a transitional world for a global age where the novel, as a Western form in its origin and under its authority, and also as an access point to modernity for the writers of the global South, aims at a certain form of transnational order. Both of these writers reject the dogmatic definition of identity from the perspective of an origin and of a supposed secular pact between fiction and nation. This paper examines the shift between francophone global fiction by way of a "regional criticism." However, this emerging global rhetoric, recently called "littérature-monde," may appear as a new utopian paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Annie Ernaux's Mémoire de fille, and drawing insight from both a recent interview with the author and from historian Arlette Farge's work on the use of archives, this paper considers briefly how Ernaux uses her archived letters to give voice to her "former self" and to a generation of girls whose public behavior was inevitably subject to evaluation and judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gap between the singing career of Édith Piaf, a national star of international fame in the 1950s, and the thinness of her career in movies. The hypothesis to explain this shift in popular cinema, where links between film and song are many, is that there is no more room in the French cinema of the time for a “chanteuse réaliste,” unlike what can be observed in the 1930s. To test this hypothesis, the paper analyzes the imperfect matching of roles and performance of Piaf, between her star persona and her image as “chanteuse réaliste” in seven films between 1946 and 1958, focusing on the movies where she is headlining—Étoile sans lumière(Marcel Blistène, 1946)—and those where she is guest-star—Boum sur Paris(Maurice de Canonge 1953) orFrench Cancan(Jean Renoir, 1955). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes reading the sense of senses in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's first work La Structure du comportement in view of positioning language as the sixth sense. La Structure du comportement precedes his best-known work Phénoménologie de la perception1 and shows in an exemplary way that language and expression are preceded by a sense of a whole in which the expression is placed. In his first book, Merleau-Ponty is heavily indebted to Gestalttheorie and he is preoccupied with the refutation of René Descartes. The sense of a whole, named form taken from Gestalt in this first book and later named chaire, serves for the refutation of Cartesian philosophy summarized in two points of Atomism and Dualism. La Structure du comportement focuses on gestures or bodily mobility as the pre-stage of perception, in which body and mind and also language are already blended. By examining symbols or naturally founded non-arbitrary signs from animals to man, Merleau-Ponty analyzes human language as symbols by referring to examples drawn from music, painting, and literature. In this sphere of symbols, philosophy and literature are identical but belong to a different whole or form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pygmalion (the complex of Pygmalion), Balthasar (the Feast of Balthasar), and Arcimboldo (the painter) present three different models of association between "Sense and Senses" in the novelistic writing of History. This paper argues that by shifting from one model to another, the contemporary fiction of History becomes a kind of "istorical novel" (without h), which embodies the "fiduciary paradigm" at work in current times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the New Novel's rhetoric (Nouveau Roman) in order to requalify, thanks to a dialectical approach, its positive definition in a negative way. Through a philosophical critique of the novelistic discourse, the aim is to highlight the theoretical power of novels which pay attention, in a rhetorical perspective, to the body thematic, the body considered as a fundamental and full component of a subjectivity determined by material and external structures. The New Novel, analyzed first as an expression of a "sensible objectivity," gives rise to a materialist and negative dialectic and has to be understood as an immanent critique of social, political, and historical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maghrebi Studies often struggles to situate cultural production from North Africa. Some scholars advocate a Mediterranean approach, while others reposition the field along an East-West axis. Novels like Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête1 have once again foregrounded the colonial legacy, while at the same time, pop culture has taken a transnational turn. Eager to replace the nation as the primary referent, new approaches honor the multidirectional flow of texts and have recast Maghrebi cultural production as fluid. This paper proposes an interpretive frame constructed around postcolonial affinity, linking cultural production from North Africa to other postcolonial spaces. Specifically, it considers the role that Irish literature has played in post-independence Algeria. While previous studies have compared the political tactics used by anti-colonial forces in both contexts, I consider the reception and adaptation of Irish literature in modern Algeria. Joyce's Ulysses was a model for Salim Bachi's Le Chien d'Ulysse (2001); Beckett continues to be performed in Algeria; and Irish literary figures appear in novels by authors like Mustapha Benfodil. I look at how Irish texts have been reformulated by Algerians and propose a new way of thinking about intertextuality across national and linguistic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the status of the literary production originating from New Caledonia and French Polynesia, a geographical and cultural area of the Francophone world that is often silenced in current mainstream “Francophone Studies” departments. The study of four recent novels by Tahitians Titaua Peu and Ari'irau and Caledonian Déwé Gorodé serves to demonstrate that the tropes they use to re-embody their stories re-inscribe them (and themselves) within the canons of Francophone literature and within History. These women writers suffer from several levels of exclusion, as a consequence of their gender, geographical location, positions as colonized subjects, and ethnicity. They write with the voiced intention of repairing the omissions of official, male- and Western-dominated History. Ultimately, this study's aim is to sketch a multidirectional feminist trauma theory in Francophone literature—or new networks of circulating tropes across oceans, so as to give a stronger voice to the woman writer from the South Pacific within the field of Francophone studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the risks involved in creating life and literature, as represented in work by Chantal Chawaf and Camille Laurens. Focusing on Chawaf's Délivrance brisée and on Laurens’ Philippe as well as on the “scandals” surrounding their publication, and drawing insight from interviews conducted with these authors, I address briefly how various “dangers” impact the processes of birth and (literary) creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a recent novel that, at its center, is propelled by a need to understand the past, silence, and death. Boualem Sansal's 2008 novel entitled Le Village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller presents a multifaceted narrative that ultimately revolves around the well-hidden past of the Schiller family patriarch. Because the Schiller patriarch never shared his Nazi involvement with his sons, their identities are unfinished from the start. In counterpoint to Marianne Hirsch's exploration of what she has called “postmemory”—a process through which the second generation after a traumatic event is affected by it as a result of the first generation sharing personal memories and stories—I argue that this novel enacts what I term “deferred postmemory.” Rather than learning about their father's traumatic history from his own memories and stories, Rachel and Malrich discover this dark period in their father's past as adults through stumbling upon his personal war archive and later by retracing his movements from Nazi Germany to colonial Algeria. These remnants of their deceased father as well as Rachel's journal provide Malrich with the tools to understand their father's past and the significance of his father's life and death in shaping his own hybrid identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigrant identities occupy the foreground in contemporary French films such as the anthologyParis, je t'aime(Paris) andEntre les mursby Laurent Cantet, signaling the changing cultural and ethnic faces that comprise the Hexagon. Yet the portrayal of East/Southeast Asians remains atemporal, confining them to the realm of the unassimilated other. In comparison, an increasing number of individuals of black and North African heritage are gradually being profiled as more linguistically and culturally—albeit never completely—“French” as in Mathieu Kassovitz'sLa Haine, his segment inParis, je t'aime, and in Yamina Benguigui's television film seriesAïcha. Does the political environment in France with respect to immigration create a hierarchy that determines the assimilability of specific racial and ethnic groups and/or do certain characteristics of East/Southeast Asian cultures contribute to crystallizing their other-ness? In order to tackle these perplexing queries, this paper considers how residual colonial ideologies underlying identity politics and citizenship as well as sociocultural elements of Asian ethnic groups help explain the perpetuation of Far Eastern Orientalism in contemporary French cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a comparative discussion of two documentary films shot in the same format, on the Place de la République, in Paris, thirty years apart. Taking stock of what seems to have changed radically and what shows a slower evolution, it focuses on personal narratives and social trends, traveling in time through the filter of “cinéma direct.” The analysis of the two works balances a detailed discussion of selected topics that surface during the interview process, with a background of key elements of contemporary French social history (women's rights, immigration, undocumented workers, laïcité) highlighting the transformation of the political climate from the post-May 1968 era into the Sarkozy presidential campaign. Working with a ten-year perspective on the 2004 film by Gayan and a forty-year distance from Malle's original work, this study takes advantage of the combined visual/textual research approach that the documentary film genre offers anyone interested in identifying and discussing crucial aspects of permanence and transformation in contemporary French society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In what way can the special position of “witnesses from outside” and “witnesses of the aftermath” that characterizes many writers who, in the space of twenty years, have devoted works to transmit the memory of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda help redefine the notion of testimony, and above all, on what terms? To the extent that a “media memory” of the event (essentially in the form of images broadcast in the mass media in 1994) predates the work of writers, the idea is to question, from an ethical and aesthetic point of view, the potential of literary fiction to construct and transmit the memory of this event today. While updating some elements of apoethics [une poéthique]ofmediation, this paper also seeks to measure how, beyond the use of a style that can be described as iconic, certain literary works can attempt a truepassing onof memory capable of crossing time and boundaries between author and reader, others and myself, visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, giving a new dimension to the issue of testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to contribute to ethnological discourses of the contexts and personal dimensions of war and displacement. Personal stories of internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not always told as they are usually lost in statistics and media reports of humanitarian responses. This work presents a documentation of stories of IDPs recorded verbatim in IDP camps in Northeast Nigeria. It explores not only their personal stories, but also the discursive meanings they make of their displacement experience. IDPs’ personal framings of ongoing and past experiences provide a useful illumination on the often ignored impacts of the Boko Haram conflict on personal lives as well as a useful resource for humanitarian interveners. While displaced persons are drawn from diverse socio-cultural and religious backgrounds, their stories reflect common yearnings. Findings can provide a useful tool for Peacebuilders to develop conflict transformation programs in crises and post-crises societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the introduction to his 1968 bookLe Roman maghrébin, Abdelkabir Khatibi writes, “l’écrivain maghrébin est désormais confronté avec les problèmes de sa société” (10). He continues, “Tous ces textes, différents par le ton, comportent une caractéristique commune: ces écrivains étaient convaincus de leur mission et de leur message. Ils entendaient exprimer le drame d'une société en crise” (11). Throughout the book, Khatibi insists on, and theorizes, the relationships among the Maghrebian novel, novelist, and society. In the wake of independence, many novelists in the Maghreb were writing as a form of nation-building. Certainly, Khatibi was quite aware of the importance of the conditions under which the Maghrebian novelist was working at the time; so, too, was he considering the problems to which the Maghrebian novel was responding. Almost fifty years later, however, scholars are reconsidering the question of the Maghrebian novel, asking such questions as: What is theroman maghrébindoing? Is it different from any other kind of novel? If so, how? In this article, I examine the stakes of localized publication of contemporary Maghrebian literature, a phenomenon that speaks to nascent aesthetic and cultural de-centering in a very real way. In this article, I specifically consider les éditions barzakh in Algiers in order to understand the role that localized publishing plays in the region, with the potential to nuance our reading of theroman maghrébinitself. This paper on the symbolic, material, and linguistic complexities of the "indigenous" publishing house in the Maghreb tells, and theorizes, the story of theroman maghrébinin a novel way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of aesthetics has been widely debated in the field of Maghrebi Literary Studies since its inception in the early 1960s. Francophone novels from the Maghreb are often called upon by publishers to serve as sociologically faithful reflections of North African society. At the same time, such works have been routinely criticized by scholars for their lack of literary artistry. The twenty-first century arrival of independent publishing houses in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has altered the flow of cultural capital across the Mediterranean, with new centers of literary production shifting the landscape of French publishing. These local publishers afford Maghrebi writers the space in which to create narratives that complicate existing paradigms for postcolonial fiction. My paper addresses the relationship between literary aesthetics and national consciousness in recent novels from the catalogue of Éditions Barzakh, Algeria's most important independent publisher. I argue that Barzakh has expanded the horizon of possibility for theroman maghrébinin the twenty-first century by publishing texts that skirt the realist/formalist tug-of-war to which literatures from North Africa are so often subjected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the risks involved in writing with reference to the work and reflections of Chantal Chawaf. Focusing specifically on Chawaf's Délivrance brisée (Paris: La Grande Ourse, 2013) and on the controversy that followed its publication, and drawing insight from an interview conducted with the author herself, I present a brief case study of how a profit-driven culture, the commercial realities of the book publishing industry, and the risk of sanction influence the process of literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposing the mythology of the "civilizing mission" of colonial France, Marguerite Duras and some other novelists from French Indochina (Daguerches, Dorgelès, Farrère) show in their works that one of the main aims of colonialism was to develop new areas for expanding capitalism, and then indebted to economic factors. This economic dimension that was deliberately hidden by colonial discourse is made prominent by Un Barrage contre le Pacifique through the extended metaphor of vampirism. The paper aims to examine which literary means are implemented to express the criticism of the spread of western capitalism–arbitrarily regarded as the arising of modernity–within a body of anticolonial works about a former French colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Marais, whose homosexuality remains largely ignored by the popular audience, is the leading man most admired by the female spectators, sinceL’Éternel Retour(Cocteau & Delannoy, 1943) until the late fifties. In the immediate post-war period, he offered an alternative image to patriarchal figures such as Fernandel, Fresnay, or Gabin. This paper examines four films between 1948 and 1952, where Marais embodies an immature masculinity, predatory or damaged by the war, cured by a woman's love. The reception of these films shows that Marais is as beloved by the popular female audience as he is denigrated by the highbrow press, with homophobic overtones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two photographs from Beirut and South Lebanon taken by Lebanese artist Paola Yacoub. In her photographic practice, Yacoub works on the relationship between the city and post-war landscapes, and the way they can be linked to architectural elements. Through a careful consideration of the circulation of territory, Yacoub intends to display what cannot be talked about: the war and its traumatic circumstances on an individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses how Wajdi Mouawad articulates, in the enclosed space of theatrical performance, family, tragedy, and civil war via the recurring figure of the twin. Mouawad's tragedies open a space allowing reflection on the consequences of the violence of civil war both at familial and national levels. But if Le Sang des promesses (Arles, Montréal: Actes Sud/Leméac, 2009) reenacts theatrically the release of hitherto silent traumatic memory, it is also, more broadly, a reflection on the vain attempt to escape a tragic Mediterranean fate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]