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This article serves two main functions: it warns about the complexity and risks surrounding proverb definition and also offers solutions to increase insight and avoid pitfalls. The first part analyses the reasons for the absence of clear consensus among scholars and includes a summary of the main trends or views in specialised literature, as well as a “scale of consensus” for definition criteria. The second part advocates for an optimistic approach and a strict methodology to define proverbs, including several principles to boost legitimacy and bypass common obstacles. The final part showcases, through concrete examples, how terminology and proverb definition can influence or distort results in several fields of paremiology.

In the present article, we examine the mechanisms of proverbialisation – the birth and propagation of proverbs – and the criteria that boost their chances of propagation and survival. Before tackling the main issues, we introduce the controversial notion of “proverbiality” and the terminological relativity it entails by establishing a scale of consensus for definition criteria in specialised literature. We then present memetics, or memology. This field, which studies the replication of cultural units, offers useful tools through the notions of “meme fitness” and “selection criteria”, which may be adapted and transferred to paremiology in order to describe the qualities that help proverbs catch on and survive. In Section 3, a model for proverbialisation is introduced and the memetic framework is applied to describe the impact of the selection criteria on the specific stages of the process, through concrete examples of sayings that successfully caught on. In the final part, the selection criteria previously identified are applied to a list of candidates in order to appraise their chances of replication. The candidates under study are part of a recent attempt by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to rewrite famous proverbs and idioms with the aim to make them “animal friendly”. Their proposals include There is more than one way to peel a potato instead of There is more than one way to skin a cat, or Don’t put the caboose before the engine instead of Don’t put the cart before the horse. The analysis reveals that despite a degree of creativity, several selection criteria remain obstacles to the propagation of these proverb candidates.

This article is an investigation of the origins and the dissemination of Time is money, which is commonly but erroneously attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Online tools and corpora are used to uncover the British origins of the proverb, as well as possible models for its coin-age. The combination of concordance tools and a theoretical framework for “proverb genesis” allows for discoveries on the stages of its birth, as well as on their chronology. Special attention is paid to the role Franklin played in the propagation of the proverb, and therefore its American birth.

Based on a thesis affirming the irreducibility of the subject of speech to the figures of oneself the autobiographical narrative foments, the author shows how the setting in narrative produces the effect of subjectification. Since the subject of the act of speaking cannot but be excluded from the statements he makes, the horizon of possibilities constitutive of his project of existing opens out to him. The significant features of the training and research techniques we promote in the field of autobiographical practices can be deduced on the basis of such principles. The analytical and interpretational tools we propose facilitate the development of a veritable textual clinic. However, a “clinical approach” does not mean that the method of autobiographical narrative necessarily involves therapeutic practices. Its areas of application are plural and the border crossings deserve to be delineated. This reflective process is brought to a close with a severe challenge against certain uses of the notion of identity to account for transformational effects noted in training, therapy or psychoanalysis. We contend that it is because of the non-identity of self to self that the subject brings to bear the chan­ges capable of bringing him nearer to his goal. In order not to conclude, we close the narrative of our journey into the world of autobiographical narrative in proposing two research orientations.

This study deals with the birth and death of proverbs: how and why do they “come and go”? Some English and French proverb specimens will be studied in order to point out the different reasons why some sayings gain proverbial currency while others don’t, and on the other hand why some proverbs lose their currency and fall out of use while others last for centuries. This study will first include the description of the sources for many ancient or modern proverbs and the description of the criteria that boost or grant their status or ‘proverbialization’. This will call for an objective and scientific definition of the proverb that allows the classification and distinction of all sayings and idioms. This will make possible the description of the different steps of a very mysterious phenomenon – proverbial birth – which will be referred to as “proverbiogenesis”. Finally, a part will be devoted to the different ways proverbs can “die”, whether “naturally” or by genre shifting (mutation).

Fringe is a work that shows itself to be highly aware of its status as a TV series, whether by the intertextual scavenger hunts it offers to spectators in the screens placed in the background, by the dialectic between fiction and the real that crystallizes there, or by the reflexive and metanarrative aspects of the works that are shown there. Negligible intertextual references appear on the televisions and monitors placed in the scenes, which, nodding to fans and making references to venerable masterpieces of the small and big screens, quickly become commentaries on the story in progress. The screens pose themselves as frames that reinforce the real nature of what surrounds them and the fictional nature of the images enshrined in them. These screens permit spectators to watch the fiction before it becomes porous over the seasons and pushes the protagonists into and out of the frame, literally changing universes and fictional regimes. The small screen defines the scope of space, but also indicates temporality. From old televisions from the 1950s placed in the decor to the 3D projections of the Observers, who have come to invade the world, the screen shows Fringe to be a story of the dematerialization of frames. Thus, screens are the principal places of the narrative ellipses that, one after another, they fill in (by projecting elements that the protagonists leave out) or create (when, in season 5, old video cassettes dictate the program of each episode).