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Abstract:Religion plays a significant role in Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine. This article scrutinizes the Parable of the Prodigal Son as an underlying feature of the novel that governs the lives of Maria's three suitors: François Paradis, Lorenzo Surprenant and Eutrope Gagnon. Focusing on the motifs of departure from and staying home, the essay will show that François, Maria's preferred suitor, and Lorenzo, her second choice, are variants of the Prodigal. While the Prodigal in the Biblical text returns home and seeks redemption, in Maria François dies and Lorenzo vows not to return to settle in Quebec. The message of the voices Maria hears is essentially the Parable. Maria, then, rejects the prodigal life outside Quebec and decides to marry Eutrope who resembles the elder son in the Parable. With its emphasis on staying in the province, the novel captures the pulse of the Quebec society in the early twentieth century.

Abstract:As a fin-de-siècle play, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) is at the crossroads of arrière- and avant-garde theater. This article interprets the collaboration and rivalry between Cyrano and Christian in their relationship with Roxane allegorically with Cyrano as mind and Christian as body. The play anticipates Antonin Artaud's ideas in his quest for a metaphysics focusing on the body: The predominance of the mind as the exogenous source of speech against which Artaud revolted, and his proposal to create an alternative language using voice, gesture, and body. With the deaths of Christian and Cyrano, the play predicts Artaud's impasse.

Abstract:Under the threat of modernity, fairy tales struggled for survival. This study examines Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) as a variant of La belle et la bête and Riquet à la houppe. In the absence of fairies, the agents of transformation, Cyrano and Christian's romantic relationship with Roxane is based on illusions that cannot be sustained. Their disillusion and death signal the end of the fairy tale as it is traditionally known. The play, however, creates a new form of illusion with Cyrano's simulated descent from and "ascent" to the moon, and points to the emergence of science fiction.

Abstract:García Márquez’s “No One Writes to the Colonel” (1961) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) are about waiting and hope. Like Vladimir and Estragon wait for the elusive Godot, the colonel waits for his pension as he and his wife eke out a living. The colonel also waits for the cockfight and hopes his rooster will win. In the first section titled “Odd Couples and Couples at Odds,” I discuss the affinities between Vladimir and Estragon, and the colonel and his wife. In the second section, I compare the animalized character, Lucky, in Godot, and the anthropomorphized rooster in “Colonel.” The distinction between animals and humans disappears as they become more and more interdependent, and they suffer communally. In the final section, using Sartre, I show that absence and nothingness create a sustained illusion of hope, and urge the characters to wait eternally. The essay concludes that Godot and “Colonel” are representative of the human condition in times of calamity.

Abstract:This essay examines the affinities of Stendhal's novel with the fairy-tale genre. Using Vladimir Propp, it discusses key motifs from Le chat botté, La belle au bois dormant, and Persinette. Julien possesses the cat's cunning and dreams of rising socially, like the miller's son in Le chat botté. In the process, he awakens and seduces the sleeping beauties, Mme de Rênal and Mathilde. Affinities between Persinette (also known as Rapunzel) and Mathilde and Mme de Rênal are analyzed focusing on the hair-ladder symbolism. The essay concludes that Julien must face reality when the fairy-tale bubble bursts.

Abstract:The hand, conspicuous in Julien Sorel’s relationship with Mme de Rênal, assumes a predominant role throughout Le rouge et le noir. Engaging nineteenth-century scholars Lavater, Bichat, and Bell, and contemporary philosophers Heidegger and Derrida, this essay proposes to show that character and identity are mediated through the hand. The study examines the thinking hand, the hand as instrument of will, the speaking hand, and the writing hand as the hand of protection and betrayal. The dispersion and divergence of the hand’s functions breach the essential relationship between the being and the hand, revealing the characters’ ambivalence and duplicity.

Michel Butor's L'Emploi du tempsis a novel about a detective novel. Drawing on the connections between the detective novel and the fait divers, this essay examines the latter as a journalistic genre that pervades the narrator's discourse. Two other elements of the journalistic discourse, the interview and the feature article, are also discussed.