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This study attempts to cast the profile of an important poet of the contemporary world. It is argued that Salah Stétié is one of the poets who fit into the aesthetic emblem of the current French lyric. It is emblematic in terms of altitude, depth, creativity, expressiveness and openness to the French culture of recent centuries.
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Poems by; Maurice Maeterlinck - ”Dorințe iarna”, ”Rond de plictis”, ”Amin”, ”Acvariu”, ”Viziuni”, ”Pahar arzând”, ”Orație”, ”Priviri”, ”Reflexe”, ”După-amiază”, ”Suflet de seră”, ”Așteptare”, ”Intenții”, ”Atingeri”, ”Suflet de noapte”.
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A zoopoetic approach to the travelogue La panthère des neiges by Sylvain Tesson. The present article aims to explore in broad lines the evolution of French zoopoetics thought and its main directions of research. Unlike the anglophone animal studies, the French zoopoetics is offering a slightly different methodology, much more focused on thematic and narratological aspects. In order to exemplify the paradigm shift produced by the zoopoetic approach in France, we will focus our article on Sylvain Tesson’s travelogue La panthère des neiges (2019). The travelogue, through its referential dimension, marks a transition from the generalizing perspective of the animal world to a specific, local and individual approach.
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Titlul eseului meu aflat acum la al doilea episod publicat în Vatra sugerează deja interpretarea pe care o voi face. În 1933, Fondane publică nu doar poemul Ulise, ci și eseul său revelatoriu despre un poet totemic francez, întemeietor al poeziei moderne – Rimbaud le voyou.
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We all know the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”. But, in fact, the cover is an invitation intended to catch the eye, to arouse the interest of the reader to buy the volume and dive into the story. Its composition must, therefore, be carefully crafted to reflect the content of the book as much as possible and not to betray the intentions of the writer. In this paper, we analyze the front cover and the back cover of the novels of the Malaussène Saga by Daniel Pennac, a novel cycle published by Gallimard Publishing House between 1985 and 2023.
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Our paper discusses the issue of theatricality in André Gide’s « Oedipus » We start from the premise that this theatricality does not only reside in the construction of the text, but also in the construction of the story, centered on Oedipus actor and stage director. What we propose in this approach is to show that there is an important projection of Gide’s recurring that Gide makes of his Oedipus an actor and also a stage director who is more conscient than ignorant, who knows that he is playing a role and who directs and observes the behavior of others because he knows the story in advance, while pretending to discover it at the same time as the others. Oedipus knows who he is, but he stages the perfection of a conjugal and family happiness which validates his political power.
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Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, in unanimous opinion of critics, is the most “mysterious” of all the writer’s novels. The article’s author asks questions about what secrets this novel reveals to the contemporary reader who has recently become aware that he lives in the time of “anthropocene marasmus” (E. Bińczyk). He finds answers by confronting the text of Verne’s novel with the views of English utilitarians (J. Bentham, J. S. Mill) and the works of contemporary thinkers (R. Brague, The Kingdom of Man. The Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project, P. Sloterdijk, What Happened in the 20th Century?), and this allowed The Mysterious Island to be considered a prophetic work, another version of a modern story about the fall of man, who, believing in his creative power and the power of instrumental reason, does not see (like the characters of the novel) that the nature he uses marks the end of human agency. This kind of blindness, into which a group of nature colonizers collapse, carrying out their modernist project of “creating of ‘nothing’”, was considered a kind of anthropocene hybris.
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The article focuses on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry read in time and space. If it is clear that the space-time duo, in their configuration, actively participates in the disintegration of the figure of the poet; with Stéphane Mallarmé, the metaphysical crisis of movement (powerlessness) and memory (regret) corrupts any possibility of taking advantage of the “here” and “now”. While mentioning the brilliance of an Azur out of reach in the space and the time, an “Azure to stare at while dying of hunger” (Mallarmé, Divagations, 1889), this article shows the modalities of a sublimated quest for an “elsewhere” and a “past”, resulting in a metaphysical dissatisfaction. This failure of the transcendental quest remains in a way the failure to free oneself from one’s human condition and also the failure of a poetry of the unspeakable.
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In the novel “Et que ne durent que les moments doux” (2020), the French writer Virginie Grimaldi creates a space in which motherhood is seen at different stages in a woman’s life. The writer questions the values and cultural myths related to motherhood, while emphasizing the transformational dimension of the experience. If the concept of motherhood is usually correlated with notions such as giving birth, breastfeeding, the female body or raising children, the intertwined stories of Lili and Elise peel off some of the idyllic aura of motherhood and bring to light the emptiness felt once a woman becomes a mother. In the novel, the representations of motherhood are illustrated by two diametrically opposed experiences: the trauma of giving birth prematurely and the empty-nest syndrome. In this article, I will focus on analyzing two unexpected spaces: the neonatal incubator and the empty nest that forces the mother to start a journey towards her own self. The poetics of motherhood entails a discourse about identity, guilt, rediscovery, and new beginnings.
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The aim of this paper is to comment the links between the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever The WasOne, and narrative utopia model. The Mercier’s work is often consideredas inventive fiction which presents a new type of utopia focusedon the future, but a large number of traditional narrative strategiesis used by the author to show Paris in 25th century. The futurecivilization is built on the Enlightenment ideas but it remains stillattached by its culture to the 18th century. The Mercier’s work is inspiredby the utopism but in this fiction the reader finds more a fictionalrealization of dreams and philosophical thinking about human nature.
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By undertaking an investigation into the unexplored thicket of nineteenth-century ideology, this study reappraises the rationale behind Emma Bovary’s suicide. The historical examination in this article reveals that the doctrine of the separate spheres exerted a great influence on the lives of middleclass women. Furthermore, the practice of this doctrine resulted in the reinforcement of a rigid housewife/harlot dichotomy. As the upshot of such an ideology, an association was made between women in public and the public women i.e. the prostitutes. By unearthing the traces of this ideology in Madame Bovary, this article aims to substantiate that as a middle-class woman, Emma’s longing for public life culminates in her identification with the figure of the prostitute. This abject metamorphosis, which is the ramification of societal adherence to the doctrine of separate spheres, ushers her toward her ultimate suicidal act.
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By the time Émile Zola published Madeleine Férat (1868), the motif of the amorous courtesan was already a Romantic cliché. The future leader of the Naturalists therefore wished to distance himself from an outdated concept of the repenting lost woman, and seized upon the embodiment par excellence of the converted sinner in the Judeo-Christian imagination, Saint Mary Magdalene, in order to subvert it. While the Gospels build the character on the dichotomy of fall and redemption, the novelist does not allow his heroine to forget her past. Chapter after chapter, the writer suggests the relentless progression of Madeleine Férat’s dramatic destiny, modernising the ancient Fatum, as he will later do in the Rougon-Macquart novels, by drawing on the medical theories of his time, in this case Dr Prosper Lucas’s publications on seminal impregnation. In spite of herself, Madeleine Férat is subject to the domination of physiological laws that clash with her moral values, and suicide seems to be her only way out. Under Zola’s pen, Marie de Magdala becomes a tragic heroine.
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In Rue du pardon (Street of Forgiveness), Mahi Binebine presents us with a marvellous tale in which a child confronts the ugliness of his pitiless environment and the monstrosity of his failing parents, guilty of a double transgression. These trials transform the tale into a novel, and the exposed child (abandoned to his fate) into an emancipated being. After the experience of rejection and the traumatic ordeal of rape, the heroine, saved and guided by the diva Serghinia, finds in the performing arts (dance and song) a saving refuge and, above all, a voice that enables her to express and exorcise abjection. The abused female body is resculpted into a living work of art. As in other novels, notably L'Ombre du poète, Terre d'ombre brûlée and Le Seigneur vous le rendra, Mahi Binebine's Rue du pardon places the artist at the center of representation. This article attempts to show how the novelist, by rehabilitating the chikha, a female artistic figure from Morocco's popular heritage, promotes a discreet feminism in which art becomes a means of access to freedom and a denunciation of social hypocrisy.
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In Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique, the night is not merely an external detail as for many pieces whose most important actions are set in a nocturnal setting. Paradoxically, this work, which takes place mainly in daytime settings, gives the night an unexpected importance. We must therefore question the dramatic and aesthetic stakes of this omnipresence. The carnival festival of Saint-Géraud and the strange serenade given by Bruno in disguise to his wife Stella arouse both laughter and concern. But above all, the night invests the speech of the characters and inspires their actions. In addition, sleep, dreams, desire, fantasies, everything relates to the night. In addition, sleep and dreams are the subject of divergent interpretations by the characters. The question of absence and desire, feeding their fantasies, is at the heart of the relationships between the characters. As for Bruno, he feeds his jealousy by his exaltation of Stella's body, by poetry and by the imagination in which he delights to the point of sinking into madness: the night darkens the love relationship to the point of making the two protagonists pass from heaven to hell into a buffoon nightmare.
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The novels of Marcel Proust and Georges Perec present kitsch under the states of principles and modes according to the theoretical grid developed by Abraham Moles. This study therefore drew conceptual resources from the Psychologie du kitsch ou l’art du bonheur in order to analyze Un amour de Swann et Les choses. If to challenge social reality still implies being inspired by it, these works do not fail to plunge into the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, at the threshold of the plots, the study has focused on the object in its acquisition, its use, its positioning, its contemplation, its manipulation. Thus, the technical words formulated by Abraham Moles offered statements such as the principle of inadequacy and accumulation as well as hedonistic, surrealist modes that revealed their literality. The kitsch offers a set of linguistic tools which explain phenomena observable at the social and literary level. As such, the object becomes the prism by which mentalities are defined. The novels of Marcel Proust and George Perec contain observations and sociological information rendered in aesthetic forms through the trial of snobbery.
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The novel Demain les chats (2016) by French writer Bernard Werber favors an analysis of the animal perspective in the narrative. Understanding the way the feline protagonists as well as the relationship between animals and humans are presented can allow conclusions about a potential world of the future in which humanity has failed during the transition between the Anthropocene and the apocalypse. Thus, the animals become both the victims of the catastrophe and the new dominant group. First, the context of the argument needs to be established by providing the fundamental information on the author, his works and the novel in question, including the feline protagonists. In the subsequent stage, the analysis will shift to the manner in which the characters of cats are depicted, examined by the means of a classification focused on the relationship between animals and humans. It leads to the observation of the hybrid nature of the characters and the perspective adopted by the author to describe them. Finally, the analysis results in the examination of the world perceived by the animals, a dystopian reality where the apocalypse marks the end of the Anthropocene and the change in the existing balance of power.
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Ironic detective is a relatively new genre in literature. Its development dates back to the middle of the twentieth century and continues up to the present days. The final crystallization of the genre is taking place in our time. The works of Polish author Joanna Chmielewska became one of the first examples of ironic detective stories. However, the French literature of the twentieth century also has notable representatives of the genre. The present article examines the peculiarities of the irony functioning in the detective genre, in the context of the work of the popular modern French writer Daniel Pennac. We distinguish irony as a means of comic and as a principle of work organization, which is inherent in the genre of ironic detective. Consideration of the ironic detective is impossible without a brief analysis of the detective development stages as a whole, therefore, the article also deals with the genesis of the detective genre from the classic to the French novel-noir. The emphasis will rest on the peculiarities of the ironic detective’s development. Using D. Pennac’s novel The Scapegoat as an example (the French edition is called Au bonheur des ogres, originally published in 1985), the features of the genre, alongside their manifestations at the content and formal level are illustrated. The article focuses on the fact that naturalistic details, scenes of cruelty, evil and chaos, caused by the consequences of the Second World War, are weakened due to ironic characteristics, stereotypes, as well as the very attitudes of the author and the narrator towards the surrounding world. The research proves that the analysed genre is an artistic form of a panoramic view of the society of the 80s with its false ideals and its consumerism.
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Gaston Bachelard’s last book (or, rather, notes from 1961–1962, edited and published by Suzanne Bachelard, more than twenty years after they were written) presents analyses of three mythical figures: Prometheus, Phoenix, and Empedocles. The Promethean myth and the myth of Empedocles’s death were earlier addressed in Bachelard’s previous works. In Fragments d’une poétique du feu, he extends and supplements his earlier analyses.The article examines the interpretations of selected myths in Fragments... in the context of the evolution of Bachelard’s philosophy and his key inspirations. It also addresses the following questions:1) what is myth in Bachelard’s late work?2) which of his main inspirations (psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, phenomenology) are still strongly visible in his late research?
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Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), a French anthropologist of the imagination, seems to be somewhat forgotten and significantly underresearched in Polish literary studies, even though his major works on poetic imagination – La Psychanalyse du feu (1938), L’Eau et les rêves (1942), L’Air et les songes (1943), La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (1947), La Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948), La Poétique de l’espace (1957), La Poétique de la rêverie (1960), and La Flamme d’une chandelle (1961) – have exerted a major impact on the perception of the literary text. Not only did Bachelard propose a new poetics (the poetics of the elements), but he also redefined the category of the author and introduced the following concepts to the humanities: the Dreaming Cogito (or the Dreamer’s Cogito), which describes a creative subjectivity, and dreamy consciousness (Fr. conscience rêveuse), or, in other words, poetic imagination. Bachelard’s poetics of the elements is founded upon his notion of symbols-images, which include principal images (Fr. imago princeps), imaginative compounds that organize the Dreamer’s Cogito.The article discusses the theoretical concepts that Bachelard explains in his monograph ontheEarthelement,entitledLaTerreetlesrêveriesdelavolonté.Essaissurlesimaginationdela matière (Corti, Paris 1947). Karwowska focuses on the reinterpretation of the mythical figure of Atlas. It is examined in the context of the imaginary relationship between anthropos and kosmos, which serves as the thematic core of Bachelard’s anthropology. Following Bachelard, Karwowska interprets the mythical Atlas as an archetypal image that can be expressed on the level of langage. What serves as its main feature is redundancy which remains open to various interpretative contexts. Bachelard’s work on myth in literary studies was most fully developed by myth-criticism. Scholars who research this field, similarly to Bachelard, investigate the human mundus imaginalis. They look for semantic basins (imaginary chreods), formed around a common meaning, the dominant myth. The article attempts to reconstruct the images generated by the Dreamer’s Cogito, which are the imagination’s response to the human encounter with material nature. It examines the mythical figure of Atlas against the wide spectrum of Bachelard’s figures of the imagination (the Antaeus complex, the Pluto-Proserpine complex, the mythical figure of Vulcan, the muscular anthropos, crystal imagination). Bachelard thoroughly investigates how humans use their imagination to colonize nature, studies the mechanisms of imagination that function on the level of the relationship between anthropos and kosmos, and finds universal anthropological antagonistic strategies of fight and domination in the human relationship with matter.
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