CEEOL - Browse Subjects Result

We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.

Vagabondage et dévergondage du personnage: réflexions sur les déambulations du héros dans les contes renardiens de la France médiévale

Author(s): Jacques Raymond Koffi Kouacou / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The continual monotony and the wandering life of individuals, members of the French society of the Middle Age has been a big concern for the fox folktales tellers. They have focused on the strolls of Renart the fox, hero of Le Roman de Renart, deriving from populous tales of former France. In fact, the fox folktales tellers represent the reign of social anarchy triggered off by the decay of central power and the implementation of an asocial life grounded on the quest and conquest of an uncertain future and desperately marked by anguish and the resort to deceit means to the disdain of human being. Even the knight dignified forfeit of the social honorable and respectable manners in the past, is compelled to a roving, boredom and brutality for survive. This contribution aims to visit this central and worrying question of the Middle Age society to establish the contemporary value and show how it is dozed a potential outline of wandering whose expression comes from the absence of a controlled life and an irresponsibility of any resignation power.

More...

Du Paria à l’Émigré : une typologie des vagabonds post-révolutionnaires

Author(s): Hugo Sert / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The « great detention » analysed by Michel Foucault shows the fear societies have of wanderers and tramps. During the wholeclassical period, political and religious elites try to lock up people who don’t have neither home nor work, thinking that they are a danger to society’s order. Arts and literature represent this threat, reinforcing the negativity of wandering and mobility in minds. However, there is a time in French history leading to question this doxa. A political revolution turns these representations round. The French Revolution changes the camp of suspicion towards wandering. Starting from 1789, old elites, ironically, find themselves out in the streets with nothing. These people, the Émigrés, are the ones creating literature during the revolutionary period. This phenomenonaffects writing at this time, and arises ethical and aesthetic questions. The texts written in exile trying to answer these questions create a new sensibility which is going to influence the minds of the 19th century.

More...

Le motif du vagabondage dans quelques nouvelles « noires » d’Émile Zola

Author(s): Anna Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The paper shows the importance of the motif of vagabondage recurrent in three of Zola’s short stories: For a Night of Love, Jacques Damour and The Death of Olivier Becaille. Their characters’ aimless wandering through the coutryside, through France or the entire world either means perfect happiness, time-filling strategy, or consequence of one’s past or bad luck. It is aways opposed to immobility of sleep or death.

More...

L’éloge du vagabondage au XIXe siècle : une pensée minoritaire

Author(s): Julien Jeusette / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

All along the nineteenth century in France, the vagabond becomes a main social and philosophical issue, for he is hunt down by scientists – vagrancy is conceived as a mental illness – and by jurists – different laws are created to criminalize the act. By establishing a link between this sudden obsession and the concern expressed by thinkers (Tocqueville, Comte, Bourget) that the society is dangerously blowing apart in separate individuals, this paper aims to analyze the manifestation of this conflict between society and vagabond in literature, among others Barrès’ Les Déracinés and Gide’s Nourritures terrestres.

More...

« J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ». Le vagabond dans la poésie française de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle

Author(s): Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

Throughout history, vagrancy appears as one of the notions of the Human Condition. Its artistic and poetical representations are drawn from multiple sources and offer various models. The fantasy of vagrancy in French poetry in the second half of the Nineteenth Century is fashioned as much through the vagrant’s relationship with space as with Society. Its models spring from marginality and contestation. Spatial structure presents an opposition between « closed » and « open », « interior » and « exterior », and so forth... These separations fluctuate and interact mutually. The poet conjures, from any questing, marginal figure, his own image. The general tendency, from Hugo to Rimbaud, shows both a crushing of the poetical figure, transforming it into a magus or a prophet, and the proliferation of the accursed poet’s « negating anger ».

More...

Le vagabond et ses avatars chez Apollinaire

Author(s): Olivia-Ioana Costaş / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

Passionate about mundane details and singular beings, Apollinaire deploys throughout his stories and novels quite a collection of mysterious and paradoxical characters. A central place in his collection is occupied by the wanderer which illustrates the propensity of the writer towards the occult and the picturesque, towards the anecdotal and the extraordinary. As a being always on the run he is sometimes associated with a bohemian spectator, jouisseur of the street and sometimes a marginal presence bordering on antisocial. Versatile character, the apollinarian wanderer does not refer to a specific social type. Wanderer, bohemian, chiffonnier, antique dealer, he has a rather metaphorical position that allows him to expose multiple identities at once. His multivalent nature makes it difficult for a true literary taxonomy. Always seeking innovation and surprise, Apollinaire was able to refine the ambivalence of the wanderer and often relates it to the image of the artist. Marginal and mystifying, the apollinarian wanderer is yet lacking any pejorative sense because its uniqueness is only a sign of originality. With its attractive heterogeneity, the apollinarian prose creates a vast and fine repertoire with a wanderer who is constantly redefining the concept of wandering. With its multiple facets, it actually becomes a living metaphor of a work that is looking through a hybrid and plural writing, mixing genres and composite images. Exploring the prose of Apollinaire, however, we can detect multiple lines of coherence that ultimately reveal a rich array of the wanderer. Despite the nature of the chameleonic apollinarian wanderer, our challenge is to analyze his literary metamorphoses and thus arrive at a definition that surprises in its many urban disguises.

More...

Le vagabondage moderne dans le théâtre de Henri-René Lenormand

Author(s): Tomasz Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The motif of the wanderer is not new in the French theatre, but in the first half of the twentieth century due to the general crisis of values, some authors refer to it in order to display the plight of modern man. One of them is H.-R. Lenormand, an author not very well-known to a wider audience nowadays, who under the influence of Strindberg writes plays which refer to the expressionist aesthetics. He creates a lot of works in which he employs the technique of the station drama.. It is this form that allows him to focus on the evolution of the character and his metamorphosis. While in Les Ratés he shows buffoons heading for the brink of despair and finally their certain death, in L'Homme et ses Fantômes he focuses on the inner journey of the main character, who is looking for the reason for his suffering in his own soul.

More...

Sur les traces du vagabond dans les textes beauvoiriens : exploration du monde et découverte de l’autre

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

Simone de Beauvoir – a writer, journalist, and philosopher, a pioneer of modern feminism, a collaborator and life partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, was also a tireless traveller, who embarked on numerous journeys described in her autobiographical accounts and correspondence. The author of The Second Sex invariably seeks new sensations and is attracted to other people. Memories of visits to foreign countries are characterized by detailed descriptions and exploration of the world. Each destination is presented from the viewpoint of aesthetics, avoiding interactions with the local population. Over time, under the influence of her trips, Beauvoir becomes aware of the complexity of "the Other" and the need to support people and reject own isolation. Her writing becomes involved, subjective, and empathetic, reflecting growing interest in the problems of other people and sensitivity to social injustice and ideological issues. The shrewd observer searches for the meaning of life and her own "self". The universal dimension of the human condition appears to be far more important than individual experiences of the previously egocentric woman.

More...

Du vagabondage à la sainteté – la quête de soi dans Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu de Jean Anouilh

Author(s): Sylwia Kucharuk / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

At first glance, the protagonist of the play has none of the characteristics of a vagabond. However, subjected to a more thorough analysis, he proves to be endowed with many features typical of a wanderer, such as alienation, unrest, loneliness, social isolation and individualism. In the text he is described as a man who is « in the search for himself, » his exile is, first and foremost, a metaphysical search for his own « self » and for the meaning of life. He is also a character undergoing a metamorphosis – from a lecher he becomes a saint. The shift seems to come as a consequence of being an exile from his own country. This exile, however, in its literal dimension, becomes too heavy a burden for him, and, be rid of the burden, he chooses to die a martyr. This article presents the evolution of the personality and the shift in the social standing of the character, as well as the reasons for, and consequence of, his exile.

More...

L’errance de l’artiste dans La Montagne secrète de Gabrielle Roy

Author(s): Anna Żurawska / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The aim of the article is to examine the figure of a vagabond and an artist in the novel The Hidden Mountain (La Montagne secrète) by Gabrielle Roy which, according to Antoine Boisclair, is the first Quebec novel completely devoted to painting. It presents the wandering of the artist who does not perceive his vagabondage as movement from one place to another, but regards it as the essence of both his existence and his creation. First, the analysis explores the problem of wandering as narrative basis, examining the tension between the external reality and the inner experience of the painter. Then, the aim of the artist’s journey, symbolically delineated by the Hidden Mountain, is analyzed. The final part of the article is devoted to the concept of art presented in the novel, with particular emphasis on the humanistic dimension of artistic creation.

More...

Vagabondage dans Le Mont Damion d’André Dhôtel

Author(s): Aleksandra Komandera / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The paper discusses the theme of wandering in the novel by French author André Dhôtel. The protagonist of Le Mont Damion, Fabien Gort, is not a typical vagrant, as he is a member of an intellectual and quite rich family. However, because of his strong absent-mindedness and strangeness, Fabien is unable to find a place in social structures. People’s hostility leads him to many wanderings and unexpected encounters which influence his existence. The novel seems to be also a generic wandering, as it possesses some features of picaresque novel, adventure novel, initiation story and fairytale fantasy.

More...

L’errance du cœur et l’oubli des injustices chez Panaït Istrati

Author(s): Anca Porumb / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

Using a simple narrative technique, Panaït Istrati is an excellent painter of the Balkans and, above all, he is the friendship seeker. Our study starts from an interrogation: What makes the main character, Adrien Zograffi, wander from one place to another? Is there his taste of adventure or any ideal? The two parts of the work describe several important moments from the volume The Youth of Adrien Zograffi, where Romanians, Greeks and other nations from a Romanian town near the Danube share their happiness and their sadness.

More...

Retrouver le temple du sacré : la logique des extrêmes dans le roman de Durtal

Author(s): Eléonore Sibourg / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

In the late 19th century a reversal of the values linked to the sacred and the profane can be observed. As Religion retreats, Positivism and faith in Progress fill the gap left by abandoned spiritual belief. A nostalgia for transcendence arises amongst writers. Naturalism turns out to be sterile, but it has nevertheless become impossible to believe in God. It is in this context that Huysmans writes his novels. The Durtal tetralogy in particular focuses on its problematics: desperate, the main character wanders around Catholicism, seeking a sense of the Sacred. He first explores the world of Satanism before converting. But even when faith is regained, problems are not solved. In the religious domain itself, Durtal condemns the sacralization of the profane. Henceforth, the Durtal tetralogy manifests itself as a novel of the in-between: from brothel to church, between up-above and down-below, between almighty materialism and bourgeois catholicism, this misanthropic writer prays for a renewed and primitive form of religious practice in which the individual can access the Sacred again. The quest for the supernatural, through a questioning of contemporary society, becomes a quest for Identity.

More...

Pèlerinages barrésiens

Author(s): Claire Bompaire-Evesque / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

This article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings successively three forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to inspire them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès' intellectual evolution is exemplified by The sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to the paganism and forward to an integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.

More...

Le choix de Ponce Pilate, entre le sacré et le profane

Author(s): Sara Tongiani / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

At the beginning of The man and the sacred (1939) Roger Caillois affirmed that “every religious conception of the universe implies that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane”. Caillois discussed the theme of the sacred throughout his life, through several essays, articles and lectures. In 1961, Caillois wrote Pontius Pilate, a brief novel in which the author explored the dilemma of the governor of the Judea. For the first time, Caillois has changed genre. The author escaped the theme of the sacred by way of the novel. The purpose of this paper is to show how the theme of the sacred leads to a comparison between the thought of Caillois, the theories of the College of Sociology, and the theme of The Scapegoat by René Girard.

More...

L’amour vu comme un « rite de passage » : la confrontation du sacrum et du profanum chez Marguerite Duras

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Marguerite Duras’ works is her focus on contradictions, especially in the realm of physicality, which is part of the "dialectic of desire", nonverbal pleasure. In the analysed novels: Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and L’Amant this passion manifests itself through the "rite of passage". It is a double discovery of one’s own and someone else’s physicality. Duras perceives love as an uncontrollable, violent "experiment", a rebellion against the mother and restrictions. Narrating one of the most important (and secret) episodes of her life – crossing the Mekong – the author depicts sexual initiation of a young heroine (Duras’ alter ego), who seduces a mature man with her behaviour and dress. This experience allows her to experience the absolute and become initiated and free. For the narrator it is an opportunity for in-depth analysis of the secular and the sacred aspects of desire. To fully understand the sacred and the profane in Duras’ works, it seems necessary to approach the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective.

More...

Sylvain Trudel et le réenchantement du monde

Author(s): Jean-Pierre Thomas / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Since the middle of the 1980s, French Canadian novelist Sylvain Trudel constantly puts his characters in contentious situations from which they try to escape by way of creating alternate worlds at the same time real and fantastical. This action brings these characters away from their trite everyday life and into a symbolic and mystical universe. The synthème seems to be feeding that symbolic frame. Through the child's point of view – which seems then to become some sort of secret language –, each object belonging to the realm of the profane becomes tinted with a sacred meaning. Synthème and symbol would then be considered as vehicles for the sacred, that which shows through Sylvain Trudel's novels.

More...

Un Dieu sadique : le rôle de l’image blasphématoire de Dieu dans Dolce agonia de Nancy Huston

Author(s): Izabela Front / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

The present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston let the author describe the sacred element in man’s life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to three text’s aspects conditioned by the God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering ; the tone and time approach variations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love.

More...

La quête du sacré dans les romans de Chantal Deltenre

Author(s): Judyta Zbierska-Mościcka / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

La plus que mère, La cérémonie des poupées and La maison de l’âme, the trilogy of the Belgian writer and ethnologist Chantal Deltenre – published in the first decade of the 21st century, illustrates post-modern religiosity, the main characteristics of which are diversity, syncretism and relativism. The search for the sacrum is supposed to be a type of initiation journey undertaken mostly by lost and uprooted individuals. It is a search for a safe and meaningful space (place) which is not just the opposite of the shapeless and meaningless world of the profanum, but also allows one to build one’s own identity.

More...

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

Author(s): Piotr Sadkowski / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Throughout the centuries Franch and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they engage the question of the identity dilemmas of contemporary people. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of a contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier's text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motives analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to freedom in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

More...