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Literary career of Jean-Pierre Camus started with his admiration for Montaigne’s “Essais” which became the pattern of his first work, “Les Diversitez”. The tome IX of this rich collection of various forms concerns passions of the soul and scholars are unanimous in considering it as the foundation of his religious teaching, both by word and by writing. Contrary to medical and moral thought in force at the threshold of modernity, the bishop of Belley believes passions are neutral, neither good nor bad, and acquire their meaning by the use man makes of them. This is in particular the case of jealousy which the writer understands as an effect of love. Yet in his treaty of passions the author describes on just several pages only the jealousy of God and for more details he refers the reader to two other places of “Les Diversitez” where, he says, he has already raised the issue of this feeling. In fact, a chapter of the tome II and a letter of the tome VIII deal with the problem of human jealousy. This paper first shows different discursive forms that Camus uses to analyze jealousy. Then it focuses on the author’s definition of jealousy, ‘desire for exclusive possession of the loved object’, and on its effects – often tragical, always painful – in the daily life of spouses. Finally, it appears that the author’s taste for dichotomous presentation of passions leads him to childish images of jealous God and implicitly to an inacceptable hypothesis of jealousy of the creature in front of a supposedly unfaithful God.
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This article presents a hybrid work by Mme de Murat, “Le Journal pour Mlle de Menou”, written between 1708 and 1709 in the château de Loches where the countess was exiled. Mme de Murat copes with the oppression of royal power by leading a life similar to that from which she was cut off. She finds consolation in the writing of the diary and affection for her cousin, she writes poems and organises literary and social life in exile demonstrating freedom of her spirit.
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The present paper focuses on the travel of Eugène Delacroix to Morocco (first six months of 1832) and his accounts given in his travel notes, letters and an unfinished travelogue, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc”. The writings of the famous painter are contrasted with the book by a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Lettre à Delacroix” (2005). The aim of the paper is to define the art of living “à la marocaine” according to the French painter and the Moroccan writer. It is done in three parts. The first one is devoted to the beauty of Moroccan landscapes, horses and architecture. The second focuses on the art of dressing : the beauty of the inhabitants of the country and the elegance of their cloths. The last part discusses Moroccan traditions, based – according to Delacroix – on Antiquity.
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In 1946, only a year after the World War II, Jean Giono, who became famous in the years 1929-1939 as a writer describing the human’s struggle with nature, writes “A King Alone” (“Un roi sans divertissement”), a novel which surprises his past readers with one of the characters being a serial killer fulfilling the uncontrolled need for entertainment by killing people. Langlois, the gendarmerie captain tasked with finding the murderer, attempts to understand the motive of the criminal turned from a respected and exemplary citizen into a potential assassin. Not to become the felon’s imitator, Langlois commits suicide. Giono’s novel is a tale of evil inextricably linked to human nature (the murderer’s name is Monsieur V. like in “voisin” – neighbor). The novel did not gain the popularity it deserved because after the World War II evil was the most willingly looked for in the defeated countries of the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan), and the communist-opposed author was blacklisted by National Writers’ Committee, controlled by the Stalinists. “A King Alone” is a personal reflection of a writer marked by war, constituting the expression of his most pessimistic vision of human nature influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Sade. The message of the novel is ambiguous: on the one hand, Langlois prefers committing suicide over being a tool of evil residing in every person; on the other hand, he interiorizes Mr. V.’s motives by exploring them, thus becoming – like any other human in Giono’s view – a potential killer. Langlois’ last act, when he takes his own life, makes him a figure of dark Christ, permeated by evil, who sacrifices himself not to become another link in the chain of malevolent individuals passing on to the potential imitators the penchant for killing, understood here as the highest form of entertainment and the contemplation of human mortality, embodied by the victim.
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Michel Houellebecq in his novels “Platform” (2001), “Map and territory” (2010) and “Submission” (2015) shows the struggles of a man trying to find his place in the modern world. Author’s “alter egos” – writer, painter, clerk of the Ministry of Culture, researcher in literary studies, witness a deep crisis that heralds the end of Europe. Unbridled consumption, clumsy journalists, crisis of democracy and Church’s institution are leading to the collapse of the old world. The prospect of being absorbed by Muslims, led by an extremely skilled politician, confirms Houellebecq’s talent, arousing anxiety and opposition.
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On January 7th 2015, Philippe Lançon, a journalist at “Libération” and at “Charlie Hebdo” attends the newspaper’s premises, when the islamist terrorists attack. The killers’bullets tear his jaws off, severely injure his arms, make his existence capsize, but he survives. In his novel “Le Lambeau”, he tells the story of a mental as well as physical reconstruction, sketching the chronology of his days in various hospitals, depicting the visitors who make his days brighter and the varied shades of his consciousness. Is his writing, a mere testimony of a tragical experiment, the chronicles of a journalist who witnesses how one comes back to life? Or is it a “pharmakon”, a poison within a remedy, which puts back to life things past and gone, as a way of healing? Or shall we give a spiritual significance to this writing, so haunted by Proust that it parodies his style and shows literature as a means of salvation?
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The aim of this article is to analyse the prefaces to the French Renaissance apocalyptic epics of the years 1576-1606 (works by Jacques de Billy, Guillaume de Chevalier, Michel Quillian and Jude Serclier) in order to understand the literary and extra-literary issues addressed by their authors. This comparison will highlight in particular the ethos of the author, the problem of representation in a biblical poem and its eschatological dimension, the place of pagan fiction and encyclopaedic erudition, and the rhetorical strategies employed.
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French writer Albert Robida, renowned for his futuristic works of fiction written in a bitter-sweet tone, somehow broke away from his usual inspiration in “The Clock of the Centuries” (published in 1902), as electric life short-circuited. This atypical novel opens up, in the early stages of the twentieth century Robida now refuses to anticipate and explore, with a cataclysm that all but extinguishes every form of life on earth and gives a symbolic warning that there is something wrong in the civilized world. Survival is organized, but Robida then subverts the “post-apocalyptic” narrative to introduce an unprecedented variation: the survivors realize that, after the catastrophe, an “out-of-joint” universe, in which the hands of time are now ticking in reverse, has now taken over. Comic relief is provided by the heroes getting younger and historical figures being brought back to life, but conceals the violence of the continuity solution staged by Robida in this counter-clockwise anticipation novel, as the restoration of order is achieved under the aegis of a mutilated Janus. This gave the momentum for an anti-progressive eschatology, which turned out to have a great future in literature.
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In this paper, the author examines the distortion of the past and the perversion of art in works of speculative dystopian fiction. Without history, there is no longer a past or a future; only the present persists as a perpetual replication of the same structures. In “1984”, everything is constantly rewritten in minute detail. In “Globalia”, the system wages a fierce war against history. Art is either recuperated or condemned to burn at the stake of state power (“Fahrenheit 451”). However, discovering art objects from past times and reading literary works signal a change of course which raises conscience and even leads to acts of resistance. In dystopian speculative literature, resistance acquires a symbolic dimension: Despite reigning darkness, there seems to appear a gleam of hope thanks to art and to literature.
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In “L’Apocalypse de 2030”, “Chroniques de la fin du monde” and “La fin des temps”, three novels by French, American and Japanese authors respectively, the novelists try to hold up a mirror to readers of our world that has become a field of ruin, but they do not fail to warn that the crisis of the present is nothing compared to what awaits us in the decade of 2030. In this gruesome setting, the question of survival remains the major leitmotif of this apocalyptic corpus. By analysing these works under the scalpel of psychocriticism, the critic comes to the conclusion that the authors are taking a critical look at the catastrophic situation of the world, with both compassion and indignation. But beyond their essentially anxiety-provoking and presentist vein, apocalyptic fictions propose a rather anxiolytic framework, oriented towards the future and the conduct to be maintained in this ‘crisis of time’. The authors of apocalyptic literature, far from being “the horsemen of the apocalypse”, set themselves up as prophets of the days of doubt.
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The objective of the study is to identify and examine the essential elements which constitute the concept of the “Other” in the novels of Giuseppe Culicchia. The texts analyzed were published by Culicchia, writer, essayist and translator in Turin, Italy, from 1994 to 2019. The theoretical literary perspective is that of mimesis (Erich Auerbach, Zofia Mitosek, Nicoletta Salomon, Cesare Segre) and the concept of the “l’Altro” derives from anthropological studies (Marc Augé, Marco Aime, Ugo Fabietti, Francesco Remotti). The purpose of this study is to promote interdisciplinary research and to present the model of the Other and its evolution in novels. The article focuses on aspects of otherness, more apparent in Culicchia, that is to say: distance and space (the idea of nonluogo, mente locale, mobility), set of values and the consequent changes in the characters of his novels.
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The analysis presented in this article concerns one of the newest philosophical novels of Aldo Nove, entitled “Il professore di Viggiù” (2018). In the book the author presents an invented interview with mysterious person, by which he transmits reflections on human life in the modern world. The text evokes the existential issues concerning the increasingly precarious conditions in which people live torn between doubts about the reality of their own being. The aim of the research is to emphasize the motifs which can be seen in the work of the Italian writer and to answer the questions related to his way of showing the consumer society.
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In this article, the author attempts to examine love relationships in the world on the brink of catastrophe, described in the works of Giovanni Agnoloni. The Florentine writer presents a vision of the world after the collapse of the Internet, a world in an economic, technological and social crisis. The author will try to prove the thesis that with the fall of civilization, love relationships are also troubled.
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The paper aims to analyze the representations of Łódź in two short stories by Juan Manuel Torres, “El muchacho que mató a la luna” and “Al principio de la primavera”, and one long narration by Eduardo Halfon “Oh gueto mi amor”.
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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the novel "Vispera del odio" (1958), by Concha Castroviejo, with special focus on its impact as a literary testimony of the female condition during the Francoist years. The central plot in the novel revolves around an unhappy marriage, with the wife experiencing violence from her husband. The dramatic situation became a common element in many novels written by women of that time, hence the paradigmatic value of a general condition of feminine struggle that defines a consequent attitude and ability of surviving to adverse historical and social circumstances.
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The paper main theme is Esther in Purim parodies. As a study case, the Jewish community in Rome is taken into consideration. In spite of the relatively small numbers of Holocaust victims among the Italian Jews, the traumatic memories of persecution were well present in the survivors’ awareness. In the early post-war years, they felt a pressing need to pass on their knowledge of the Holocaust to the younger. Apart from academic papers and literary works of import, a number of popular texts appeared. One example is a version of the Tale of Purim written around 1950. The narration carries on the Italian tradition of Aggadah-style literature, and its language makes it one of the latest documents featuring idioms of the now forgotten Jewish-Roman dialect. In the tale, the Holocaust is referred to by equalling Hitler to the persecutor of the Jews as of Megillath Esther. In that fashion, Esther as a literary character wanders from the ancient religious discourse to the extra-literary actuality.
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The article studies a theatrical project presented in Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid by Alberto Conejero, with Susi Sánchez y José Troncoso, based on “El príncipe constante” by Calderón: “Esta primavera fugitive” (“Varaciones sobre” “El príncipe constante” de Calderón de la Barca). The performance was commissioned by Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico and staged on 17th of March 2021. The playwright converged several voices in his personal recast to manifest the strength and universality of “El príncipe constante”. The “mise-en-abyme” effect is stressed by the presence of Alberto in his play, as well as the mention of Jerzy Grotowski, Ryszard Cieślak and Juliusz Słowacki, the author of the Polish version of “The Constant Prince”. Different testimonies confirm the fundamental function of theater as ars vitae.
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Written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais, the movie “Hiroshima mon amour” (1959) is set in the immediate post-war period, precisely in the Japanese city destroyed by the first nuclear bombardment, while life is trying to begin again. Considering the immense wounds inflicted on the anonymous people of all nations during the Second World War, the scenario proposes to oppose this unprecedented catastrophe with a romantic encounter, in which the authors attempt to identify the irreducibility of affects and feelings, as a condition for renewing the living of a fractured humanity that is more sensitive than ever.
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The present article analyzes the translation of Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s novel “Jak zawsze” (“As usual”) into French (translation: Kamil Barbarski, title: “Te souviendras-tu de demain?”) and focuses particularly on the play between implicit and explicit elements related to the history and culture of Poland. The protagonists of the novel travel back in time fifty years to Poland, where it occurs that history unfolded completely differently than in reality. They have the opportunity to relive their lives in a different world, but it occurs that although their private lives will turn out differently, the history of Poland will end as usual. Miłoszewski uses stereotypes and allusions which, without explication in translation, will be incomprehensible or will lose their “raison d’être”. The author analyzes the translator’s strategies and the ability to understand the text by the recipient of the translation.
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