{"title":"Faire is the Heaven: Action and Utopia in Simone de Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus et Cinéas","authors":"Thomas Chesworth","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0409","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Simone de Beauvoir’s early essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) can be read as an articulation of a critically utopian ethics. It suggests that the ontology of action developed in Pyrrhus et Cinéas is an early case of Beauvoir’s critical engagement with Hegel and, in particular, the Kojèvian reading popular among her existentialist contemporaries. Unlike Kojève, whose Marxist reading of Hegel suggested that he was theorising a teleological model of History, Beauvoir develops a critique of utopian models of History wherein freedom is an ultimate finality, arguing instead that freedom is to be found in action, and thus must be persistently renewed. This article closes by suggesting that the existential ethics Beauvoir develops from this model of freedom implies an account of utopia which is critical of orthodox socialist philosophies of history.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141696492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impossibility of Logging Off: Technological Disconnection in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La Clé USB (2019)","authors":"André Pettman","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0415","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the question of technological disconnection in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La Clé USB (2019). It shows how Toussaint’s novel offers a vision of everyday life in which existence is tantamount to being logged on, so to speak, in perpetuity. I consider how La Clé USB testifies to the fraught process of technological disconnection. I offer an extended analysis of the novel’s narrator, Jean Detrez, focusing specifically on his attempts to ‘disconnect’ from technological mediation, which result in paranoia, guilt and corporeal disembodiment. Ultimately, I argue that La Clé USB draws our attention to the affective, sensorial and relational dimensions of everyday life and compels us to reckon with their potential degradation in our hyperconnected digital age.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141714338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Child Protagonist: Children’s Agency in International Children’s Rights Law and in Four Francophone African Novels","authors":"Kate MacKenzie","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0412","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I explore how the contested notion of children’s agency is represented in international children’s rights law and in four novels by francophone African authors. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child establish children as rights holding subjects within a framework of adult care, while the fictional texts position children as protagonists, deprived of adult protection amid conflict and social upheaval. In both, children are understood as acting and acted upon, forming and formed by their environment. Through the utopian vision of children’s rights law and the damaged child narratives of the fictional texts, children’s agency can be read as a critique of adult society. At the same time, children are recognized as active participants in history, their choices and actions, however determined, shaping their own future selves and society.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141713385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating ‘Le Pagnol des Comores’: Ali Zamir's Anguille Sous Roche in English Translation","authors":"Clara Défachel","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0410","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, Ali Zamir's acclaimed debut novel Anguille sous roche became the first Comorian novel to circulate in translation in Europe. This article discusses its English translation, A Girl Called Eel, by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (2019) in relation to the reception, circulation, and canon formation of literature from the Comoros islands. By discussing translation's ties to heritage conservation and literary consecration in the Comorian context alongside a comparative textual and paratextual analysis of Anguille and Eel, I investigate the extent to which the novel's ‘Comorianness’ was erased, reclaimed, or playfully constructed along this translation journey by a wide variety of actors. These include the independent publishers Le Tripode and Jacaranda Books, who respectively published the French and English texts, various French literary institutions and French and UK-based funding bodies, as well as the author and translator themselves.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141704950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Unhinged Women’: Violence and Gender in Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade (1887) and Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (2020)","authors":"Marie Martine","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0413","url":null,"abstract":"In the last decade, representations of ‘female rage’ has taken over our social media, cinema, and literature. The fictional depiction of women’s use of violence is not as radically new as it seems, as the 1887 French novel La Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde, reflects. This paper will compare it to a more recent text, Boy Parts (2020) by Eliza Clark, to uncover how our current literary production shares similar concerns with nineteenth-century society, particularly our ambivalent responses to violence enacted by women. Both authors portray sadistic female protagonists who take pleasure in dominating and torturing men in a society that dismisses the possibility of women acting violently and attempting to reverse gender power dynamics. However, both authors challenge any fictional idealisation of ‘female rage’ by showing how their protagonists act out because of their traumatic past and are ultimately unable to bring about systemic change.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141711023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conceptualizing Linguistic and Cultural Identity among Breton and Arabic Users in Brittany","authors":"Sarah Eichhorn","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0411","url":null,"abstract":"The linguistic diversity of France is a highly discussed topic, particularly in relation to the French state's (lack of) support for regional and minority languages (RMLs). There are approximately 200,000 speakers of the regional language Breton, while Arabic is the second-most widely spoken language in France with an estimated 3–4 million speakers. Recent studies have called for comparative analyses and this research seeks to fill this gap, focusing on individual speakers and their social experiences as they relate to language(s), diversity, and identity. This paper discusses findings of fieldwork conducted in Brittany with Breton and Arabic language users, examining how Breton and Arabic language users describe their language experiences, and how identity can be shaped by language practices. This research also explores how such language practices relate to diversity and multilingualism across France more broadly, and how individuals understand the multifaceted nature of identity using terms such as ‘double culture’ and ‘mélange’.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141697409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sartre and Bourdieu on Flaubert’s Authorship between the Two Versions of L’Éducation sentimentale","authors":"Mark O’Rawe","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2024.0414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0414","url":null,"abstract":"This article engages with the readings of Flaubert's two versions of L’Éducation sentimentale (1845 and 1869) given respectively by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu in L’Idiot de la famille and Les Règles de l’art. In the first instance, Sartre's reading of the first L’Éducation sentimentale will be considered, in which Sartre argues that Flaubert rationalises and incorporates his 1844 illness into his protagonist Jules’ moment of artistic revelation. The article will then examine Bourdieu's response to Sartre in Les Règles de l’art wherein he rejects the existential psychoanalysis of Sartre's biography by highlighting the need for an understanding of the author in his socio-literary context which he sees as objectified in the structure of the 1869 version of the novel. Ultimately, this article will seek to evaluate the distinct readings given of the two versions of Flaubert's novel by highlighting them as the clearest elucidations of Sartre and Bourdieu's differing approaches to Flaubert's authorship and the contexts in which his novels were produced.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141695294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Open Your Ears, Paris Dada! Where Is Your Music Coming From?","authors":"P. Dayan","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0376","url":null,"abstract":"The historical record tells us that music of many kinds was played at Paris Dada events. There was piano music from the contemporary high art tradition; there was jazz; and there was also ‘anti-music’, later described (not entirely credibly) by its composer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. None of this music finds an audible echo in the Paris Dada manifestos of Tristan Tzara. Music is central to his discourse on Dada; but it is music as incarnated, out of time, by the physical musical instrument, not music as it was played in live performance and received by an audience in real time. The reason is the Dada refusal to see art as anything that can be defined, or as the communication of a message sent by a human agent. The instrument, as a physical object, cannot, in Dada, be seen through to the art or the artist beyond. This is in many ways a logically untenable position, because we never cease to believe that the music we hear is something more than the instrument on which it is played. Lies have to be told in order for Dada to occupy that untenable position. But Tzara assumes those lies, and the necessity for them; and so do I.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43310167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Winged Things: Insects and Birds as Flying Messengers in Céline Arnauld's Poetry","authors":"Ruth Hemus","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0379","url":null,"abstract":"The metropolis and the machine are the epitome of modernity in the avant-garde but in the interstices of the cityscape the natural world persists. In the disrupted Dada poems of Céline Arnauld, from the 1920s through to the 1940s, collisions between the man-made and natural environment produce sparks of lyrical beauty and of anxiety. The skyline is punctuated both by aeroplanes and birds; the roar of trains and buzz of insects clash in soundscapes. From wasps to doves, Arnauld’s winged things frequent and transcend the anthropocentric environment. Unbound by man-made borders, they range across temporal and spatial environments, the real and imaginary. This essay considers how Arnauld used her flying messengers to negotiate complex experiences and ecologies of modernity. Albeit mapped to temporal moments in the twentieth century, it emerges that her points of enquiry and tensions – from migration to war, freedom to precarity – are startlingly relevant one hundred years later.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47993841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Attention Seeking: Tristan Tzara's Art Critical Prose Poetry","authors":"Kathryn Brown","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0380","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Tristan Tzara's innovative art critical writing of the 1940s and shows how the poet's engagement with European avant-garde painting developed ideas that shaped Paris Dada during the 1920s. Focusing on essays about Joan Miró and Paul Klee, it is argued that Tzara employed an unorthodox language for writing about art and promoted a distinctive style of art critical prose poetry. His approach to art criticism is shown to raise specific issues about attention by problematizing how audiences might have regard to words, sounds, and pictures simultaneously. Taking his cue from the distinctive ontologies he finds in works by Miró and Klee, Tzara uses language to perform with painting rather than conveying ideas about it. In a distinctive linguistic performance that borders on music, Tzara's art critical prose poems are seen to mobilize elements of language and visual art in non-hierarchical, undirected ways, thereby prompting a complex phenomenological exercise in attention. Cet article examine les essais critiques sur l'art que Tristan Tzara a écrit pendant les années quarante et montre comment l'engagement du poète avec la peinture d'avant-garde européenne lui a fourni l'occasion de développer des idées qui ont façonné les débuts de Paris Dada. En se concentrant sur des essais sur Joan Miró et Paul Klee, il est soutenu que Tzara a créé un langage peu orthodoxe pour écrire sur l'art et a promu un style distinctif de poésie en prose critique. Cette façon d'aborder la peinture soulève des questions spécifiques sur l'attention en problématisant la manière dont le lecteur pourrait considérer simultanément les mots, les sons et les images. S'inspirant des ontologies distinctives qu'il trouve dans les œuvres de Miró et de Klee, Tzara utilise le langage pour jouer avec la peinture plutôt que de transmettre des idées à son sujet. Dans une performance linguistique distinctive qui frôle la musique, les poèmes en prose critique de Tzara mobilisent des éléments du langage et de l'art visuel de manière non hiérarchique et non dirigée, provoquant ainsi un exercice phénoménologique complexe de l'attention.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47269277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}