{"title":"La Critique et le dépassement de la « méthode expérimentale » dans Thérèse Raquin","authors":"Hélène Sicard-Cowan","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2021.0330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2021.0330","url":null,"abstract":"This article makes the case for reading Zola’s protagonists Laurent and Thérèse as literary foils for one of the founding fathers of the experimental method, namely the physiologist Claude Bernard, and his wife, Fanny Martin. Drawing more particularly on elements from Bernard’s and Martin’s lives, as well as Bernard’s scientific writings, the article shows that Zola ‘performs’ two grueling experiments in the aforementioned novel: the first one, initiated by the author himself, results in the death of three protagonists and the paralysis of the fourth one; the second experiment, initiated by Laurent, reveals that the latter’s evaluation of Thérèse and his ensuing hypothesis are seriously flawed. In fact, Laurent’s gaze is marred by his tendency to ‘dirty’ nature (‘salir la nature,’ to borrow Zola’s expression), and his experiment doesn’t turn out the way he had originally planned, as both lovers turned murderers end up committing suicide together. This article thus argues that, in Thérèse Raquin, Zola resorts to critical posturing as a vivisector in a text that can be read as a revenge narrative which gestures towards the possibility for vivisectors to be ‘redeemed’ as individuals made fully capable of feeling compassion for their objects through angelic intervention.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48964348","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":"De L'œil du savant au regard impudique dans La Curée","authors":"Aude Campmas","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2021.0329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2021.0329","url":null,"abstract":"La Curée is a novel about financial excesses and sexual appetites. A problem arises for Zola: how to describe sexual acts and avoid censorship? Zola's strategy is to portray sexuality in a slightly indirect way. He uses a scientific gaze as an alibi to describe human sexuality. This article demonstrates how Zola combines references to botany and fairground anatomy for this purpose. Botany allows Zola to write about sexuality in a way that is both explicit and indirect. In addition, the naturalistic method of observation offers a ‘neutral’ scientific perspective of sexuality. Finally, references to anatomical Venuses allow the pseudo-pedagogical observation of the naked female body. Therefore, an indecent, voyeuristic gaze reveals itself behind science as alibi, behind the naturalist gaze.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49469285","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":"Introduction: New Dialogues with Breton Literature and Culture","authors":"David. Evans, Heather Williams","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0313","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42184719","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":"Performing Identities, Displacing Homelands: Transnational Poetics in the Theatre of Paol Keineg","authors":"Annie de Saussure","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0319","url":null,"abstract":"While Breton literature has often been viewed as either nationalist or nostalgic, Paol Keineg offers alternative expressions of Breton consciousness. From his first published work, Le Poème du pays qui a faim (1967), inspired by Aimé Césaire, Keineg inscribes Breton literature in transnational paradigms while resisting essentialist and nationalist discourses through literary strategies of displacement. This article compares two protagonists in Keineg's theatre. First, I describe the decolonial context of Keineg's first play Le Printemps des bonnets rouges (1972), written with Jean-Marie Serreau and modelled on Césaire's theatre of négritude, before analysing the poetic displacements of the play's Breton hero Sebastian Ar Balp. I then explore how Keineg's depiction of Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement in Terre lointaine (2004) highlights his contradictions and ambiguities, and deploys ghosts, or spectres in the Derridean sense, which allow for multiple histories, geographies, and identities to overlap, further inscribing them in transnational paradigms.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44531207","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":"La Bretagne à l'Académie française","authors":"Mannaig Thomas","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0318","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the tensions which shaped the careers of three Breton writers – Charles Le Goffic, Anatole Le Braz and Auguste Dupouy – who achieved a degree of national recognition during their lifetime while maintaining their regional affiliations. Although ‘regionalist’ writing was in vogue from 1890 to the early 1940s, such a label could be a handicap for authors attempting to achieve legitimacy on the national stage. In contrast to ‘French’ authors well established in Paris, these ‘polygraphic’ writers published works across a wide variety of genres, with multiple publishing houses both in the capital and in Brittany. All three lived a kind of double life, oscillating between works of universal scope and those which foregrounded local specificity. This analysis offers a fluid model of literary activity which calls into question the rigidity of the familiar Paris/provinces dichotomy, demonstrating how these authors helped to redefine the frontiers of national literary life while affirming their regional identity.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41466216","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":"Entretien avec Paol Keineg","authors":"Annie de Saussure","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48543110","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":"Are the Bretons French? The Case of François Jaffrennou/Taldir ab Hernin","authors":"Heather Williams","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0316","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the poetry of François Jaffrennou, who published under the druidic pseudonym Taldir ab Hernin, as a case study in decolonized multilingualism. Close readings of Taldir's writing in Breton, Welsh and French reveal the pressures of negotiating a hybrid Celtic-French identity, as he affirms his Celticity while maintaining a careful relationship with France. Taldir criticizes the French state in his Welsh texts, whereas in French and Breton his critique is more guarded, subtly codified. The Celtic space which emerges here is full of tensions, as Taldir works both within and against the impulse to reconcile Celtic and French identities. I argue that being provincially Other in France requires a delicate balancing act, a special way of being French. I also contend that to work on the local is to work on the global, looking beyond regionalist and postcolonial approaches to Breton writing in an effort to dismantle the monolingualizing tendencies of French Studies.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46061358","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":"Myths of Authenticity and Cultural Performance: Breton Identity in the Poetry Anthology, 1830–2000","authors":"David F. Evans","doi":"10.3366/NFS.2021.0314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/NFS.2021.0314","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the various constructions of Breton identity in twelve anthologies of poetry revealing three broad conceptual phases: celebration of an essential ethno-cultural otherness which nonetheless belongs within the French Republic (1830–1918), calls for independence which harness pan-Celtic or postcolonial discourses (1919–71), and a playful, performative notion of identity based on cultural affinity, inclusive of incomers (1976–2000). I focus on strategies of editorial framing which, in each phase, insist on the apartness, and the authenticity, of Breton expression. These anthological, quasi-anthropological projects both anticipate and encourage the reader's touristic gaze, betraying anxieties about Brittany's relationship to the nation within which it must negotiate a place. These negotiations are played out in texts which, in their use of the French language and French poetic forms, operate a constant dialogue with the national tradition, a mode of self-questioning to which the poem is particularly well suited.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42361667","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}