{"title":"Le Zéro et l'Infini. Sens et fonction des personnages mort-nés dans le Haut Livre du Graal","authors":"Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier","doi":"10.7202/1076089AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076089AR","url":null,"abstract":"If the death of a character generally happens at the end of a journey into narrative time and space, the High Book of the Grail features three characters who can be described as stillborn. Their death happens at the same moment, or precedes their first mention in the romance. The meaning of these characters and the one of the work as a whole raises therefore an hermeneutical problem. In fact, their death is not considered as a minor incident, but as a tremendous event which affects the balance of the universe of fiction, politically as well as symbolically and religiously.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126269502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Proustian Reading of Michel Onfray's Cosmos and Christian Signol's Les vrais bonheurs: \"Privileged Moments\" of Sensorial Ecstasy","authors":"Keith Moser","doi":"10.7202/1076095AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076095AR","url":null,"abstract":"This study probes the philosophical significance of the strange joy induced by a trigger sensation that immediately strikes the reader in Michel Onfray’s Cosmos and Christian Signol’s Les vrais bonheurs. Heavily influenced by Proust’s vision of involuntary memory, the role of the senses, and the nature of time in A la recherche du temps perdu, Onfray and Signol attempt to explore the essence of everything in the context of powerful, transformative sensorial encounters. Some critics automatically dismiss the rending ecstasy depicted by the Proustian narrator in the “petite madeleine” scene as nothing more than a form of whimsical artistry. However, Onfray and Signol’s rewriting of this renowned passage demonstrates that the notion of a privileged moment, associated with Proust in French literary circles, is an all-encompassing metaphor for delving into the most fundamental philosophical questions of all.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"56 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116544218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"« Un beau viveur et un délicat vivant ». Le baron de Besenval, courtisan et collectionneur, à travers son iconographie","authors":"Agnes Calatayud","doi":"10.7202/1076091AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076091AR","url":null,"abstract":"At the zenith of his life, the baron Pierre-Joseph-Victor de Besenval de Brünstatt (1721-1791), after having distinguished himself in battle under the reign of Louis XV as a colonel in the regiment of Swiss guards, had become the most seasoned courtier of Versailles. Assiduous member of Marie-Antoinette’s entourage, witty and attractive, he excelled in the two arts which were the mainstays of the Queen’s coterie at the Trianon château: the art of conversation and that of gallantry. Besenval had a prevailing passion; he was one of the finest art collectors of his time. In the aftermath of the storming of the Bastille, a momentous event he could not prevent despite commanding the Royal troops in Paris, he left the capital hastily, was caught, imprisoned, judged, and miraculously freed. The aim of this article is to examine different portraits of this aristocrat who embodied the Ancien régime and its downfall who, at the dawn of the Revolution, wanted to bow out gracefully from these tumultuous times leaving behind an exceptional portrait of himself as an art collector. A unique painting of its kind amongst 18th century French works, this fascinating and intimate fireside portrait immortalises Besenval’s wit and taste for posterity.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128974816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Ethos and Moralité: Reading La Fontaine's \"Préface\" to the Fables","authors":"S. Bold","doi":"10.7202/1076090AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076090AR","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a reading of La Fontaine’s puzzling and coy preface to his first volume of Fables. Presented at the start as a friendly debate between the author and a rival, the “Préface” becomes an ironic sort of performance art that reveals the fabulist’s own ambivalence toward a genre that has come to him cloaked in the sober robes of a moralizing pedagogy. La Fontaine tries on the costume and does his best to play the part, composing his role from the illustrious examples of Socrates — a fabulist in extremis — and eventually a crafty Aesop, only to show us little by little that he is more a poet and artist than a moralist. Distrustful of those who would lecture on virtue and rectitude, La Fontaine’s teaching anticipates at once Rousseau’s negative education in the Émile and also Victor Turner’s pedagogy of anti-structure.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132345484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What we do in the Shadows... Rapports de force/rapports de France dans quelques romans de Jean-Christophe Grangé","authors":"Isabelle Casta","doi":"10.7202/1076098AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076098AR","url":null,"abstract":"Middlebrow author, Jean-Christophe Grangé is little studied as such, but his novels (widely read) nonetheless draw a strange map of France: the police, the seat and visible embodiment of official power, is regularly overwhelmed by a shifting and disparate sects, camarillas, more or less occult organizations or all-powerful paramilitary groups, in line with the apocalyptic thought of the illuminists of the eighteenth century.The France of the balance of power is fantastically present, crisscrossed at full speed by movements precisely described and timed, but totally improbable by their very ease.There is therefore realism - the Brittany of Lontano, the rue Goujon de Miserere, the cathedral Notre-Dame du Serment des Limbes... and at the same time immersed in a “liquidity” of actions and journeys which properly belong to the dream. Spectrography of an overexposed unreality, Grangé's romantic universe could be summed up by the leitmotif that runs through most of the meetings and exchanges, like an isotopy: “I'll be there in less than an hour”. This curialized “power” of the sects of the bizarre, of the hellish returns of the past, of the ill-liquidated ghosts of (de) colonization is embodied in several figures of Evil, serial killers or sorcerer's apprentices (La forêt des mânes) which never ceases. to undermine the official instruments of democracy. The juxtaposition of the licit and the paranormal, the realistic and the wacky, creates the special atmosphere of this universe where the swarming and deadly “below” undermines and corrupts more and more the orderly and brilliant “above” of social norms, and where savagery winds infinitely in the signs of modernity.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134301166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le langage des murs qui enferment dans L'Étranger de Camus et Hiroshima mon amour de Duras","authors":"V. Grégoire","doi":"10.7202/1076093AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1076093AR","url":null,"abstract":"Meursault from L’Étranger, and “Elle” from Hiroshima mon amour are tragic characters who, as if driven by an ancient fatum, have committed a crime, blood crime or crime of love, for which they must pay. While the first is accused of insensitivity and sentenced to death because justice sees him as a “moral monster”, the second is found guilty of “horizontal collaboration” and punished by “popular justice”. From then on, locked up in a cell for Meursault, or alternately in a room and a cellar for “Elle”, these two characters seek the faces and voices of past loves. The quest for these faces and voices from a bygone world which make the protagonists suffer by their absence will give way for Meursault and “Elle” to a state of peace that will allow them to come to terms with their past. While the first character, who has changed in prison, is going to rediscover his mother and finally understand her desire to reembrace life in the home for the elderly, the second character, “healed” by the Japanese, will finally find a sentimental balance.","PeriodicalId":311064,"journal":{"name":"Dalhousie French Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127613375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}