TEXT AND INTERTEXT IN DANIEL PENNAC'S MALAUSSÈNE NOVELS

1984

B.A.S. British and American Studies, 2019

The paper looks at Agatha Christie’s thought-provoking selection of titles for her detective stories both from a literary critic’s and from a translator’s perspective. The fact that many titles include or allude to well-known English nursery rhymes is not a mere coincidence, but the deliberate choice of an author who created a subtle interplay in her reader’s horizon of expectation, between the tension and thrilling atmosphere of a classical crime narrative and the tranquility and playful mood of a children’s poem or fairy tale. Observing the Romanian translations of Agatha Christie’s original titles, we comment on situations when this interplay is replicated; when it is not, we pay attention to the compensatory strategies – if any – used by the Romanian translators

Modern and Contemporary France, 13.2 (2005), 149-60

Questions of perception have for a long time held a central place in French intellectual life, from investigations into perception and consciousness by Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, through a psychoanalytic focus on self-image, to more recent preoccupations with photography and the moving image.1 This interest has been echoed by several writers of literary fiction, and the relationship between visual theorists and literary writers has been a topic of critical interest. The author's argument here, though, concerns popular fiction. The author claims that the treatment of perception in the detective story is a special case in literature, that the perception of the physical world in crime fiction is qualitatively different from that usually represented in other literary forms. It is also the author's contention that crime fiction's unique approach ranks it among the influences that have informed the representation of perception in French literary fiction of the later twentieth century.

2000

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Sex and Violence or the Destruction of the Traditional Novel Dr. Elvira Monika Laskowski-Caujolle is a lecturer in French at the University of California, Santa Barbara Alain Robbe-Gril let's fiction can be characterized by its transgression against conventional narrative forms. To subvert the established novel, which is supposed to imitate nature and reality, Robbe-Grillet emphasizes the artificial character of his writings. He denies mimesis in order to destroy the dominant ideology so that it will lose the beautiful mask of innocence and of being natural. Robbe-Grillet sets a trap for the typical reader of the conventional novel who is used to the classical plot, to a In narrative of causality that results in a completed process. Projet pour une revolution a New York and Topologie dune cite fantome, for example, the reader waits in vain for the answer to many of the questions raised by the author who doesn't supply the solution, leaving the reader con...

Dix-Neuf, 2004

ESC: English Studies in Canada

Sartre Studies International, 2001

"The Words", as its name suggests, interweaves with the fictionalized account of Jean-Paul Sartre's childhood the story of his discovery of reading and writing—while keeping a veil over certain things, of course, since he doesn't set out to "confess" everything (no doubt he doesn't know everything). He tells us about himself with the touching self mockery of the Great Writer, with the clear-sightedness and intelligence of the thinker pretending to analyze himself in front of his readers. Even if the philosopher seems to tell all without beating about the bush, his point of view is still that of the observer amused by his character: a little Oedipus overflowing with narcissism, the fruit of a twisted family tree, but who is destined to become Sartre all the same! ... "The Words" is first of all writing in action, and fine writing at that, grating, amused, pleasurable. It is so undoubtedly because of its object: the author himself, a beauti fully masochistically malleable subject. Indeed, this manipulation, of a child by adults and of the adults by the child, will be the chief topic of Sartre's book. Aggressiveness sublimates itself in love, especially in the love of words. In a mirror within a mirror, Sartre's book tells of Sartre's coming to books, a Sartre who is still that child living among books and readers, writers and publishers...

Thanks to progress in learning and in postal organization, the letter becomes an important medium for communicating information and can be viewed as a precursor to the modern gazette. So the evolution of the epistolary form facilitates news circulation concerning politics, literature, family and society: it's the main way used by aristocracy and bourgeoisie to find news (Grassi, 1994 : 302). So the readers are impatient to receive a letter to enliven an ordinary life. The value of a letter lies in several aspects considering that the "art" of letter writing under the Ancien Régime in France clearly has an ethic as well as an aesthetic importance, a politic as well as a poetic component. So letters published as "art" under Classicism are always transformed into illustrations of the "art" of writing letters where the writing subject is positioned as a loyal (male) servant of an aristocratic order revolving around an absolute king 1. However, epistolary novel gives arise in the second half of the eighteenth century. The beginning of the Eighteenth is dominated by memoirs in which the protagonists offer their experience of life and love. The principle quality, attributed to a letter, is its capacity to transmit feelings immediately: in fact, a letter avoids temporal distance between lived experience and its written expression. In this way, the absence of a narrator guarantees the authenticity of narration because nobody can talk or think in place of characters (Burel, 2012: 506) 2. 1. "This writer serves the monarch through public speech acts that constitute a predictable and universally imitable model of courtesy. The counter current to this dominant Classical model, which coexists with it from the outset, is epistolary 'art' interpreted as inimitable but inspiring emulation, because it is understood to emanate from differing, private literary spaces that articulate the particularities of historical contingency. The latter concept of epistolary art generates discourses of cultural difference, which will assume a renewed ascendancy in the eighteenth century" (Altman, 1986: 62). 2. P. V. Conroy analyses the principal elements concerning the French epistolary genre (epistolary choice, public and authenticity) in this way: "By adopting the epistolary format, the novel took upon itself that particular way of rendering the outside world that the letter had already conditioned the reading public to accept as normal. To the extent that fictitious novel followed the same conventions and satisfied the same expectations as did American Research Journal of English and Literature Abstract: The eighteenth century is considered as the golden age of epistolary art. If we analyse the historical and social value of letters, we notice that epistolary exchange soon becomes one of the principal ways of communication and of providing information. One of the most important qualities of the epistolary novel is its ability to effectively convey emotion. The epistolary novel removes the temporal distance between personal history and its written form. The most famous writers of the time (such as Montesquieu) and libertine writers (Laclos and Sade in particular) employed the epistolary novel in different ways. So eighteenth-century literature is characterised by the successful epistolary novel. Since the Modern Age letter has held great historical and social importance due to the power of letter to act as a vehicle for information. This emerges as one of the main reasons for the rise in popularity of the epistolary novel.

2006

One of the central aspects of the nouveau roman, the most important French literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s, was the way in which it questioned the idea of the novel as storytelling. The nouveaux romanciers, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, wanted to bring forth the ideological questionability of narrativity epitomized by what they called “Balzacian realism” – in terms of which, they felt, the novel as a genre was still viewed and assessed. However, after this period of radical problematization, a rehabilitation of storytelling is visible in the French novel of the 1970s – a shift that some scholars have characterized as the “return of the narrative” or as “re-narratization of the novel” (see e.g. Kibedi Varga 1988, 38; Gratton 1997, 248; cf. Davis & Fallaize 2000, 14–15). In my article, I would like to shed some light on this “narrative turn” by arguing that it can be seen as a turn towards a fundamentally hermeneutic view of the narrative me...