Recherche multi-critères

Generic reference: the exceptional status of human nouns par Ismaël Zaïdi, publié le 30/12/2020

[Fiche] This article examines the particular status of generic references (statements that assign a characteristic to a class or subclass) that concern human subjects. While such statements are often described as interchangeable, our study shows that each form of generic reference has social implications when human subjects are under study. Between non-acceptability, the expression of stereotypes and a need for context which is usually absent in studies, human nouns highlight more than ever the relationship between grammar and semantics within generic references.

Giving Voice in Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick: Disability in a Modern Rewriting of Richard III par Méline Dumot, publié le 09/10/2020

This article examines a contemporary rewriting of Shakespeare’s Richard III by Chinese-American playwright Mike Lew. In his play Teenage Dick (2018), Lew gives a new voice to Shakespeare’s well-known villain. Noticing that one of the most famous disabled characters in theatre history is rarely – if ever – performed by a disabled actor, Lew centers his play on Richard’s experience as a disabled teenager. The play questions our current vision of disability, both in the theatrical world and in our society. This article explores the ways in which Lew adapts the Shakespearean legacy to produce a new narrative and envisions the concept of accessibility in multiple ways.

“I, poor monster” (Twelfth Night, II. 2. 33): Monsters as Subjects in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest par Manon Turban, publié le 02/10/2018

This paper aims to study how the unusual characterisation of Caliban and Bottom as feeling and thinking subjects in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest provokes the emergence of compassion, an emotion which monsters seldom inspired in the early modern period and which invites the audience to catch a glimpse of the mutability of human identity in these two monstrous characters.

Taiye Selasi: On Emotions par Taiye Selasi, publié le 31/08/2015

How do writers succeed in submerging us in situations so unlike our own lives? I would argue that, as a reader, I have yet to encounter a situation in literature "unlike" my life. The demographic details may differ: Charlotte is a spider, I am a human; Teju Cole's narrators are men, I am a woman; many of Toni Morrison's characters are mothers, I am not. The list of things that I am not is long: white, male, a parent, a soldier, Chinese-speaking, South American, a witness to any war.

Morality (Adelle Waldman) par Adelle Waldman, publié le 26/08/2015

Two of my favorite authors, Jane Austen and George Eliot, are very concerned with characters’ moral lives. In “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” I look closely at how Nathaniel P. justifies his behavior to himself. Today, books or films about romantic relationships, or dating, are often seen as very light—mere amusements and escapes—but this is the area in life when most of us will reveal how we treat others: how kind we are to those we don’t (or no longer) love and how we respond when differences arise with those we do love. I wanted to write a book about relationships that was truthful without being escapist, and I wanted to look closely at how dating behavior reflects morality in the deepest sense.

Goldie Goldbloom: Portraits and Faces - Appearance and Disfigurement par Goldie Goldbloom, publié le 27/09/2013

Chekhov is well known for his impartial observations of his characters and for his grasp of “realism”. When I first read his description of the lady with the little dog, I discovered that she is “a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret.” I was puzzled. This less than enthusiastic description of the woman Gurov will come to love leaves out many basic details such as the colour of Anna Sergeyevna’s eyes and whether she has an attractive figure. I wondered why Chekhov departs from the wordier earlier traditions of written portraiture, and how his simple sketch of Anna illustrated the “realism” for which he is known.

Rebelling as a female in the 18th and 19th century literature. From Pamela to Jane Eyre: a path to equality? par Marion Lopez-Burette, publié le 23/09/2013

This article intends to study and compare the way Pamela, Richardson's early heroine of the novel genre, and Charlotte Brontë's romantic Jane, rebel. What follows will underscore the path trodden by female fictional characters in terms of shaping the individual, from the Enlightenment period to the romantic era. The patterns of entrapment and self-willed seclusion the protagonists are involved in function as incentives for rebellion. The ideals they rebel for play the role of living forces in a way that is meaningful to comprehend how the essence of rebellion evolved with time. No matter how much the protagonists' respective procedure may differ, from moral conservatism to personal answering of moral questions through rites of passage, the two female heroines are equally conscious of their value as human beings. Their handling of their hardships and their allegiance to God, however, points to the qualitative and quantitative evolution of the notion of equality.

Keith Scribner: Representation and Psychology of Conflict par Keith Scribner, publié le 27/08/2013

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech William Faulkner famously said that all real meaning in fiction comes from the human heart in conflict with itself. As a novelist I’m compelled by the internal conflicts inherent in the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and how those stories come to define us, how they allow us to justify our actions and possibly delude ourselves about who we are. Like any narrative, these stories help us shape otherwise disparate experiences into a comprehensible form. Over time we become so heavily invested in these narratives that when their veracity is challenged, the resulting conflict can be explosive.

William Hogarth - Characters and Caricaturas par Vincent Brault, publié le 19/04/2013

Reproduction commentée de l'oeuvre "Characters and Caricaturas" du graveur anglais William Hogarth.

Amending Mariana in Measure for Measure par Michael Dobson, publié le 11/04/2013

With all of this provocative and intriguing play to choose from, complete with a beguiling cast list that includes figures as complex and compelling as Angelo, Isabella, and the Duke, I have chosen to discuss the person who may seem in her own right the least interesting of the six newly-married, betrothed-and-expecting, or potentially betrothed characters who dominate Measure for Measure’s final tableau: Mariana.

The cultural perception of the American land: a short history par Mireille Chambon-Pernet, publié le 20/11/2012

The importance of land and nature in the American culture is widely known. The Pilgrim Fathers who landed on the coast of the Massachussetts in 1620 were looking for freedom which was both spiritual and material. The latter derived from land ownership, as a landowner called no man master. Yet, in 1893, Jackson Turner announced that: “the American character did not spring full-blown from the Mayflower” “ It came out of the forests and gained new strength each time it touched a frontier”.

Kate Colquhoun on the blurred boundaries between fiction and non-fiction par Kate Colquhoun, publié le 11/09/2012

Truman Capote called his 1966 book In Cold Blood the first non-fiction novel. Since then, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have become increasingly blurred. Are these false definitions? At least we could say that novelists are able to articulate the internal worlds – the thoughts and feelings – of their characters while non-fiction relies entirely on evidence.

Helen Oyeyemi on haunted house novels par Helen Oyeyemi, publié le 18/06/2012

"You read of extreme cases of jamais vu in the newspapers. There was one recently involving a husband who, after eighteen years of happy stability with his wife, told her he had a surprise for her. He blindfolded her, then ‘hit her over the head with the blunt end of an axe, fracturing her skull in three places.’ She survived and tried to forgive him, even vouched for his good character in court. The husband-turned-attacker, unable to explain his moment of terminal hostility, deferred to psychiatrists who offered the opinion that it was his past that had caused it. "

Jonathan Dee on the place of the novel in a money-driven society par Jonathan Dee, publié le 13/06/2012

About money there is nothing new. Nor about social inequity. When I wrote The Privileges, I was careful to leave out as many time-specific details as possible, because I felt that to tie its characters, and the lives they led, to the circumstances of a particular moment in history was to excuse them, in a way, and thus to miss the point of their existence...

Narration in the Human Mind par Siri Hustvedt, publié le 16/02/2012

"Human beings are forever explaining themselves to themselves. This is the nature of our self-consciousness. We are not only awake and aware of the world around us, but are able to reflect on ourselves as actors in that world. We reason and we tell stories. Unlike our mammalian relatives who do not narrate their own lives, we become characters in our own tales, both when we recollect ourselves in the past and imagine ourselves in the future. Our ability to represent our experience in language - in those sounds and signs of our essential intersubjectivity - allows us the necessary symbolic alienation required for mental time travel..."

“The shadow of the fifth”: patterns of exclusion in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child par Anne-Laure Brevet, publié le 06/12/2011

This study of The Fifth Child (1988) attempts to show that the eponymous character, a traumatic semi-human creature who neither assimilates into his ordinary family nor conforms to the demands of society impersonates a drive for disorder, chaos and violence undermining collective ideals. On the one hand, the fact that the alien child is not only excluded from family life but also from any type of “normal” human interaction, especially in Ben, in the World (2000), reveals hidden discordant notes that further lead to the disruption of his model family. On the other hand, as the symbol of a dark, destructive force fighting against enlightenment and progress, Ben’s inherently disruptive figure is a reminder of the two World Wars and the impersonation of social unrest. Through the various patterns of exclusion triggered off by his subversive presence, the fifth child reveals that the primitive dimension of the self and of humanity at large should be understood as part and parcel of human nature.

Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories: An Introduction par Emilie Walezak , publié le 28/06/2011

Katherine Mansfield wrote short stories exclusively and produced a large body of work though she died quite young from tuberculosis when she was 30. She is one the best representatives of modernist short story writing. Virginia Woolf herself admitted to Mansfield that she was jealous of her writing: "and then Morgan Foster said the Prelude and The Voyage Out were the best novels of their time, and I said damn Katherine! Why can't I be the only woman who knows how to write?"

The Intricacies of Onomastics in Harry Potter and its French Translation par Carole Mulliez, publié le 16/11/2009

To put it in a nutshell, here, I am going to consider two categories in the vast corpus of Rowling's proper nouns, namely character naming and place naming. I would like to show that not only do they point at one single instance but also that they are in keeping with the reference characteristics - or sometimes misleading - ; that they contain cultural echoes and plays on words; and that their sounds are also appropriate. To conclude I am going to underline how difficult it must have been for translators to find a satisfactory solution as a result.

A reading of The Brooklyn Follies through the lens of autofiction par Marie Thévenon, publié le 02/10/2009

From his very first novel, The Invention of Solitude, to his very last, Man in the Dark, Paul Auster has always played with the mixture between autobiography and fiction. The Brooklyn Follies pertains to this tradition and it is through the lens of autofiction that this article proposes to explore this novel. The author starts by observing the similarities between Paul Auster and his characters and pays close attention to the intertextual dimension. She then analyses the metafictional aspects of the narration. Finally, she places this novel among Paul Auster's other works and wonders if there has been an evolution in his writing.

Paul Auster: A General Introduction par Jocelyn Dupont, publié le 13/02/2009

This document provides a short general overview of Paul Auster’s work. After a brief discussion of Auster’s texts positioning in the literary heritage, it tackles the place and role of the writer in an often alienating environment. It then deals with the representation of the city in Auster’s work, notably Brooklyn, before concluding on the gift for storytelling that so characterizes Paul Auster’s production.

Fiche de lecture : Celebration, Harold Pinter par Juliette Dorotte, publié le 07/05/2008

In a posh restaurant, two couples of friends, Matt and Prue, and Lambert and Julie, are having lunch. They are together to celebrate Lambert and Julie's wedding anniversary, but the mood is not proper to celebration. At an adjacent table, another couple is having a talk. Revelations are fusing on both sides: the man had an affair, and the woman reveals the dark side of her past. Before the six characters meet and make the general atmosphere even tenser, three characters come and go between the tables: the owner of the restaurant, a waitress, and a mythomaniac waiter.

Across the ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’: Jean Rhys’s Revision of Charlotte Brontë’s Eurocentric Gothic par Sylvie Maurel, publié le 20/03/2008

In this article, Sylvie Maurel analyses the Gothic destabilizing machinery at work in Jean Rhys’s "Wide Sargasso Sea". The first Gothic element the author looks at is the demonic agency that haunts the novel. Colonial history lingers in Rhys’s world and accounts for some of the strange and unexpected phenomena that occur on the island. Actually, the narrative is under the double influence of a past set in an actual history of slavery and a future already written in the story of "Jane Eyre". Rhys’s characters have an uncanny prescience of what lies ahead and a sense that they cannot evade repetition. The motif of witchcraft is another element that links "WSS" to the Gothic. The motif goes beyond a picturesque reference to the West Indian context and functions as a metaphor of the relationship between language and power. Christophine’s witchcraft and Rochester’s Eurocentric discourse are two similar attempts at transforming the world through language. The power of language is also reflected in the way the novel constantly brings together multiple voices and conflicting views which seem to hide a secret rather than reveal a final truth. Rochester can only feel the presence of such a secret and risks delirium as he tries to get a grip on something that constantly eludes him.