Recherche multi-critères

Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) par Louise Bailly, publié le 17/09/2020

Known for his witty aphorisms, fanciful style and extravagant way of life, Oscar Wilde was not only a dandy par excellence but also a major figure of nineteenth-century literature. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, he expresses his belief that art should be dissociated from moral considerations and creates an anti-hero at odds with traditional protagonists whose virtuous behaviours were meant to be exemplary models.

"60% of new jobs are precarious jobs": A conversation with Ken Loach par Ken Loach, publié le 14/11/2019

Ken Loach was invited to the Festival Lumière in Lyon to present his new film, Sorry We Missed You, about a family struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. His masterclass at the Comédie Odéon was moderated by Thierry Frémaux, director of the Festival, and Clémentine Autin, a French politician. This resource is an edited transcript of the discussion about the film.

Reconfigurations of space in Partition novels par Sandrine Soukaï, publié le 19/09/2019

This article examines two Indian novels Clear Light of Day (1980) by Anita Desai and The Shadow Lines (1988) by Amitav Ghosh along with Burnt Shadows (2009) by Anglo-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, books written about the Partition of India that accompanied independence in 1947. Partition led to violence on an enormous scale; the exact number of people who were killed has never been ascertained, and estimates vary between one and two million. Partition also caused massive displacements of population, estimated between 12 and 18 million. This paper examines the way in which space – national, familial and communal – was divided and then reshaped by and through Partition. After discussing the fractures, ruptures and uprooting brought about by this trauma, I will consider the way in which diasporic writers devise fictional maps of memory of the past that foster exchanges across geographical borders.

Roundtable on Literary Studies in the United States par Christine Froula, Sandra Gustafson, publié le 12/09/2019

Christine Froula (Northwestern University) and Sandra Gustafson (University of Notre Dame) were guest lecturers at the ENS de Lyon in May 2019 and participated in a roundtable on Literary Studies in the US today. The roundtable was moderated by Vanessa Guignery and François Specq, both Professors at the ENS.

Fiche de lecture : Wish You Were Here, Graham Swift par Mathilde Le Clainche, publié le 20/09/2016

La guerre est un thème récurrent chez Graham Swift. La seconde guerre mondiale est par exemple évoquée dans Last Orders (1996) ou encore dans Shuttlecock (1981), où le récit du père du narrateur, retenu prisonnier, constitue le cœur du texte. Wish You Were Here (2011) semble s’inscrire dans la lignée de ces romans puisque le récit est notamment marqué par les allusions aux commémorations annuelles de la première Guerre mondiale.

Le passé comme fantôme dans Wish You Were Here de Graham Swift par Mathilde Le Clainche, publié le 20/09/2016

Cet article étudie la figure du fantôme dans l'un des romans de Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (2011). Si les représentations de la spectralité sont souvent rattachées au fantastique et au gothique, elles semblent ici faire partie de l'ordinaire et en deviennent presque banales: ainsi, loin de susciter l'effroi, le fantôme de Wish You Were Here est assimilé à un personnage parmi d'autres. Néanmoins, son rôle est prépondérant dans le récit, puisqu'il agit comme un révélateur des traumatismes du passé, qui sont comme condensés dans les lieux revisités par Jack Luxton. L'espace semble en fait constituer le cœur même de la hantise, dont le fantôme n'est qu'une illustration.

“When the Indians were there”: memory and forgetfulness in Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades par Lorie-Anne Rainville, publié le 01/03/2016

Le laboratoire ERIBIA et le département d’anglais de l’Université de Caen Normandie accueillaient le vendredi 8 janvier 2016 une journée d’étude autour du programme de l’agrégation externe d’anglais 2016. Les textes des communications sont réunis ici en deux parties : littérature et civilisation.

Identity (Dana Spiotta) par Dana Spiotta, publié le 26/08/2015

I read obituaries. I love to read about people who were notable for one thing—say the woman who appears in a famous photo at Kent State. I am drawn to what people think of as failures: the guy who backed the wrong videotape format or the guy who lost an election after a tweet. I like to read about people whose lives took dramatic turns, like the guy who spent most of his life running an ice cream shop in New Jersey but secretly had a past life as a war criminal. I am fascinated by secret lives or multiplex identities. I imagine the day-to-day ordinary life, what does it feel like over time. I wonder about consequences, guilt, and redemption. I wonder how your past shapes who you are. And I wonder about the life that takes shape around an event. How a fleeting moment can change you, or maybe not. Maybe you are you no matter what.

Home (Taiye Selasi) par Taiye Selasi, publié le 26/08/2015

What were we seeking when we set out? And where did we set out from? Birthplace. Plausible. But who was born? Not ‘we,’ not whole. Not yet, not then. Then, we were theirs: the parents, the adults, the fully-formed members of loosely-formed worlds. They had homes. Or thought they did. We belonged to them. They belonged to There. At least they tried: they ate the food, they spoke the tongue, they donned the garb. Still they moved like strangers There, like looser threads in tight-knit Thens. A question. If they belonged to There then why did they leave in search of Where?

Cinematic (Manu Joseph) par Manu Joseph, publié le 29/06/2015

As a lonely young man largely forgotten by the world and invisible to the most gorgeous women whom you adore, should you not be writing melancholy poetry or the vain prose of deep self-regard. Instead you are drawn to cinema, you derive so much from movies, and it appears that you have been infected by the unsung altruism of commercial cinema, its duty to entertain. Is it because you think you know how to entertain? Is that your conceit? Or is it humility that pushes you to entertain? Is it not true that you find the need to have a deal with your audience – ‘I have something to say and I am afraid you may not be interested, but I seek the right to say it by giving you something in return’. Isn’t that the humility of cinema?

Teaching Humanities par Gayatri Spivak, publié le 06/05/2015

Fifty years of institutional teaching has brought me this lesson: try to learn to learn how to teach this group, for me the two ends of the spectrum: Columbia University in the City of New York and six elementary schools on the border between West Bengal and Jharkhand. Everything I say will be marked by this. I take my motto from Kafka: “Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: Impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”

Ireland’s political life during the Famine: Election, constitutionalism and revolution par Anne-Catherine de Bouvier, publié le 07/03/2015

This article aims at exploring the available means of political response in Ireland to the issue of the Famine. What comes first to mind is the case of the representative function, democratic, or approximately so, by the standards of the day; i. e., parliamentary activity. Compiling the records of all individual Irish MPs in Parliament over the period is a tempting intellectual task but clearly beyond the scope of this paper; instead, I approach electoral activity during the period, since elections provide the opportunity of assessment of past contributions, and of confrontation. In the specific context of the Famine, theoretically at least, Irish MPs at Westminster were instrumental in bringing about a better knowledge of what was going on – and indeed some did so in quite a sustained, articulate, and often humane manner. Conversely, elections are moments in a country’s life when voters can take their representatives to account; and clearly, there was much to account for.

Asenath Nicholson and the Great Famine par Maureen Murphy, publié le 02/03/2015

Parts of this article were presented at the Agrégation/Research conference at the University of Caen, 23rd January, 2015. An earlier version appeared in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish history: essays in honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997), pp. 109-124.

Qu'est-ce qu'un acte d'écriture ? Analyse d'un cas : les promesses de mémoire adressées aux morts du 11/9 par Béatrice Fraenkel, publié le 29/01/2015

Dans le cadre de la construction d'une anthropologie pragmatique de l'écriture, Béatrice Fraenkel, anthropologue et directrice d'étude à l'EHESS, interrogera cette notion, à partir d'une analyse de cas : celui des "promesses de mémoire" (ex. "we will never forget you") recueillies à New York après le 11/9. Il s'agira à la fois de proposer une analyse des énoncés comme actes de langage (Austin), comme acte d'écriture, en prenant appui sur leur matérialité (affichage, autographie, signature etc) et la situation dans laquelle ils sont produits, et de proposer une interprétation concernant la mémoire promise par ces actes d'écriture, en prenant appui sur les travaux d'Arendt, d'Halbwachs et de Ricoeur.

Analysing front pages par Clifford Armion, publié le 20/01/2015

A front page tells you a lot about the contents of a newspaper and its attitude towards the news. Even if the traditional format difference between broadsheet newspapers and the more compact tabloids is disappearing – most papers are now printed in the same size – you can still easily recognize serious newspapers from tabloids. Tabloids usually have a large red masthead, very bold typeface and eye-catching pictures. The more serious papers have more text on the front-page and a plainer layout. Contrary to tabloids, broadsheets have no puns or jokes in the headlines and use a more formal language. Here are the main features you will find in any front-page…

Analysing press images par Clifford Armion, publié le 13/01/2015

Newspapers and press websites NEED to illustrate their pages with a variety of images. Illustration, along with headlines, is what draws the attention of the reader/buyer/visitor. When looking at a press image, one has to wonder why that particular picture has been chosen and how it contributes to the news. Here are a few examples showing how those images function.

Avital Ronell on authority par Avital Ronell, Clifford Armion, publié le 02/12/2014

We have to understand what education implies. To educate means to pull out of the other. There’s a pulling, there’s a little violence. I’m sure that education does take place without authority, if we understand by that a certain, measurable, examinable, testable level of acquisition and performance. However if you want to truly inspire, to accelerate and quicken and enliven the pulse of the student body, then authority would probably be an important premise.

Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) par ENS Lyon La Clé des Langues, publié le 21/11/2014

Travel books were very fashionable in the eighteenth century. Real travelers sometimes included elements of fiction in their accounts of their wanderings to make them sound more exotic and interesting. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift makes fun of this literary genre by introducing a fictitious traveler, Gulliver, who tells us about his encounters with strange creatures and countries. Gulliver's first person narrative is introduced by a fake publisher's note which is also written in the first person...

Writing on the self par ENS Lyon La Clé des Langues, publié le 14/11/2014

Critics and academics tend to draw a line between autobiography and fiction. However, it is sometimes difficult to make such a clear distinction between what is made up and what is not. Here are some short texts written by authors who reflect on their use of the first person.

The educational system in the United States: an overview par Daniel Wright, publié le 10/11/2014

In general, we have what is called a federal system, where there is a lot of power that States have, and then cities within states and even smaller municipalities within cities can make their own rules. And education is a good example of where it can really depend on where you are. The requirements can be very different from place to place and the type of schools that are offered can vary very much from state to state...

Nikolai Grozni: The Whispers of Music Lost par Nikolai Grozni, publié le 10/09/2014

“Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased,” writes Beckett in his Texts for Nothing. Or does he sing it? If words were the only sounds, then a sentence would be the only melody. We might never understand which came first—the words or the melody. Perhaps the first humans knew how to sing long before they knew how to talk. In this Dionysian vision of antiquity, all mortals were originally musicians. Music was the only thing that mattered. People understood each other by inventing mimetic melodies and singing together in tune. They appeared, loved, suffered, worshipped the gods and died like opera singers on stage.

Kirsty Gunn: Sound and Writing par Kirsty Gunn, publié le 08/09/2014

That sound you hear, as though coming off the lonely Scottish hills, through the fine Highland air, passing across straths and glens, along rivers and to the sea... Is the sound of the piobaireachd, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe, a music made for Gatherings, Salutes and Laments, a grand and grave and complicated music - Ceol Mor it is in Gaelic - The Big Music. The Big Music, too, is the title of my latest work of fiction - not a novel, but an elegy, as Virginia Woolf described all her work - a story that sounds as much as it says... An experience of words, of a story of people and a landscape, of a love story played across generations, that nevertheless sounds in the mind...

Sofi Oksanen: They fooled you - Greetings from the countries bordering Russia par Sofi Oksanen, publié le 01/07/2014

When I was a kid, my Estonian family never watched TV. Not because they disliked TV-shows, but because Soviet-TV was pure zombie-propaganda. Finland was my other homeland and when we got back to Finland, after visiting my Estonian family, switching on the television was one of the first things we did. It was like opening a window. I can still smell that moment, when my lungs were filled with free air, though I wouldn't have used that word at the time – free.

The gun control debate in the US par James B. Jacobs, Claire Richard, publié le 08/04/2014

I consider myself a gun control skeptic. I do not believe, at this point in our history, with 300 millions firearms in private hands, and a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and a political situation in which there is a very very small number of politicians who are willing to take a strong position on firearms, that there is a serious potential for regulatory controls. I don’t think that will happen. There is no magic bullet, if you can excuse the phrase, that will change American violence, but the good news is that it has been reduced substantially over the last 25 years....

What's a hero? par Susan Neiman, publié le 01/04/2014

When talking about heroes I’ve often been asked if I could please drop the problematic term ‘hero’ in favor of the term ‘role model’. I cannot, since the word role model is part of the problem: a sterile term that social scientists invented in 1957, which simply doesn’t work the way the word heroes does: to inspire, to challenge, to light fires for (and under) people of whatever age who need to be reminded that there is more to their lives than they are told to be resigned to. When attempting to use the word hero in a BBC discussion I was attacked by an interlocutor who justified her refusal to use the old-fashioned word ‘hero’ because “Hitler and Stalin were heroes.”

Remembering 9/11 - Politics of Memory par Marita Sturken, Claire Richard, publié le 31/03/2014

One of the reasons I was interested in trying to unpack the meanings of kitsch memory culture, say for instance in relationship to 9/11, is precisely the ways in which it creates this culture of comfort, that allows us to feel reassured. And that allows us to not confront the larger questions, about the project of American empire, about the project of national identity, about our priorities and our values as a nation, and about the kind of sacrifices that we have demanded on those serving in the armed forces, and all of the ways in which many families and many communities were really devastated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Susan Neiman on heroism par Susan Neiman, Clifford Armion, publié le 20/01/2014

I think we’re very confused about the subject of heroism. I began to get interested in the subject when I realised that we are actually at a historical cesure since the end of the Second World War. It used to be the case although there were many different conceptions of heroism. It used to be unquestioned that everyone wanted to be a hero, and everybody wanted to be a better hero than the next person. What has happened in the last fifty years or so is that the notion of the hero has in many ways been replaced by the notion of the victim.

Taking History Personnally par Cynthia Carr, publié le 12/12/2013

Two black men were lynched in Marion, Indiana, on the night of August 7, 1930. That was my father’s hometown, the town where I have my roots, and I heard this story when I was a little girl: The night it happened someone called my grandfather, whose shift at the Post Office began at three in the morning. "Don’t walk through the courthouse square tonight on your way to work," the caller said. "You might see something you don’t want to see." Apparently that was the punchline, which puzzled me. Something you don’t want to see. Then laughter. I was in my late twenties — my grandfather long dead — when I first came upon the photo of this lynching in a book. It has become an iconic image of racial injustice in America: two black men in bloody tattered clothing hang from a tree and below them stand the grinning, gloating, proud and pleased white folks.

Are You Going to Write That in Your Book? par Siddhartha Deb, publié le 03/12/2013

Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative nonfiction, ((The Beautiful and the Damned)), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Daily Telegraph, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Going Solo par Eric Klinenberg, publié le 19/02/2013

About five years ago I started working on a book that I planned to call ALONE IN AMERICA. My original idea was to write a book that would sound an alarm about a disturbing trend: the unprecedented rise of living alone. I was motivated by my belief that the rise of living alone is a profound social change – the greatest change of the past 60 years that we have failed to name or identify. Consider that, until the 1950s, not a single human society in the history of our species sustained large numbers of people living alone for long periods of time. Today, however, living alone is ubiquitous in affluent, open societies. In some nations, one-person households are now more common than nuclear families who share the same roof. Consider America. In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single, and only 9 percent of all households had just one occupant. Today, 49 percent of American adults are single, and 28 percent of all households have one, solitary resident.

Can Religion Make you Free? A Sermon on Diabolical Happiness par Simon Critchley, publié le 15/02/2013

"What is it that makes human beings happy? In a word, bread. And here we return to Jesus’ answers to the Devil’s desert temptations. In refusing to transform miraculously the stones into loaves, Jesus rejected bread for the sake of freedom, for the bread of heaven."

The Young Lords par Johanna Fernandez, Claire Richard, publié le 22/01/2013

The Young Lords were the children of the first large wave of Puerto Rican migration to the North East of the United States, in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Hartford. The Young Lords was begun not in New York, interestingly enough, but in Chicago. And it was initiated by the efforts of the leader of the Young Lords, who initially in Chicago had been a gang. Cha Cha Jimenez, who was the leader of that gang, worked with a leader of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, to transform this gang into a political organization.

The Intensive Care Unit: A Place of Technology and Myth par Cécile Guilbert, publié le 22/01/2013

If we follow Giorgio Agamben, who defined “religion as that which subtracts things, places, animals and persons from common use to transfer them into a separate sphere,” the intensive care unit seems to be a sacred place within the hospital because it is special, separate, and governed by specific protocols, whether we’re talking about reduced visiting hours or its bunker-like nature (like the operating room and the morgue). And because it’s the place of suspension between life and death, a passageway between the conscious and the unconscious, or between presence and absence, intensive care is the place for all sorts of metaphysical questions, in the form of oxymora. What’s at stake here, for the patient—a dying life? A living death? What then is life? and death?

Power – which powers? par Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, publié le 21/01/2013

To read, thirty-five years later, the essay that Jean Baudrillard published on Michel Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge is an odd experience : not only because many aspects of this intellectual fight are now litteraly archeological, in the usual sense of this word (if we haven’t forgotten Foucault, we hardly remember that time, when sexual liberation was a motto so important that interpreting it was a path to understand the whole society) ; but also because the two authors were talking and thinking in the name of a future that is now our past, or at least the shadow of our present.

Some Thoughts About Memory, Identity, and the False Family Narrative par Mira Bartók, publié le 15/01/2013

Identity and family legacy are partially formed by the family “memory narrative”—a family member, usually our mother or father, tells us stories about what happened before we were born or when we were too young to remember momentous events. But what happens when that narrator in the family is mentally ill, or a compulsive liar? In my case, my schizophrenic mother was the unreliable narrator of our family history. And my alcoholic father, a gifted writer who left when I was four, told my mother’s family grandiose lies about his own past.

Reclaiming the streets, public space and quality of life in New York par Janette Sadik-Khan, Clifford Armion, publié le 11/01/2013

Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative was a thirty year plan to say ‘what do we need to do to ensure that a 9.4 million New York City works better than an 8.4 million New York City works today?’ so that when you open the door in the year 2030 you like what you see. That long term planning view, understanding the growth that’s going to happen, meant that we needed to change some fundamental things. One of the first things we needed to do was to look at our transport systems differently and use the lever of growth to modernise those transport systems.

Understanding the social media: an interview with Jeffrey Rosen par Jeffrey Rosen, Clifford Armion, publié le 10/01/2013

Now that we’re living most of our lives online, all of us are vulnerable to the internet. The difficulty with young people is that they may not have experienced the dangers of not being able to escape your past until it’s too late. I like to tell the story of Stacy Sneider, the young 22 year old teacher in training who posted a picture of herself on Myspace wearing a pirate’s hat and drinking from a plastic cup that said drunken pirate. Her supervisor at the school said she was promoting drinking and she was fired. She sued and was unable to get her job back and she had to pick an entirely different career. That’s a very dramatic example on how vulnerable all of us are to being judged out of context by a single image or ill chosen picture and once you do that it may be very hard to escape your past.

For a public service of human augmentation par Thierry Hoquet, publié le 04/01/2013

Thinking about humanity begins with the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus: forgotten during the distribution of efficient organs, humans remained naked. While Epimetheus gave claws to some, shells to others, speed or cunning to still others, humans were neglected and ended up the poorest of creatures. To help them provide for the necessities of life and to repair as best he could his brother’s fundamental and foundational omission, Prometheus came to the rescue.

Video game theory par Liel Leibovtiz, Claire Richard, publié le 05/12/2012

TV requires you to interpret, to find meaning, to reject meaning, to make up new meaning, to negociate. Video games aren’t like that. Video games require you to do something else. You turn on a video game, and immediately you exist in three separate forms : you are that self on the couch, sitting in the physical space, watching the TV, holding the remote in your hand, you are the avatar on the screen, the character which you control and manipulate, and you’re a sort of third entity, an amalgamation of the two of you, of real and unreal, person and avatar, of gamer and character.

What Does a New Yorker Think When He Bites into a Hamburger? par Caroline Heinrich, publié le 20/11/2012

What do you think of when you bite into a hamburger? Mmm, how delicious? Oh boy, this is bad for me? Or: I hope I won’t make a mess. Or perhaps you don’t want to think about anything at all? Maybe you are just thinking, “What a crazy question!”? Or are you trying to figure out what this crazy question has to do with philosophy and, particularly, with Baudrillard’s thought?

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”.

The 9/11 memorial - Interview and footage of the WTC site par Clifford Chanin, Clifford Armion, publié le 30/10/2012

The original World Trade Centre site was 16 acres which if my calculations are correct is about 10 hectares in French geographical terms. So it was a very large space in the centre of the downtown Wall Street business district in New York. Those two buildings were each 110 stories tall. Each floor was an acre square. So you had 10 million square feet of floor space in those buildings. It really was an attempt to build the largest buildings in the world and bring companies from around the world to do business in those buildings. Once the attacks came and the buildings collapsed, it emerged very quickly in the planning process that the actual footprints of the buildings, those places were the they stood, were considered sacred ground.

Biographical essay on the genius and works of Hogarth (Part II) par John Nichols, publié le 05/10/2012

So much has already been written respecting the illustrious Artist who is the subject of the present memoir, that, were it not intended as a necessary accompaniment to this Edition of his works, a sketch of his life might seem to require some apology. It is not here professed to bring forward additional facts, but rather to examine generally his peculiar merits as an Artist, and to exhibit, within a moderate compass, the opinions of his various Commentators; connecting this criticism with such a brief outline of his life as may serve to give a biographical form to the whole.

Biographical essay on the genius and works of Hogarth par John Nichols, publié le 27/09/2012

So much has already been written respecting the illustrious Artist who is the subject of the present memoir, that, were it not intended as a necessary accompaniment to this Edition of his works, a sketch of his life might seem to require some apology. It is not here professed to bring forward additional facts, but rather to examine generally his peculiar merits as an Artist, and to exhibit, within a moderate compass, the opinions of his various Commentators; connecting this criticism with such a brief outline of his life as may serve to give a biographical form to the whole.

"I’m the antidote to propaganda": A conversation with Martin Parr par Martin Parr, Marie Gautier, Aurore Fossard, publié le 21/09/2012

"Well I like bright colours. I took the palette that was used for commercial photography, especially in advertising and fashion, and I applied that to the art world because I’m fundamentally trying to create entertainment in my photographs. The idea is to make them bright and colourful but if you want to read a more serious message in the photographs then you can do it as well. But my prime aim is to make accessible entertainment for ‘the masses’. So it’s a serious message disguised as entertainment."

Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching par ENS Lyon La Clé des Langues, publié le 27/08/2012

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi (born 10 December 1984) is a British novelist. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. Whilst studying Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen.

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. "

Nicholson Baker on his literary career and how he came to write about sex par Nicholson Baker, publié le 13/06/2012

I think the job of the novelist is to write about interesting things, including things that might not seem all that interesting at first glance--like, say, a lunch hour on an ordinary weekday – and to offer evidence that life is worth living. At least, that’s what I try to do – not always successfully. My first book was about a lunch hour – the second about sitting in a rocking chair holding a baby – the third about literary ambition. There was almost no sex in those three books. But I always wanted to be a pornographer – because after all sex is amazing and irrational and embarrassing and endlessly worth thinking about. My fourth book was called Vox, and it was about two strangers telling stories to each other on the phone. I decided to write it as one big sex scene, because if you’re going to do it, do it.

Beauty, Intensity, Asymmetry par François Chaignaud, publié le 16/02/2012

"Beauty, Intensity, Asymmetry are born in my mouth like three goddesses ripe for veneration - far more than Identity, Gender, or Transgression, and utterly different from them. But this Beauty, of which we know only that some wish to buy but never to sell it, much less allow it to disappear or cause it to flee - nor to be the man or woman who no longer possesses anything but memories of it - is she a prescriptive goddess?"

Three Words for Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich par Wendy Lesser, publié le 14/02/2012

As an element in Shostakovich's music, the shame is perhaps not as audible as the dread, but it is everpresent nonetheless. One cannot point to a precise place in the music where you can hear it, but it underlies and supports most of the other painful emotions, and if it were removed from the mix, you would certainly notice the difference. The shame is apparent in the harshness with which Shostakovich treats himself and his own feelings; it saves the saddest quartets (like the Eighth) from self-pity, and it saves the more cheerful ones (like the Sixth) from any tincture of smugness or self-assurance...

For Free Union in Criticism par Pierre Bayard, publié le 14/02/2012

The idea of attributing old works to new authors is not original. It has long been practiced by those lovers of literature, our students, who do not hesitate to attribute The Old Man and the Sea to Melville or War and Peace to Dostoevsky. What is interesting is that this kind of reinvention is not always properly appreciated by teachers. Students are not the only readers to practice reattribution. Scientific discoveries have on occasion forced historians of literature - and even more, of art - to ascribe works to creators other than those to whom they were at first incorrectly attributed...

Chords and Discords - Musical Patterns of Affinities par Pierre Bayard, Wendy Lesser, François Noudelmann, publié le 20/01/2012

Les « tables d'affinités » établies par les chimistes ont souvent servi de modèle aux rencontres sentimentales. Or, la concordance et la discordance qui résultent des affinités sont plus proches des phénomènes musicaux, où les associations redistribuent infiniment les correspondances harmoniques. Pierre Bayard, auteur de Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus, abordera cette question avec Wendy Lesser, auteur de Music for Silenced Voices : Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, et François Noudelmann, qui explore, dans Le Toucher les philosophes (en cours de traduction) la relation que Barthes, Sartre et Nietzsche avaient avec leur propre pratique du piano. The affinity tables established by chemists served as models for sentimental encounters. But the concordance and discordance resulting from affinities are closer to musical phenomena, where associations infinitely redistribute harmonic correlations. Pierre Bayard, author of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, will discuss this topic with Wendy Lesser, author of Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, and François Noudelmann, who explores in Le toucher des philosophes (to be translated) the relationship that Barthes, Sartre and Nietzsche had to their own practise of the piano.

The Black Panther Party's fight against medical discrimination par Alondra Nelson, Claire Richard, publié le 09/01/2012

Claire Richard asks Alondra Nelson about a neglected and yet essential legacy of the Black Panther Party. When the party emerged in 1966, the Jim Crow laws had been dismantled and there was no legal support for discrimination in the United States, but there were still segregated practices within the healthcare sector. As the saying goes, when America has a cold, African Americans have pneumonia. The Black Panthers fought for healthcare equality as a way to achieve social justice. Alondra Nelson tells us about the clinics they created where they did basic healthcare but also screening and vaccination programs. They were asking for a universal healthcare system which the USA still don't have today...

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?"

Race Relations and the Presidency of Barack Obama par Randall Kennedy, publié le 05/03/2010

I attended the inauguration of Barack Obama with two million other people who created the largest crowd in the history of Washington, D.C. Although I grew up in the nation's capital, I had never before attended an inauguration. None had previously beckoned. But this time I felt compelled to be present. The sentiments that gripped me were similar to those that animated many who attended the proceedings.

"Come, unbutton here": Exposing "the thing itself" in Shakespeare’s King Lear par Denis Lagae-Devoldère, publié le 14/02/2010

The first definition of the verb "to expose" in the Oxford English Dictionary is "to put out", "to deprive of shelter", "to turn out of doors", formed on the original Latin exponere: in King Lear, the king is famously kicked out of his respective daughters' houses and exposed to the elements. Throughout the play, such exposure to danger goes hand in hand with the exposure of something or somebody, which the OED defines as to denounce or to lay open (to danger, to ridicule, to censure)...

Promoting patients in narrative discourse: A developmental perspective par Harriet Jisa , publié le 18/12/2009

Languages provide speakers with a number of structural options for manipulating the expression of events in narrative discourse. Underlying narrative competence is the capacity to view events as dynamic actions composed of a bundle of elements such as, agent, patient, affectedness, etc. (Hopper and Thompson, 1980). This study examines the grammatical constructions used by children (5-6-, 7-8- and 10-11-year-olds) and adult speakers of Amharic, English, French and Hungarian to manipulate the expression of agent and patient participants in the expression of events. The narrative task used to elicit the data is composed of a series of pictures which recount the adventures of two principal characters (a boy and a dog) in search of their runaway frog (Frog, Where are you? Mayer 1969). Over the course of the story the boy and the dog encounter a host of secondary characters (a mole, an owl, a swarm of bees and a deer) and change participant status, going from controlling agent to affected patient of a secondary character's action. Our interest lies in the range of structures available in the languages studied and their use by children and adults in narrative discourse. We detail how children and adults native speakers of the four languages use topicalising constructions to promote the patient participant in an event to the starting point (Langacker, 1998) of the recounting of that event.

All the World’s a Folly : Theatricality and Intertextuality in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies par Brigitte Friant-Kessler, publié le 11/12/2009

There is a manner in which Auster's revisiting classic sources is not merely a simple lift or a citation from the work when he playfully offers a postmodern context to old texts, especially with major literary figures in the wings. As J. Dupont argues in his introductory note to The Brooklyn Follies : "It would however be an exhaustingly vain task to try and undertake a census of the literary intertexts that run beneath the surface of Auster's work". Such an attempt is all the more so destined to be a failure as there are, beside the clearly stated references, less obvious, possibly unavowed though not any the less significant, undercurrents of intertextuality to be traced in Auster's Brooklyn Follies. Were there only one idiosyncratic trait to be highlighted in Auster's style, it would obviously be his taste for patch-working...

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.

"People tried to figure if they were offended and why" : L'intertextualité dans le roman américain contemporain ou la lecture en procès par Françoise Sammarcelli, publié le 09/10/2009

L’objet de ce travail est de problématiser la notion d’intertexte en prenant appui sur le court roman de Louise Welsh : Tamburlaine Must Die. Dans le sillage des études du généticien Louis Hay qui proposait dès 1985 que le texte n’existe pas, l’introduction propose d’argumenter que l’intertexte n’existe pas, il n’existe que des modalités d’intertextualité dont le point commun est le fantasme originaire : l’illusion que l’on pourrait identifier un point d’origine fixe et stable à l’écriture. En lieu et place de l’intertexte est alors postulée l’existence de ce qu’on pourrait appeler la voix textuelle, distincte de la voix auctoriale de l’autorité de l’auteur, qui serait en partie fondée sur la co-présence de multiples modalités d’intertextualité mais qui dépasse largement ce cadre si on la relie à la problématique analytique de l’objet-voix lacanien.