Recherche multi-critères

From National Literatures to World Literature par Suagata Bhaduri, publié le 02/03/2023

If, rather than being rooted in sectarian identity politics, reading strategies for literary and cultural practice have to be other-regarding, and not be cocooned within one’s self-same monolingual and monocultural universes, it calls for translation and comparative literature – where one goes beyond literary and cultural texts in one’s own language and reaches out to the other – to become mainstays of such a practice. To what extent would an emphasis on going beyond one’s own identitarian literary universes require one to align with the project of World Literature, considering further the question of access to ‘worlding’ and canonization in a deeply differential globalized world? The role played by translation and comparative literature in leading pedagogic praxes beyond national monolingual literatures towards the ethical and other-regarding project of World Literature will be examined in this lecture with particular reference to the Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore’s views on the same.

War, Catharsis, Peace: Ancient Greek Visions and 21st Century Violence par Christine Froula, publié le 12/03/2020

This presentation brings together an American play and an American film inspired by Greek plays: Aeschylus’s Suppliants and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. Charles Mee’s gripping drama Big Love (2000) animates the plot of The Suppliants to explore the violence of the American socio-economic sex/gender system, moving from male violence to female violence to catharsis to peace. The title of Spike Lee’s brilliant, urgent, visionary utopian film Chi-Raq (2015) names Chicago’s horrific neighborhood gang wars and America’s imperial violence in one angry word and empowers its heroine, Lysistrata, to organize the neighborhood women to seize arms, treasure and the power of language in order to stop the gang warfare that, in real life as in the film, destroys children and young men in our city every day.

The Scottish Education System and Scotland’s Languages Policy par Louise Glen, publié le 21/11/2019

Louise Glen, Senior Education Officer, details the specificities of the Scottish education system.

"Language is a movement between scattered forms": Interview with Amitava Kumar par Amitava Kumar, Natacha Lasorak, publié le 25/10/2019

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who teaches literature at Vassar College. In this interview, he talks about his collection of essays Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (2004) and his novel Immigrant, Montana (2017), and focuses on the notion of "home", immigration, the caste system and the political situation in India.

"Language is power" : Entretien avec Claire Messud par Claire Messud, Jillian Bruns, publié le 25/09/2018

À l'occasion des Assises Internationales du Roman, organisées par la Villa Gillet, la Clé des langues a pu rencontrer Claire Messud, romancière et enseignante américaine, auteure de The Burning Girl, paru en 2017. Dans cet entretien, elle nous livre ses réflexions sur l'importance de la langue et du roman en tant que genre littéraire, et revient sur son enfance partagée entre la France et les États-Unis.

Présenter un article d’opinion, une chronique ou un éditorial par Anne Robtael, publié le 05/09/2017

Le format scolaire des présentations d’article de presse à l’oral (épreuve présente dans de nombreux concours) consiste habituellement à résumer, puis à “commenter” le document choisi, ce qui signifie en fait le mettre en perspective. Les conseils de méthode suivants sont tout particulièrement adaptés aux articles d’opinion et aux éditoriaux.

Loin de la foule déchaînée (Far from the Madding Crowd) par Clifford Armion, publié le 21/05/2015

Dans la campagne anglaise de l’époque victorienne, une jeune héritière, Bathsheba Everdeene doit diriger la ferme léguée par son oncle. Femme belle et libre, elle veut s’assumer seule et sans mari, ce qui n’est pas au goût de tous à commencer par ses ouvriers. Bathsheba ne se mariera qu’une fois amoureuse. Qu’à cela ne tienne, elle se fait courtiser par trois hommes, le berger Gabriel Oake, le riche voisin Mr Boldwood et le Sergent Troy. Parenthèse Cinéma nous permet de partager avec vous un très beau dossier pédagogique pour les enseignants qui souhaiteraient aborder cette adaptation du roman de Thomas Hardy avec leurs classes.

Seeing Between the Lines: Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth and the art of adaptation par Wendy Everett, publié le 02/03/2015

Examining Terence Davies’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, this article identifies ways in which the creative interpretation of the filmmaker may serve to open up new insights into both the original text and the language of cinema itself. It considers, in particular, aspects such as music, painting, and visual metaphor in its presentation of cinema as an essentially multilayered and complex medium which requires of the spectator an imaginative and creative engagement, just as the novel requires of the reader.

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…

End of Story par Avital Ronell, publié le 19/01/2015

"For my part, I practice affirmative dissociation. Prompted mostly by a Nietzschean will to fiction and love of masks, I “fake it ‘til I make it,” assuming shrewd yet fragile identities, rotating signatures, reappropriating for myself syntactical maneuvers and rhetorical feints."

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.

American Indians - A conversation with David Treuer par David Treuer, Clifford Armion, publié le 08/09/2014

David Treuer took part in the eighth edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. He answered our questions on his involvement in the protection of Indian culture.

The Truth of Pussy Riot par Masha Gessen, publié le 21/02/2014

A great work of art is also often not immediately recognizable. Five young women entered the enormous Cathedral of Christ the Savior early in the morning on February 21, 2012, took off their overcoats to expose differently colored dresses and neon-colored tights, pulled on similarly neon-colored balaclavas, climbed up on the soleas (having lost one of their number in the process—she had been grabbed by a security guard), and proceeded to dance, play air guitar, and sing a song they called a “punk prayer,” beseeching Mother of God to “get rid of Putin.”

In Praise of Babel par Robyn Creswell, publié le 22/11/2013

Like Jewish and Christian commentators, Muslim exegetes understood the Babel story to be a parable of how mankind’s hubris, in the form of a desire for knowledge or an attempt to reach the heavens, leads to divine punishment. The subsequent confusion of human idioms and scattering of peoples is a second fall from grace, an expulsion from the paradise of monolingualism. Henceforth, translation becomes at once necessary and impossible—impossible in the sense that no translation could ever match the transparency of the original Ur-Sprache. So the Islamic tradition, like the Judaic one in particular, comes to bear a tremendous nostalgia for the lost language of Eden.

We’re All Translators Now par Esther Allen, publié le 15/11/2013

As our language ceases to dominate cyberspace (our share of the Web has fallen to about 27%), we English speakers are hesitantly stepping out of our monolingual sphere and evincing renewed interest in foreign tongues. Language learning websites like Livemocha and Matador Network seem to crop up like mushrooms, Rosetta Stone is a publicly traded company whose stock is up 41% year to date, and last year’s top-rated YouTube video — remember? —was in Korean (with a few repetitions of “hey sexy lady” thrown in for nostalgia’s sake).

Translation as Muse: Muse as Teacher par Mary Jo Bang, publié le 15/11/2013

how can reading not add to one’s experience, and in turn influence a person’s writing? And wouldn’t translation especially affect the brain, since translation involves the closest sort of reading, one where the mind simultaneously reads for meaning and tries to access the equivalent word or expression in another language. Wouldn’t reading the word “pelle” in Italian similarly send a message to the brain to access the synaptic record of all past sensory experience having to do with leather: black jacket, kid gloves, car seat, red belt with an alligator buckle, toy-gun holster, shoe shop. Wouldn’t the experiential knowledge of how those various leathers felt be carried along as the translator toggled between two different linguistic systems? And of course each of those leather memories would be connected to other associational memories, some quite rich in subjectivity.

Macbeth - Conveying madness through language par ENS Lyon La Clé des Langues, publié le 02/07/2013

Cette page propose plusieurs extraits de "Macbeth" de Shakespeare, ainsi qu'une reproduction d'un tableau d'Henry Fuseli représentant le personnage de Lady Macbeth. Ces documents sont accompagnés d'exercices de compréhension et d'analyse d'image...

The Speckled People - a conversation with Hugo Hamilton par Hugo Hamilton, Kouadio N'Duessan, publié le 10/06/2013

Somebody mentioned the word confusion. That is probably the word that describes my childhood most clearly. It was a confusion of languages, confusion between the inside of the house and the outside of the house, confusion between my father’s idealism and my mother’s memories. There’s always been confusion in my life.

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..."

Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece: the wound that cannot heal par Clifford Armion, publié le 17/09/2010

In Shakespeare's works, the assaults on the body and the marks they leave in the flesh constitute a complex form of language. The shape of the wound, its seriousness, its position on the body, the situation in which it was inflicted, the terms and metaphors used to describe it: all these elements contribute to its semantic load.

An interview with Beverley Naidoo par Beverley Naidoo, Clifford Armion, publié le 01/06/2010

Un entretien accordé à La Clé des langues par Beverley Naidoo suite à son déplacement dans l'académie de Rouen.

The Language of Gesture: Melville's Imaging of Blackness and the Modernity of Billy Budd par Klaus Benesch , publié le 04/01/2010

In light of recent studies of both the life of black seamen and of the role of blacks in the Enlightenment, the paper discusses the representation of African sailors in the work of Herman Melville, in particular in his unfinished manuscript Billy Budd, Sailor. As I argue, Melville's imaging of a "noble" black sailor in the opening chapter is crucial to the author's ongoing attempt to untangle the complex relationship of race and modernity. By invoking a non-totalitarian, gestural/visual aesthetics of blackness Melville not only reinforces his earlier critique of modernity's foundation in slavery; he also revivifies and, simultaneously, trans-forms the eighteenth-century tradition of visualizing blacks as tragic witnesses to the para-doxes of the enlightenment. In so doing, Melville couches his argument against racism in a 'gestural' (black) critique of white judgments on blacks that may well be read to foreshadow later, more radical gestures of black pride from zoot-suiters to the raised fists of black pan-thers or the corporeal self-fashioning of the gangster rapper.

From buds to flowers: the blossoming of constructions in child language par Aliyah Morgenstern, publié le 18/12/2009

In the course of their development, children make their way along successive transitory systems with their own internal coherence. We will present the paths they follow from gestures and first words to complex constructions embedded in their dialogic context, developing both linguistic, conversational and social skills necessary to full mastery of language. Our data shows that the use of grammatical forms is irregular in terms of canonical syntax but not random, and corresponds to particular semantic/pragmatic features.

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.

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.