Feminism, Comparison and Creation — volume resulting from the study day “Is there a female art? Toward a gendered approach to comparatism” (8 March 2019)

Literary tradition has, in practice (if not in principle), been predominantly male. As a result, women scholars, critics, and theorists—particularly comparatists—face more than a challenge: they confront a territory to (re)conquer.

Is female comparative writing a tool for independence? Does comparatism from a female perspective function as a form of feminine speech? And can one speak of a reflexive or mimetic proximity/distance between these two practices—female discourse and comparative discourse? Is female comparatist discourse (if such a thing exists) an ideal, a means, a medium? Does it involve subjectivity or singularity?

Around fifteen comparatists from around the world, from the United States to Macau via Colombia, Hungary, Switzerland, and Ukraine, gathered to address these questions.

Editor’s website : éditions orizons

The Nobel Prize in Literature and Europe (volume following the study day “Nobel Prize: a European spirit?” held on 20 June 2019)

The backbone of this volume is the question of the values that, on the one hand, govern the selection of Nobel Prize in Literature laureates, and on the other hand, underpin—within the cultural economy—the legitimacy of the Nobel Prize in Literature as an institution claiming to define orders and hierarchies. These values appear to be closely tied to those structuring a European ideal which, in a geographically expanded form, remains very much alive today in official discourse.

Editor’s website : Peter Lang

Collective work.

Rousseau’s Confessions are often regarded as the founding text of an autobiographical genre, distinguished from memoirs and other forms of life writing. This volume challenges that division by examining the autobiographical gesture across a variety of forms, while also re-evaluating Rousseau’s own undertaking.

Editor’s website

Collective work.

Romande poetry is described as “an experimental field,” still relatively underexplored, writes Peter Schnyder in his introduction to this volume. This is precisely its aim: to invite readers to discover the richness and vitality of a body of work which, through its forms, languages, and motifs, occupies a distinctive place within French-language literature.

The interviews gathered here bring together intimate reflections—on writing and its powers—with broader considerations on contemporary Swiss poetry. The voices of poets emerge in their singularity, opening up critical perspectives grounded in living poetry.

Editor’s website

Régine Battiston and Sonia Goldblum

The infinite dialogue with forms and colors, sounds and scents is an intangible hallmark of the artist Hermann Hesse, who throughout his life was able to reveal his multiple talents in literature, painting, and landscape design. His work, marked by a love of nature and landscape, experiences a continuous process of transformation. This volume opens new perspectives on these rarely connected fields within academic studies.

Among its innovative aspects, the theme of gardens occupies a central place. It is approached both through the concrete practice of the artist who designs and tends them, and on a literary and pictorial level. This study, devoted to the kinesthetic art of colors and forms in Hesse’s work, highlights the resonance of the artist’s inner landscape within his artistic creations.

Editor’s website

Journal d’un fou ukrainien, a novel by Lina Kostenko, published by L’Harmattan, in the “Présence Ukrainienne” series. Translated from Ukrainian by Nikol Dziub and Sonia Philonenko. Foreword by Radomyr Mokryk.

This novel takes the form of the diary of a thirty-year-old Kyiv-based programmer who painfully reflects on the globalization of misinformation and the virtualization of emotions at the turn of the millennium. Born in 1968, the year of the Soviet invasion of Prague, the often powerless protagonist describes the crescendo of catastrophes that marked the years 1999 to 2004.

More than a chronicle, this novel is a warning: the tragic events of recent years in Ukraine are foreshadowed within its pages. Above all, it is a work of struggle, as the protagonist attempts to bridge the ever-widening gap between men and women, between yesterday’s and today’s generations, and between Europe and an Ukraine turned into a battleground for antagonistic worlds.

These annals of ordinary madness and the extraordinary courage of Ukrainian citizens conclude with an evocation of the famous Orange Revolution, a true Day of Wrath from which Ukrainian civil society emerged.

Editor’s website

Latest issue of the French journal Viatica, dedicated to travel literature.

9 | 2022 – Return from the U.S.S.R. “French Travels in the Soviet Union and Their Accounts”. Edited by Nikol Dzuib.

From Duhamel and Durtain to Maillart, passing through Malraux, the Bloch couple, Romain Rolland, Nizan, Herbart, Gide, and Guilloux, this issue focuses—apart from one exception, Simone de Beauvoir—on journeys to the USSR made in the late 1920s and the 1930s, a turning-point period that saw the transition from the “honeymoon phase” to the “era of suspicion.” Combining methodologies from imagology, genetic criticism, and reception studies, the contributors examine how travelers’ return journeys influenced both the narrative shaping of their travels and the construction of their respective authorial personas.

Journal website – online and free access

EDITED BY

Sofia Lodén is a researcher at Stockholm University and at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.

Vanessa Obry is Associate Professor of Medieval French Language and Literature at the University of Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse).

HIGHLIGHTS

– A legend widely circulated throughout Europe, possibly inspired by One Thousand and One Nights
– Bilingual edition: original texts alongside translations into modern French
– Previously unpublished French translations
– Critical overview in the introduction and presentation notes for each text

SUMMARY

The tale of the lovers Floire and Blancheflor achieved great success during the Middle Ages, as shown by its adaptation into numerous languages: French, Low and High German, English, Old Norse, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Greek. This wide circulation continued beyond the medieval period, and the story was even adapted into Yiddish in the eighteenth century. Gathered here for the first time are fourteen excerpts representing each of the surviving medieval versions, along with five excerpts from later works. The texts are accompanied by commentary placing them within their historical and cultural contexts, as well as translations into French. This anthology therefore provides access to works that until now had only been available in their original language, and in some cases had never been published before.

Written by specialists of the various linguistic traditions represented, the collection is intended both for scholars of medieval literature and for readers interested in the history of European culture or curious to follow the variations of a love legend across time and space. The selected excerpts show how the narrative material adapts to different contexts of reception, audiences, and social environments. By tracing the journeys of Floire and Blancheflor, one can see to what extent medieval and early modern European culture was shaped by circulation and exchange.

Journal website – and the Press release

Author: Martina Della Casa

Summary: This study examines Christianity Against Christ, an essay by André Gide which, although devoted to a subject that occupied the writer until his death, was never published. The study aims to reconstruct the development of this fragmentary text, which found a particular place within the author’s body of work.

Number of pages: 186

Publication date: 15/06/2022

Journal’s website

Women Spectators! From Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Véronique Lochert, Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Céline Candiard, Fabien Cavaillé, Jeanne-Marie Hostiou, and Mélanie Traversier, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2022.

Presentation:

Women have occupied a continuous place within the audiences of live performance since its very beginnings. Seeking traces of this presence, the contributors gathered here have identified the venues and genres of performances favored by women, their places in auditoriums and galleries, and attempted to recover their emotions, filtered through male commentary.

Female spectators were often considered to be governed by their passions and lacking any critical distance. They were placed either in a subordinate position, reflecting their status in society, or in the front rows—not to offer them a better view, but to allow other spectators to observe them and scrutinize their dresses and hairstyles. Opponents and defenders of the theater debated the presence of these women: the former regretted it, believing that this art encouraged illicit desires, while the latter praised it, with female spectators then becoming guarantors of decency and the usefulness of theatrical art. At the same time, women’s reception of performances played an increasingly important role in the strategies of playwrights and actors. Depending on the period, the place, and their social background, female spectators enjoyed varying degrees of freedom; they also used the theater as a place of emancipation and sometimes took care to leave direct accounts of their experiences.

This large-scale study restores to these women a voice and a presence, a body and gestures, as well as contrasting emotions ranging from exasperation to pleasure.

To read the introduction and the table of contents:

https://www.cnrseditions.fr/catalogue/histoire/spectatrices/