Documents found
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The relationship between “lyric” form and “comic” expression is one of the key epistemological couples used in literary criticism. While both are seen as foundational in the modern history and theory of French poetry, these terms may be less of any heuristic interest than of a commonplace conceptual association. My goal here is to critically examine some of the presuppositions that lie in the notion of “lyric” when applied to analyze the comic devices in the poem. Indeed, such an opposition involves categorizing “comic” as the marked term, while “lyric” is considered to be the unmarked term. Although the notion of “comic” opens up a new avenue for the text based on its hybrid and polyphonic forms as much as its pragmatic and aesthetic effects, the notion of “lyric” rather refers to an eclectic, ambiguous, or even stereotyped vision of poetic writing.
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757.
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758.More information
Is there a recurring tendency towards a damning negativity, in the discourse about Québec's literature? In order to answer this question, this paper examines a large corpus of periodicals, searching for generalizations about what Québec literature “is”, and demonstrates that those characterizations are overwhelmingly negative, expressing over and over again a regret for a collective “flaw”. The works of Belleau, Biron, Daunais and Ricard are then read, in the light of this result, as expressing different essayistic versions of this recurring doxa.
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759.More information
The idea of fiction's movement towards musical structures, which was closely dependent on the Romantic project of “progressive universal poetry”, occurred gradually, accompanying the absolute music movement that took root at the close of the eighteenth century. This article focuses first, on recalling the main attributes of this utopian arrangement, termed meloform, to next observe what might be called its secularization: cut off from the Romantic faith in the supremacy of art and deprived of its ontological roots, the “musical” novel tended, after the Second World War, to adopt a more pragmatic attitude, notably embodied in the less totalizing, often isomorphic narratives of singular musical opera. In recent times, thanks to novels like The Time of our Singing by Richard Powers, Apologie de la fuite by Léonid Guirchovitch, Confessions by Jaume Cabré or Central Europe by William T. Vollmann, there seems to be a “rebirth” of complex fiction that is ambitious, polyphonic and reflexive, one that reconnects, without reverting to all of Romantic doctrine, to the ideal of a musical ideality of the literary text.
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760.More information
This article analyzes the rhetorical position of the journal L'Inconvénient, founded in 1999. It attempts to define this position in the form of “essentialist irony”, which must be conceived as a defense of modern ideals against the postmodern relativist party. The demonstrations are based on various actors of the journal as well as on their productions, sometimes outside the pages of the journal.