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74.More information
This article proposes to show that the critical significance of Molière's Misantbrope consists in the confrontation of two "meanings" of the secret : one, closely linked with the courtly literature of the 17th century, the other, connected with a more political use of the term. After a brief overview of the role of the secret (and, more spe- cifically, of the Psyche myth, which takes various forms in Molière) in 17thcentury love Literature, we will show how the play goes beyond the commonplaces of courtly literature through an analysis of the intricacies of Alceste's speech. In fact, Alceste puts forward a new interpretation based on another tradition: that of "courtier" treatises. Among the beauxesprits frequenting Célimène's salon, Alceste adheres to a political interpretation of the secret. In so doing, he strikes us as being far more in tune with. modernity than the other characters in the play.
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Theatre for Sade is above all a social activity, a means of positioning oneself in relation to the world. Unlike playwrights such as Diderot and Beaumarchais, Sade is no dramatic innovator, but if he does not question the traditional and even recent genres, he does so in order to manipulate them, to play with them. A close analysis of two plays—Le misanthrope par amour and Le capricieux—allows for a clearer understanding of Sade's relationship with his theatrical heritage, and to see how this author profits from dramatic rules and expectations.
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Discursively, beginnings are always retroactive. They are just backward projections from an everflowing present that has been stopped by an arbitrary decision, which lays it as some kind of milestone. Nowhere more than in the incipit of a novel can such a backward narrative surge be observed. After briefly looking at Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur, this article analyzes Diderot's most famous incipit, the one present in Le Neveu de Rameau, showing for instance how the character of Rameau's nephew literally comes from this initial vortex as from a semiotic ground.
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During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, certain physiological theories were used for political and ideological purpose, notably to define the enemy. But numerous counter-arguments persisted up to the First World War, vigorously challenging the dubious scientific statements that referenced an historical imaginary and rhetoric which essentially glorified war. We here propose that in the short stories Boule de Suif and Saint-Antoine, Maupassant discloses the perverse use of these discourses. Indeed, the author demonstrates, often with irony, that the social imaginary is mostly founded not on objective and empirical reason, but rather on the subjective persuasion of a moral and anthropological distinction amongst individuals which is established through anxiety, fear and the resolve of power by one being over another. In these works, the “mise en ennemi”, depends, beyond historical fact, on an embedding of natural (biological and physiological) and cultural (moral and customary) evidences that thus define the enemy as “l'Autre à tuer”. The irony is concealed within the use that Maupassant makes of the anthropological model. In enacting hybrid identities that contain the qualities and defects of both the dominant and the dominated, the author departs from the ethnic rationalization of an exclusively French or German experience and transcends the notion of nationality to instead address human nature as a whole and mankind's innate propensity to barbarity.
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The article sets out to show how Asian corpora can not only enrich the topical inventory, but also contribute to renewing theoretical reflection, using the example of the topos ‘A woman uses coded language to give her lover a rendezvous’, present in the first tale of the Vetala Panchavimshati (Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā) inserted in the great Sanskrit collection composed in the eleventh century by Somadeva, the Kathāsaritsāgara (Ocean of the Streams of Story). The motif can also be found in Boccaccio and Lope de Vega, as well as in the Chinese world, in Kunlun Nu (‘The Kunlun Slave’), a famous ‘relation of an extraordinary case’ (chuanqi) attributed to Pei Xing. The remoteness of the literatures concerned, as well as the sheer scale of their dissemination, disrupt the classic operation of topical recognition, raising a whole series of questions that we will formulate without claiming to have definitive answers: is it possible to ignore the geographical, cultural and linguistic roots of topoi; to what extent can we speak, beyond the phenomenon of interculturality, of transcultural topoi?
Keywords: topos, Asie, interculturalité, transculturalité, théories de la lecture, reconnaissance, topos, Asia, interculturality, transculturality, reading theories, recognition