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The roman à clé receives a lot of negative press. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, it has innervated fundamental books such as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or some novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. More widely, many contemporary novels use devices of “blurring” to bring reality, and more particularly real people, in the fiction. Thus the issue, in the two Quebec novels analyzed in this article, is to find another way to include reality in fiction. The examples of “reluctance” and hesitation vis-à-vis the proper name correspond here to various strategies of perception of history or of the intimate relationship between beings, which certainly require detours but which, at the same time, require a certain transparency of the reference to let perceive a weight of reality – the guarantee of an authenticity for which the readers of today would have, so one says, an insatiable hunger. These strategies, as we shall see, invite us to review the relationship between reality and fiction, to question the boundaries that are supposed to partition them.

German unification is both a cause and an effect of the restructuring of alliances now taking place with the end of the long postwar era. An enlarged Germany finds itself in a new geostrategic position at the centre of a henceforth unified continent and its vocation is pan-European. The underpinnings of its external policy and its security have been modified. In this context, the German government has opted not only for keeping a renewed NATO but also for deepening and widening Europe's economic and political institutions. It does not want to disappoint either the Americans or its European Community partners and those wishing to join the EC. Nor does it want to disappoint the East Europeans, including those-of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the traditional policy of seeking non-isolation, at times not without ambivalence, is destined to change and could become more assertive. Two items testify to this change in direction : the "debate over normalization', which has brought down taboos in Germany, and the leadership role that Bonn has openly taken, for the first time since 1945, on the issue of recognition without further delay of Slovenia and Croatia by the European Community as of January 15 1992.

AbstractThis article examines the relation between the German identity and its security policy in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In these three cases, the Federal Republic's authorities tried to preserve a German and European identity. In Kosovo and Afghanistan, the preservation of this identity went hand in hand with the defence of a Western identity which was promoted by the United States. However, during the Iraq crisis, both identities seemed incompatible to the German decision-makers. Thus, they distanced themselves from their American counterparts. As in the two previous cases, the security identity promoted here by the German government reflected the opinion of the majority of its citizens.

This article deals with the problem of the crisis of narration after the First and Second World Wars. The thesis is supported by the reading of Primo Levi's novels and Paul Celan's poetry, in order to see the strategic response they give to this crisis. Their answer consists in a “thinning down” of the language, versus the “abridgement” of the language in totalitarian nazism.

Dominique Desanti (1920-2011), whose grandfather was a Russian emigrate, was engaged in the French Résistance, then into the Communist Party. She dedicated her life to writing : an historian and a professor, she was also a journalist for « l'Humanité », collaborated with « Le Monde » and « Les Temps Modernes », and a talentuous writer. She shared her life with the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, whom she met in 1937. She died in Paris on April 8th, 2011. One of her last major book « La sainte et l'incroyante » Bayard 2007, tells the life of an orthodox saint and martyr, Mother Marie Skobtsov, who died in the Ravensbrück camp gaschamber, March 31st, 1945, and was sanctified in the year 2004. Dominique met her into the Paris of the « avant-guerre », she recalls the pathetic episodes of their encounters, and introduces us to the life of that outstanding woman, who crossed apparently all the storms marking her century, from the Russian revolution on. « Mother Marie remained into my bones, and haunted me », she wrote.

Keywords: Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Résistance, Parti communiste français, philosophie, histoire, justice, vérité, combat, liberté des femmes, journaliste, historienne, biographe, clandestinité, Élisabeth Pilenko, mère Marie de Paris, moniale orthodoxe, martyre, Ravensbrück, foyer de Lourmel, père Gillet, père Dimitri Klepinine, émigration russe

Vicente Huidobro and Jorge-Luis Borgès who, in his youth, wrote under the direct influence of the first, are part of the Latin American literary avant-garde of the 20th century. In Chile, in addition to Jean Emar (compatriot and great friend of Huidobro), other writers such as “antinovelist” Juan-Agustín Palazuelos and Mauricio Wacquez worked in the same perspective, in search of a new literature. Several other writers will be added, still under the influence of Huidobro and Jean Emar, uncle of José Donoso, novelist and historian of the “Latin American boom”, which is also mentioned in this article.

Keywords: avant-garde littéraire chilienne, antiroman, intertexte, Altazor, Borgès, Donoso, Jean Emar, Chilean literary avant-garde, antiroman, intertext, Altazor, Borgès, Donoso, Jean Emar

With La semaine sainte [Holy Week] (1958), Louis Aragon travels as far back as 1815 to find a suitable context for the fictionalization of a reflection on the meaning of history and engagement. During the political disorientation at the outset of the Hundred Days War, Théodore Géricault plays the key role in a fable that highlights the ancient heroes of the Empire, henceforth confused with the main players of the King's Household on the run. To depict them, Aragon draws, notably, from the primary sources constituted by their Mémoires, material that would play a significant role in the genesis of French realist fiction. This documentation, which sheds light on the representation of a pivotal moment in French political and literary history, has implications for the poetics of the novel, heavily influenced by the narration of the memoirists to the point that the emerging authorial voice appears to echo them.