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This article is rooted in the firm belief that Marcel Aymé was given the very first Populist Novel Award for his June 1930 novel La Rue sans nom. We believe this notion, much echoed by academic and literary critics, to be proof enough of the populist nature of the novel. However, Marcel Aymé was never labelled a populist, despite having won some literary awards, including the 1929 Renaudot Prize for La Table-aux-Crevés. This article seeks to clarify the origins of this misunderstanding, for which Aymé himself may be partly responsible. Indeed, the author, populist by default, edged increasingly closer to a broad-ranging sensibility, the ambiguous nature of which gave him the significant advantage of being able to write in a popular fashion without being pinned down by a defining label.

This article presents the preliminary results of the author's postdoctoral research project concerning “The figure of the African ancestor in the Caribbean novel.” The confrontational relationship between the novelists and this African icon is examined using an imagological approach with the notion of stereotype as a starting point. Based on an analysis of the works of René Maran, Joseph Zobel, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Aimé Césaire, Paul Niger, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau, the study attempts to locate the predicates evoked by the speaker-writers in their perception of the African character, and show that, hovering between doxical vigilance and the unconscious revival of stereotypes internalized during the colonial era, the discourse of Caribbean novelists can be seen as a never-ending negotiation between the saying and the said, ushering in a cautious effort to go beyond convention and come to peace with a past that seeks to be finally accepted.

This article examines the images of the woman (servant, traitor or idol) in popular Haitian song according to the Brazilian model created by Manoel Tosta Berlinck for the samba. This model underlines the close link of the socio-economic foundation of love relations with the image that the man has of the woman. The corpus of works considered is made up of poems written in French and Creole.

To the problem of the pícaro's ambition to rise socially and the inevitable frustration of that ambition by hereditary dishonour, the original texts of the picaresque novel ( Lazarillo, Guzmán and Buscón) offer contradictory answers. Finding its way to England from 1576 (the first translation of Lazarillo) to 1723 (the last version of Guzmán), the autobiography of the pícaro was indeed seen as a roguish tale. The subgenre produced two new offshoots: the "rogue story," a lowlife narrative that is both comical and satirical, and the "criminal biography," a moral tale that presents us with a delinquent sinner. It was Defoe that revived the picaresque dilemma in Moll Flanders (1723). Poor and illegitimate, Moll seeks to escape her underprivileged condition and to achieve gentility. She manages this by operating in a society who has ceased to regard the acquisition of riches as an ignoble pursuit.

The series Oz features a prisoner, Augustus Hill, in a kind of transparent cage, addressing the television viewer at the beginning, middle and end of each episode. At first sight, he appears to be extra-diegetic and his comments appear to be related semantically to the episode. In reality, this “narrative cell” is both an immune space and a buffer zone between the outside world and the prison, and then between the world of the dead and the world of the living. The author begins by studying the multiple variations in Hill's interventions from both an iconic and an artistic point of view. While they are constantly being recreated, they have a paradoxical rhetorical function which might be described as characteristic of American television series and whose roots lie in an Anglophone literary tradition, that of the commonplace book. The particularity of Oz is that its narrative is built on the cornerstone of television's intimacy : looking at the camera. Through his analysis, the author seeks to demonstrate that, if we are to understand series as televisual objects, they must be put back in their context and finality, that of a programmed broadcast in a medium which accompanies television viewers in their temporality.

This study proposes to analyse the instrumental role of voice-over using three contemporary Brazilian films which seek to balance their directors' concerns with the demands placed on films made for the general public : City of God (Cidade de Deus) by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, The Man Who Copied (O homem que copiava) by Jorge Furtado and Redeemer (Redentor) by Cláudio Torres. In these films, speech as the subject's “in situ” discourse bears the signs of its relationship to the social context, one marked by tensions stemming from violence, the growth of the black market, corporate delinquency, the hegemony of consumerism and the crisis in the family as institution.

This articles finds in the mysteries of Eleusis the necessary form and content needed to interpret the relation between Bernard-Marie Koltès' plays and the images which motivated his writing. This reference makes it possible to unite politics, mysticism and theatre in a body of work which has always shown its characters both struggling in the mire and having extatic visions. Into the gap between these two conflicting types of images, which constitute a virtual film, a kind of off screen narration of Koltès' work, would appear a meditation on the meaning of "salvation".

Les fées ont soif by Denise Boucher represents an important date in the brief history of Québec theatre. Written ten years after the shockwave generated by Michel Tremblay's Belles-Soeurs, Les fées ont soif – described as a drama manifest (Lise Gauvin) – none the less seems to have been largely forgotten if one judges by the absence of recent remounts on Québec stages and by the fact that it was barely mentioned in 2008, thirty years after the scandal that – at the time – had mobilised the entire theatre community. It is thus as an event that we have chosen to study Denise Boucher's play, given that the controversy surrounding it echoed far beyond the boundaries of artistic culture. All the varying discourses produced by professionals, artists, specialists and everyday people will constitute the privileged material for this inquiry in which we intend to highlight the ideological fault lines within Québec society that the Fées ont soif event brought to the forefront. This study proposes an analysis of the post Quiet Revolution québécois social discourse and falls within the boundaries of recent research on the construction of cultural memory.