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This article seeks to bring into focus the experimental dimension of Paramount's New York studio during the earliest years of sound film. Through an analysis of Paramount's production processes and advertising strategies, it examines the way in which the company profited from its Astoria studio's closeness to the resources of Broadway to make it a place for exploring and experimenting with musicality in the cinema, and in particular film's potential with respect to various kinds of staged musical attractions and the ways in which they could be incorporated into feature fiction films. The article thus seeks to demonstrate the predominant role of theatrical resources in the establishment of the forms of musical cinema.

Often seen as merely a poetical work that priorizes the reader's entertainment, Odes funambulesques by Théodore de Banville is much more a corrosive project. In this article I argue that the author aims to compose a “pamphlet” in verse which targets the core values of the bourgeois society (from money to realism and prose) and to make of poems a way to bound people together in a spirit of universal brotherhood. As much in order to be heard by his contemporaries as to escape from the mundane, Banville takes his inspiration from the art of caricature. He borrows from its social types whose success lies in their power to capture the essence of different classes of people. He ridicules figures of literary, social and political authority by exaggerating their salient features. He takes off pantomime masks in order to reveal the true face of a society. The parody brings to light the commonplaces and stereotypes used by that society to idealize mediocre and humdrum realities. The apparent madness of the ode funambulesque leads thus to a protest against times. As with Gavarni or Daumier, the representation of the faults of contemporary society goes beyond the banal. The comic metamorphosis of beings through image, rhyme, and intertext transports the reader into a world where dream prevails over triviality. The drug-like effect of the rhythms and the “rimes sauvages,” freed from strict rules, clothes the everyday universe in a hyperbolic magic by creating a new and joyful harmony, which is easy to commit to memory. The lyric intoxication extends to the reader and invites him to experience a new way of seeing and feeling.

This article contextualizes some of the roles that women played in Montreal's interwar jazz scene. The archives testify to the importance of pianists such as Vera Guilaroff and Ilene Bourne, piano teacher Daisy Peterson Sweeney, dance teachers Olga Spencer Foderingham and Ethel Bruneau, as well as black women performers on the variety stage in the development of Canada's most thriving jazz scene in the first half of the twentieth century. This article explains why women were drawn to these particular performance spaces (piano, teaching, theatrical dance) and documents the historiographical processes that have led to their marginalization from the historical record.

AbstractLong separated from their French origins, Cajuns and Creoles have more or less preserved their linguistic identity despite the pressures of Americanization after 1803. Since the creation of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana in 1968, many researchers, including linguists, educators and teachers, have tried to develop new ways to teach French in this difficult environment. Regenerating the language by introducing standard French does not allow us to preserve the specific nature of French as it is spoken in Louisiana. We must therefore create and develop new educational methods based on an understanding of dialects and their evolution that recognizes the natural variability of Cajun and Creole French. Only this way will we be able to preserve Louisiana French and ensure the continuity of this mode of cultural expression.

Popular tales (or tales from the oral tradition) are among the first objects of study in ethnology/folklore. They belong to the realm of orality, often described as “oral literature” or “orature.” This article first presents a historiography of the ethnological study of tales, showing how researchers have shifted their gaze from the “text” to the “context,” i.e., from the object itself to the context in which it is uttered and to the person telling the story. Secondly, to provide an example of what characterizes the oral tale and storytellers of the past, two contemporary storytellers associated with the transmission of a heritage of oral tales—Michel Faubert and Fred Pellerin—are studied in order to illustrate their concept of the tale, their influences, and their storytelling art, while attempting to determine if they are part of the tradition. For these storytellers, the art of the tale consists in making images appear: performance is what nourishes the imagination, and the storyteller's relation with the audience is what makes the tale come alive and what sustains it as an oral form. Today's ethnological research on tales includes modern, multiple and innovative forms emerging from a dynamic process of communication and transmission in which storytellers' performativity plays a key role. From an ethnological perspective, in other words, the art of storytelling is not a kind of folklore that has been relegated to museums but a living tradition.