Documents found
-
3264.More information
Published in 1866, the Mémoires of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (1786-1871) extend the rich tradition of French memorialists of the classical period, belonging to a genre that embodies both historical chronicling and self-narrative. As such, they are marked by the underlying tension that constitutes memoirs as a genre, and studying the manuscript of Aubert de Gaspé's memoirs—one of the few surviving modern manuscripts of 19th-century Quebec—is highly relevant to the understanding of this tension. Examining the hesitations and second thoughts whose traces are apparent in the fragmentary writing of the work enables us to read the genesis of a text and the genealogy of a genre in which, in the margins and beneath the deletions, are negotiated the key features of a way of writing history based on the representation of an ethos defined by the “exquisite” figure of “l'homme d'esprit d'autrefois.”
-
3265.
-
3267.More information
Wearing a diogenic mask in the autofiction of his Adventures, Dassoucy proceeds to a falsification of social values which contaminates the musical topic. He thus reappropriates the facetious tradition of Renaissance storytellers and of Rabelais to exacerbate its satirical and blasphemous virtualities. These facetious perspectives set up a reading device based on a game of encrypted connivance to deconstruct the topic of the harmonia mundi, even to substitute the Christian symbolism of the bells for the cynical sign of recognition of a laugh with obscene and blasphemous resonances.
Keywords: Laughter, rire, burlesque, Burlesque, cynisme, Cynicism, Libertine, libertin, Connivance, connivence, Facetious, facétieux
-
3270.More information
Beginning with the first series of flights by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783, hot air ballooning quickly metamorphosed from a dangerous scientific experiment with potential military uses into a widespread cultural craze with deep social implications. Using the lens of the idea of “wonder,” I examine the word-image interactions in a selection of engraved representations of the first Montgolfier demonstration for Louis XVI at Versailles. Such a collective close reading first exposes techniques that aim at encouraging admiration in readers for both the new technology and the French state that produced it. However, visual cues in the images indicate a persistent suggestion of doubt and uncertainty—and even fear—as they take readers “up and away” from the confines and comforts of everyday life. The word-image nexus surrounding this spectacle generates an altered textual world in which traditional social and sexual hierarchies lose stability and the future is full of possibility.