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Gary-Ajar's autobiographical work constitutes a unicum in the panorama of contemporary French literature: by working on the borderline of genres, the author manages to accomplish a total uprooting with the intention of casting doubt on the validity of a stable identity, mirror of a definite subject. Using an analysis of the formal uncertainty that marks Promise at Dawn, The Night Will Be Calm, Pseudo and The Life and Death of Émile Ajar, this article aims to show how Romain Gary succeeds in diverting the reader's interest from issues such as authenticity and veracity of writing and crossing the boundary between document and fiction to realize his “dream of a total novel, at once character and author.” By challenging what he sees as the intimist tendencies of his day, Gary obliterates the narcissistic character of autobiographical writing to give birth to a form that allows the subject to self-create.

Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the composite statue in Daniel 2 has belonged to the traditional folklore of the Judeo-Christian tradition since Antiquity. Since the figure of Nebuchadnezzar is based largely on Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon (556-539 BC), this article offers new elements of reflection on the origin of this vision, arguing that the motif of the succession of empires originated during the reign of Nabonidus, and that the demands of Nebuchadnezzar to the Chaldeans reflect a reminiscence of the obsession of Nabonidus for his own dreams and their mantic content.

AbstractLouis d'Ussieux (1744-1805) was a prolific Paris-based author, translator, editor and journalist whose varied pre-Revolution oeuvre is widely distributed throughout Europe, yet remains little studied. This article surveys the illustrated short stories from his Décaméron françois that take place in the Orient or in America, outside Europe. The study of Thélaïre, nouvelle mexicaine (1775) shoes how d'Ussieux transforms the idyllic vision of the Aztecs prevalent in Prévost's Histoire générale des voyages (1750s) into a tragedy, thereby tarnishing the questionable glory of Cortes, Spain and Europe.

What have we learned from the recent wealth of studies about the Early Modern French Atlantic, produced by both Francophone and Anglophone historians ? This historiographical survey focuses on three aspects of the issue : a refining and questioning of the Atlantic model as a coherent and integrated economic space ; slavery, its consequences and its forms of resistance ; and the creation and circulation of knowledge. Studies about regional and individual specificities are particularly enlightening in this matter. Some potential avenues for further research are also suggested.

Michelle Maillet's L'Étoile noire is a novel about the notebook kept by a young black woman from Martinique who is deported to a German concentration camp. This article invites the reader to ponder the intentionality of a literary genre that meshes Holocaust and slavery narratives, thereby allowing the development of an innovative geographic and rhetorical framework for fascism, while revisiting the place of colonialism in French history. The overarching goal is to call on both Jewish and postcolonial research to feed a “multi-directional” Caribbean history.

Relying on Adrienne Choquette's 1939 compilation of Confidences d'écrivains canadiens-français, this article looks at women's discourse and influence in literary exchanges. The starting point for this analysis is Choquette's foreword, in which she outlines her goals. Looking at the stance of those female authors she interviewed, this article reveals how both Choquette and her colleagues negotiate the acceptability of their positions in a given literary and media context, and how those exchanges shed a different light on the 1930s Quebec literary landscape.

In this paper, we propose exploring the sensibilities as regard the territory of Quebec by focussing on representations of the forest in literary discourses during the first half of the twentieth century. Our research focuses on literary works as discourses on the social, cultural, political and economic context surrounding territorial expansion and is a first step in de-compartmentalizing interdependent universes. In an intellectual environment where the image of the forest seemed caught between two ideologies -the agricultural past versus the surge of sciences- these authors initiated a collective dialogue about the symbolic space occupied by forests in society and, by extension, the larger issue of the social relationships to the territory. These literary works show that, amidst the State's actions, the appropriation of the territory was proposed as a collective and multidimensional act.

AbstractBy providing a sampling from Kant and Hegel's theories of madness, this article argues that Baudelaire's prose poem “Mademoiselle Bistouri” affords an unexpected lens through which to rethink the term monomania. In the hands of the poem's narrator, mademoiselle Bistouri's idée fixe becomes an antidote to Hegel's unhappy consciousness. Her obsession brings a raison d'être to a world that has relinquished its systems of belief. Gladys Swain's Dialogue avec l'insensé serves as theoretical backbone to the article.

AbstractThe deglacial marine-limit surface is a virtual topography that shows the increase of elevation since deglaciation. The currently available set of marine-limit elevations (n = 929), about three times the number available in the most recent synthesis, allows a fairly detailed rendering of the surface across most of glaciated North America and Greenland. Certain large glacial lake-limit surfaces are analogous to marine-limit surfaces, except that their gradients were not dampened by eustatic sea-level rise. Collectively the surfaces reflect both gross ice-sheet geometry and regional to local rates of ice-marginal recession. As such, they are replication targets for glacioisostatic modelling that are supplementary to and more continuously distributed than relative sea-level curves.

The anti-Semitic writings of Catholic French-Canadian intellectuals have received a lot of attention. From Lionel Groulx to Le Devoir, not to mention the Jeune-Canada movement, the 1930s have much to offer those interested in the issue of anti-Semitism in Catholic Quebec. A large number of relevant studies have focused on the period. However, although Catholicism has often been identified as a source of anti-Semitism, the role of the Catholic Church as an institution has yet to be examined. This article explores the views of the Catholic Church on anti-Semitism and its expressions, especially in relation to Adrien Arcand's Christian National Socialist Party. Did the Church encourage anti-Semitism among its followers, did it condemn anti-Semitism, or did it largely ignore the issue ? Did the bishops themselves harbour prejudice against Jews, or even fear them ? The recently opened archives of the Archdioceses of Quebec and Montreal show that, on the one hand, the Church generally failed to reach out to the Jewish community or encourage Catholics to be more open and understanding. On the other hand, the Church was suspicious of Adrien Arcand's party and had little appetite for his virulently anti-Jewish discourse. The article illustrates these findings by revisiting the 1930 debate on Jewish schools, the the relationship between the Quebec Church and the Christian National Socialist Party, as well as the anti-Semitic rhetoric of some priests in the Diocese of Quebec.