The Romanic Review articles from May 1996

The Romanic Review archives from May 1996

Polyphonic narrative in early modern France: a question of literary history.
May 1, 1996... The sharp distinction traditionally drawn between French Renaissance and Classical literature was based in part on the assumption that the defining genre of literary history was poetry--including verse tragedy and epic; if prose fiction is...

'Lo cop mortal': the evil eye and the origins of courtly love.
May 1, 1996... "There be none of the Affections, which have beene noted to fascinate, or bewitch but Love, and Envy. They both have vehement wishes; They frame themselves readily into the Eye; especially upon the presence of the Objects;...

"He doesn't have a leg to stand on": lameness and knowledge in 'Des Boyteux.'(Analysis of essay by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.)
May 1, 1996... The figure of the lame person is a troubling one in `Des boyteux.' The lame person appears relatively late in the essay. His presence is never fully explained in any straightforward way by the essayist. Especially because it occurs in an...

Travel, transgression, and possession in Merimee's 'Carmen.'
May 1, 1996... "Je vais aller en Espagne, c'est-a-dire en Afrique." --Stendhal "Comment ferez-vous pour parler de l'Espagne quand vous y serez alle? " --Heine to Gautier There's more to Carmen than meets Bizet. Explications of...

Adieu, Arthur Rimbaud: a future for syntax in 'Le Parti pris des choses.'
May 1, 1996... "La revolution spirituelle doit se faire actuellement, dans une certaine mesure, contre Rimbaud." "Un bon texte nourrit aussi la generation contradictoire." --Francis Ponge.(*) Since its first publication in 1965, Pour...

The syntactic panopticon and Mallarmean resistance.
May 1, 1996... In Discipline & Punish, Foucault describes discipline as a modality of power that aspires "to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed" (164). Bentham's...

Rereading Swann's narrative.(Interpretation of Marcel Proust's 'A la recherche du temps perdu.')
May 1, 1996... Critics have long recognized the Princesse de Guermantes' reception as the turning point of the hero's social ascension in A la recherche du temps perdu.(1) At the close of the evening, the hero, who had initially feared that his invitation to...

Celine's 'Voyage au bout de la nuit': the nation constructed through storytelling.
May 1, 1996... Celine's oeuvre, like those of numerous other twentieth-century writers, is strongly marked by the problematic status of the writer's fiction visa-vis his politics. For some critics, Celine's anti-semitism and his avowed fascism raise...

Sartre et Michaux: les modes de vie du corps. (Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Michaux)
May 1, 1996... A defaut d'etre quelqu'un, le poete Henri Michaux a exprime le desir de n'etre personne, "rien et rien que rien"(2). Neanmoins ce desir n'a jamais ete realise dans ses oeuvres(3). J'expliquerai l'incapacite du poete a atteindre son but en...

Between myth and reference: Puig and Ionesco.
May 1, 1996... What is myth? Why link it to reference? We have shown elsewhere that myth and reference are diametrically opposed to one another, given their different relationship with time.(1) Myth eschews specific spatiotemporal coordinates. As...

Paris a l'epoque de Balzac et dans la 'Comedie humaine:' La ville et la societe.
May 1, 1996... De Jean Ygaunin. Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1992. Pp. 320. Dans le champ deja riche des essais sur le Paris de Balzac, et apres les ouvrages de Stevenson (Paris dans la "Comedic humaine" de Balzac, 1938), Raser (The heart of Balzac's...

L'Alcool du Silence: sur la decadence.
May 1, 1996... By Pierre Jourde. Paris: Honore Champion, 1994. Pp 328. The trouble with such an agreeably enigmatic notion as "l'alcool du silence" are the claims one feels compelled to make for it. Taken from Laforgue's "Salome", the backpage notes...