Positivism in the Mirror of Carnival: The Rabelaisian Chronotope in the Works of E. Zola

This paper deals with using the Rabelaisian cultural code, which the author of the article suggests to be applied to the reading and interpreting of some novels by E. Zola. From the authors point of view, such an experiment allows us to look at French naturalism from a new point of view, as a variant of a typologically recurring phenomenon in the history of literature. For the French naturalistic novel Rabelaisianism is considered as a kind of meaning-generating model, as appropriated communication or as an element of traditional literary discourse. The latter is actualized in a period when the cultural conditions and the nature of the main ideological and aesthetic conflicts became similar to the time of the French Renaissance. The author attempts to apply the theory of the carnival chronotope, which is developed by M.M. Bakhtin, to the interpretation of some of E. Zolas texts. Meanwhile, the concept of the chronotope is considered more widely than that of M.M. Bakhtin: it is proposed to understand the chronotope as a universal model of space-time relations in the novel. The author also views the poetics of the real in the naturalistic novel through the prism of the carnival (i. e. extremely detailed material world); as examples, the motives of food and wine, as well as the motive of rebellion and war as a variant of the war for food and the carnival battle of Shrovetide (pancake week) and Lent are analyzed in the article. The main material used for the analysis is taken from the novels Le Ventre de Paris , 1873 ( The Belly of Paris ), LAssommoir , 1877 ( The Trap ), and Germinal , 1885, by E. Zola.

The Heraldic Shield and the Woman’s Body in the Blasons Anatomiques du corps féminin (1543)

In the French Renaissance, the term ‘anatomical blason’ (blason anatomique) designated a highly descriptive love poem praising a single part of a woman’s body, while in heraldry, the noun ‘blason’ defined the ensemble of ornamental components constituting the shield. Just as the French verb blasonner meant to describe and to interpret the shield’s material and symbolic parts, so could this verb be used in amatory poetry to signify the act of lauding the details of the beloved’s anatomical parts. This study examines the structural analogies between heraldic shield and the anatomical blason, addressing how the technical terms defining the shield’s components such as partitions, points, charges, tinctures, and the achievement could be given analogous expressions in the anatomical love poetry.

petits jeux, combat doux und fleurs écloses: Sexualität und ihre Kodierung im französischen Renaissancelied

Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generally appears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthology representing a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses the excerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the images that describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizes them according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and further subdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as flora and fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear, instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, the article shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content. The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followed by metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, as the dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and female body parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluation of common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeper understanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of the early use of sexual euphemisms in French.