Forms of Building, Forms of Living: Viollet-Le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture and Zola’s Pot-Bouille

This article examines the historical and theoretical connections between architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc (1815-1879) and Émile Zola (1840-1902). By analyzing the ways in which Viollet-Le-Duc’s theory on domestic architecture in his Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863-1872) resonates in Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), this study illustrates how Zola’s text depicts the correlation between architectural form and ways of living. In light of the work of Viollet-Le-Duc, the particular characteristics of domestic architecture in Pot-Bouille are imagined to mould the personalities of the inhabitants, thereby shaping their domestic values. First, the ways in which Viollet-Le-Duc’s theory overlaps with naturalism are introduced. Then Zola’s own interest in architecture and his knowledge of Viollet-Le-Duc are documented. Finally, the article argues that, in Pot-Bouille, domestic architecture has an influence on the characters’ domestic lives and that a study of Entretiens provides a better cultural understanding of Pot-Bouille and the ways in which architecture was imagined to impact on people’s personalities.

Marivauder à l’écart du monde : langage et identité

In most French dictionaries, the word marivaudage is defined as a style named after the characteristics and excesses of Marivaux’s style, which expresses sentiment in a refined and stylized manner. The verb marivauder refers to the imitation of Marivaux’s refinements, often with negative connotations. This article, however, Marivaux’s complete works, including novels, journals and plays, to reveal new meanings of reads these two terms by examining the close relationship between marivaudage, language and identity. As a result, marivaudage also comes to indicate a form of reflection that analyzes individual identity and marivauder comes to refers to the process of self-knowledge.

Myth- and Monarch-Making: Claire de Duras’s Pensées de Louis XIV (1827)

Louis XIV is one of the most captivating figures in French history despite his myth sitting uneasily alongside a modern Republican France. Louis XIV’s rarely read memoirs provide unique insight into the monarch’s role, demonstrating the tension between God-given right and the day-to-day duties of being a king. Novelist Claire de Duras used the memoirs to compile Pensées de Louis XIV (1827), a collection of seventy selected quotations. This article shows how Duras attempts to reconcile past and present, maintaining the mythical aura of the monarch while also portraying Louis XIV as a figure that might appeal to a post-Revolutionary, post-Imperial society.

Une « science » de la durée : Valéry lecteur de la poésie du xixe siècle

Although Paul Valéry’s lack of interest—if not outright contempt—for literary history is by now well known, as is his rather singular conception of reading, this article argues for the importance of reexamining the many texts in which he positions himself first as a reader of nineteenth-century French poetry. A constant preoccupation of Valéry’s when reviewing Hugo, Baudelaire or Mallarmé (among several others) is the capacity of any given text to resist at once its reader and the unavoidable flight of time. At stake in Valéry’s meditation, as this article demonstrates, is what he comes to label as a “science” of duration (durée).

La Notion de l’inceste heureux dans la littérature utopique de la fin du xviiie siècle

This article examines ways in which the existence of incestuous relationships at the heart of the utopian project at the end of the Eighteenth century poses a philosophical challenge. When a utopian community is built on the principle of a definite improvement, how is it possible to envision a positive future when incest is introduced at the foundation of a society that pretends to be better than the existing one? Furthermore, how is it possible to establish laws and rules in a society when the initial members of this society have not been able to respect a law supposedly inviolable? Lastly, how can a utopian community, which thrives to be an ideological model, adopt incest as a legitimate possibility or even a norm? This article explores how several prerevolutionary utopias try to answer all those questions. Among the texts it considers are Guillaume Grivel’s L’Isle inconnue, Giacomo Casanova’s L’Icosameron, and Jacques Henri-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.

Fragmenting, Repeating, Rebuilding: The Chaotic Cyclones of Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam

This article explores the creative potential of the repeating cyclones at the heart of Gisèle Pineau’s 1995 novel L’Espérance-macadam. Examining the novel in relation to Édouard Glissant’s chaos-monde, it understands the cyclone not simply as catastrophe but also as an ambiguous agent of chaos in line with Glissant’s key metaphor of the slave ship, capable of both destroying and building anew a community through violent cycles of unearthing, fragmenting and interweaving. Engaging with previous critical readings of Pineau’s cyclonic figures that have relied on Freud’s “repetition compulsion”, this article argues that Pineau’s representation of external and internal repetitive events—natural disasters and personal traumas—are not to be read as regression or stasis, but as the possibility of incremental progress through constant movement and towards what Pineau names an “espérance-macadam”. Repetition thus becomes a catalyst for systemic change, allowing her protagonist to process trauma, join a community of survivors of sexual abuse and environmental injustice and find agency within and through the cyclonic events that affect her community.

Quand Marie Darrieussecq parle de race : réception et posture de l’écrivain blanc

This article reflects upon the remarkable reception of Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes in the autumn of 2013. In the first instance, it questions the response of literary critics—surprisingly unanimous in spite of the novel’s treatment of interracial relations and colonial heritage—as well as the author’s posturing until she was awarded the prestigious Médicis prize. While French literary studies continue to be governed by ethnoracial criteria applied to minority authors (“francophone” writers, “beur” or “banlieue” literature, etc.), this article seeks to demonstrate that, during this period marked by extensively reported racist incidents, a certain image of the white writer emerged from the novel’s critical reception as well as Darrieussecq’s own public interventions.

Métropolitain.e: Language in Compressed Spaces

A few years ago, I described myself finding a livelier sense of self by looking up at the windows of the metro as it clattered past the iron wings above me. A corner of city, I wrote, which I had explored so frequently that my unceasing movement within it founded me more than the State-led rationalities that were reshaping the landscape around me. The blinking eyes of the metro cast a gaze that made me feel particularly me amid the ruination of the textures of life that were being smoothed out and boxed in, all the while this city, to which I had repeatedly returned, underwent a massive phase of renovation. What of me was I tied to in that shuddering moment, and what of the city? How did my own turn to translingual poetics relate to my readings in “metro” and mass transportation aesthetics, and where do I find myself now, writing in the constrained distances and proximities of Paris in 2020, when movement to and from—and in and around—the city and the continent more broadly has become all the more difficult for many, and nigh impossible for those living without papers.

“Cherchez la fiction”: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges

Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.