This paper looks at Couperin as both painter and poet, revealing his satirical verve, his humour, the porous relationship between his work and the world of theatre, his taste for mystery, mystification, irony and literary strategy. Couperin cultivates an aesthetic of connivance and echoes the cultural and societal context of his time. His titles, with their suggestive power, are both Barricades mysterieuses and precious keys that open up the meanders of the 'imagination'. The portrait of Couperin and the interpretation of his music are enriched by this journey through his work.
Published in 1724 and 1725, Couperin's Apotheoses are two singular musical portraits that, in both form and intent, go beyond the numerous title pieces that punctuate his harpsichord music. Dedicated to two emblematic figures of the 17th century, Corelli and Lully, these works translate into sound all that these musicians represent in the aesthetics of the time. In a mythological landscape tinged with contemporary references, the two and the musical styles they embody cross paths, sizing each other up, then reconcile in a "Peace of Parnassus" that seals the union of tastes previously deemed irreconcilable. Beyond painting and poetry, this is the apotheosis of a manifesto that Couperin defended throughout his career.
The article analyzes three autobiographical works that reflect the difficult reconstruction after the Islamist attack on the weekly journal Charlie Hebdo in 2015: the narrative Le Lambeau (2018) by Philippe Lawn as well as the graphic novels La Legerete (2016) by Catherine Meurisse and Catharsis (2015) by Luz. More specifically, the article is interested in the survival of and by comic procedures, fathoming thus the role of the aesthetic experience when confronted to terror. It stresses the respective contributions of literary text and of drawing in gaining distance from traumatic experience.
This article explores Pasolini's contribution to film adaptation by examining the nature of his adaptations, a kind of excess that draws inspiration from both religious pictorial works and "classical" texts. In Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, he transposes the excesses of the Marquis de Sade's work to Fascist Italy to speak of the excesses of capitalism. Pier Paolo Pasolini, assassinated in 1975, was also a martyr and heretic in his own way, in relation to the dogmas of Catholicism, Marxism and the institutions of cinema.
Deeply affected by the upheavals of their time, Camus and Gary explore the excesses of modern man, his quest for the absolute, and the tensions that arise between reason and imagination, measure and excess. Drawing on mythic figures such as Faust, these authors sought to engage in a dialogue between myth and rationality to critique the excesses of their era. While some myths are deliberately degraded to expose their inadequacies, Camus and Gary never abandon the idea of re-enchanting the world through myth, all while maintaining a critical lucidity regarding modernity. This article highlights their approach to reconciling existential aspirations with contemporary realities.
Jean Giono's novel The Polish Mill, completed in January 1952, is the fifth of his "Romantic Chronicles". It tells the story of the tragic "destiny of the Costes" over five generations, from 1815 to the war of 14. The Coste family lives on the Moulin de Poland estate. Members of every generation are victims of tragic accidents. But Julie finds protection with the mysterious Mr. Joseph, who marries her and with whom he has a son, Leonce. But ultimately fate catches up with the Costes: Leonce runs away with a woman of the wrong gender and Julie, in despair, disappears. However, it is their excess that is thus punished, because they will not have stopped defying destiny. But destiny is only a metaphor here: in reality, they have not given up on satisfying the desire, fundamental for Giono, to lose oneself, by confronting death - failing to be able to enjoy the happy mixture with the world, a world that recent history has tragically closed to human desire. Unlike misers who, by "instinct of self-preservation", only satisfy their desire by proxy, by enjoying the loss of others that if necessary they foment, the Costes create their own outlet for their passion - such is their counter-world - and only give in to the seduction of nothingness in desperation, when they come up against the petty mediocrity of modern society. For Julie: despite the protective "kingdom" that Mr. Joseph built around her.
"Excess" and "measure" are two key notions largely structuring the thought of Amelie Nothomb in her autobiographical novel Stupeur et tremblements (1999). Coming from a bourgeois and Catholic family, Amelie, the main character of the novel, goes to Japan to live and work. But she suffers a "tremendous social fall" and does not expect her boss to suggest that she becomes "madame pipi". The paradox of superiority/inferiority at work in Japanese business manages human relations, thus creating executioners and victims. The authority of men is a source of excess, which is understood as hegemony of the strongest and humiliation of the weakest. Faced with professional failure and anti-Western racism, Amelie decides to engage in writing, the only world that allows total emancipation from social constraints. Writing is a weapon of defense against evil and excess, a permanent challenge that it launches into literary creation to restore a certain integrity of the Self She sees writing as "the greatest necessity" and "the greatest passion" of her life. Writing becomes a means of emancipation and a reason for living.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a postcolonial writer; he opts for carnivalesque excess as a compensation strategy serving to subvert colonial history and to overthrow the hierarchies established between the colonizer and the colonized. The excess is manifested in the parody of the conquering epic, which aims, first and foremost, to desacralize and demystify the victory of the ex-colonizer by emphasizing the misdeeds of domination. Thus, the writer adopts the approach of a polemicist who finds in the judicial genre a means to denounce the various historical traumas. In parallel with the demystification of the conquering epic, Chamoiseau disguises the defeat of the dominated into an epic glory and it is by resorting to the epideictic genre that serves to praise the resistance led by the colonized. In fact, operated by the use of amplification rhetoric, the epic magnification depicts the heroism of the fugitive slave who is ready to face death to heal his being and dignity, consequently, it makes this character a popular hero and transforms his defeat into a grandiose glory.
The society of the 19th century had to face multiple upheavals, especially in regard of its relationship to work and the working classes. The literary treatment of the hands of laborers reveals a particularly divided perception of the people, betraying both goodwill and hostility. We propose to study how the representation of hands in the works of Balzac, Sand, and Zola reflects with efficiency their different convictions as well as their respective sensitivity to the cause of the working classes.
Les Giants is "a cry of revolt" (back cover of the book) against the disproportionate excesses of triumphant capitalism. There are hints of La Guerre (1970), a story which also reflects a desire for revolt against the cynical war of mercantilism, against a world dominated by violence and monstrosity. Excess appears in these texts (just like Le Deluge) in diffuse forms of an unbearable presence (in the most semiotic sense of the term) of violence which goes against the ideal of Beauty, of harmony or even measure that all of Le Clezio's work seeks so much. Le Livre des fuites is a perpetual escape from the world of monstrous cities with their teeming populations and wide highways; Les Geants describes a super market whose name - Hyperpolis - calls for hyperbole, a "fascinating universe, so bathed in light that people lose all existence there." (back cover of the book). This study will aim to present the forms and aspects and even the modalities of this symbolic excess of death (of existence) which results from it, based - mainly - on these different stories by Le Clezio.
In "Ferveur de Brigid", the opening story of Winter Mythologies, Pierre Michon disquietingly confronts the realm of the sacred with the power of eros. Identifying the original legend that served as his starting point enables us to analyze the writing process for the first time, and to describe the subversive nature of the rewriting. It is organized around a tug-of-war between a young woman "in the grip of desire" and a missionary who defends an "arid truth". Michon's text is colored by a network of biblical and iconographic references, and benefits from the confusion of a narrative instance shared in principle between a medieval witness and the modern narrator.
Dominique Viart proposes to qualify literature after 1980 as "transitive", in reaction to the generally more "solipsistic" literature of the three previous decades. We can only be struck by the number of contemporary works which once again invite the world into their works, no longer abandoning its historical, economic, sociological and political dimensions to the human and social sciences alone, but considering that literature also has something precious to say about it with her own means. We will mainly focus here on a novel published in 1984 by Sylvie Germain - Le Livre des nuits - which has the particularity of covering a period of one hundred years, marked by three wars and on a novel published some twenty years later by Hubert Mingarelli - La Route de Beit Zera - which looks at a conflict which poisoned almost the entire 20th century and whose horror continues to grow: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, to reflect the traumas of this "century of excess" according to the Jean-Francois Mattei's expression, their stylistic choices are diametrically opposed: one chooses excess, the other minimalism.
In 1994, Roberto Benigni directed the comedy of misunderstandings The Monster (Il Mostro), whose protagonist, the marginal Loris, is the victim of a miscarriage of justice as monstrous as the serial murderer with whom the Italian authorities confuse him throughout the filmic narrative. Like Benigni's previous films, this fifth one revolves around the burlesque figure of the jester, the embodiment of a style of outrageousness that Benigni uses to paint a corrosive picture of 1990's Italy and its dysfunctions. The aim is to examine the mechanisms of this rhetoric of outrageousness, based on a constant questioning of the normality/monstruosity dialectic. The excesses of Benigni's character place him on the bangs of a community against which he struggles in vain, opposing the resistance of the burlesque body to the repressive social norms whose guardians strive to confine him to the territory of the monstrous. His literally eccentric situation makes him a figure of excess, who does not hesitate to transgress the founding pact of the social body. Italian society is central to Benigni's satire, in a film where carnivalesque strategies and burlesque devices are combined to denounce the aberrations of the established order and the monstrous manipulative power of its representatives.
The novel Le Deterreur by Moroccan author Mohamed Khair-Eddine is marked by different representations of excess and exaggeration, sometimes pushed to the point of delirium. Whether through stylistic originality or through the atypicality and extravagance of the character-narrator, the absence of measured behavior, moderation and weighting strikes the reader from the start. The political commitment which obliges the author to bear witness to his time does not prevent him from imagining a monstrous character through his captivating and irresistible voice.
In the narrative of filiation, the narrator is no longer the faithful continuator of family memory, but rather the detective who tracks down the lies, the hermeneuticist and critic, who does not hesitate to defy decency and propriety to reveal the shame and secrets of the family circle. Such is the undertaking undertaken by Michel Del Castillo in Rue des Archives and De pere francais. The raw description of the mother's physical decline shortly before her death, and of the sordid figure of an uncultured, racist father, sweeps aside historical, ethical and aesthetic traditions. Can family secrets be revealed in a literary work? Should parental figures be preserved from realistic description or denunciation? How can filial respect and the freedom of literary creation interact? The myth of the family is deconstructed by pointing out the odious and the abject, often using irony in the treatment of the father figure. The traditionally respected figure is transformed into a belittled and mocked one; the inversion of norms evokes the tradition of the "fool's party". The description of the mother's dilapidated state reflects an inventory madness reminiscent of Rabelaisian excess. Revealing the mother's physical and moral decay allows us to distance ourselves from an idealized image of the parents.
Personnel mais partageable, terrestre et chrétien, aussi attentif à l’esprit d’enfance qu’à celui des natures les plus fines, tissu de souvenirs et de sensations en même temps qu’aimanté par le champ de force d’une très vaste bibliothèque, tel est l’univers qu’a édifié Georges Saint-Clair. Le mot qu’emploie souvent le poète pour désigner cet univers, c’est « Territoire ». Or, ce ou ces « Territoires » – superposés ou imbriqués en volume – sont à la fois réels et imaginaires, visibles et invisibles. De là une « géographie sensible » qui est aussi une remontée dans le temps et un déchiffrement.
Robert Bober et Georges Perec partagent une enfance parisienne dans des quartiers populaires situés sur des buttes. Ils ont aussi en commun le goût de la flânerie. Mais le traumatisme de la guerre et des déportations a rendu leur rapport aux rues de leurs enfances difficile et lacunaire. Il est dominé par le sentiment d’être étranger dans sa propre ville. La géographie sensible que leurs œuvres dessinent est donc paradoxale, à la fois émue et douloureuse. Pour eux, il n’est pas de refuge dans la nostalgie, mais un état d’exil intérieur qui les ouvre aussi au présent. Le dialogue entre les deux écrivains, initié lors de la réalisation de Récits d’Ellis Island, se continue à travers l’œuvre de Robert Bober et notamment son dernier livre, Il y a quand même dans la rue des gens qui passent.
Dans quelle mesure peut-on qualifier Les Racines du ciel, le grand roman africain de Romain Gary, d’œuvre « écologique » ? Si l’Afrique a d’abord représenté un espace initiatique dans la formation de l’écrivain et la terre de résistance où est née la France libre, elle inspire très vite à l’auteur plusieurs nouvelles qui montrent à quel point la « géographie humaine » de ce continent lui est chère. Concernant Les Racines du ciel, même si le lexique de l’écologie est anachronique pour une action située dans les années cinquante, et même si la préoccupation écologique s’y mêle à d’autres enjeux, l’emploi du mot dans l’édition de 1980 est justifié tant ce roman fut précurseur dans son « appel au secours de notre biosphère menacée ».
Dans Le Pas de La Demi-Lune, roman publié en 2022, David Bosc réinvestit par l’imaginaire les lieux de son enfance et de son adolescence. Le titre désigne les calanques marseillaises comme lieu de la diégèse, puisque c’est le nom d’une brèche dans le rocher Saint-Michel d’Eau Douce, mais la mention de la lune, si fréquemment à l’honneur dans la poésie extrême-orientale traditionnelle, annonce déjà subtilement le brouillage des chronotopes auxquels va se livrer l’auteur. Nous verrons comment, contant une randonnée improvisée dans les calanques à une époque postérieure de plusieurs décennies à la nôtre, il nous entraîne aussi vers le Japon et vers les temps les plus reculés, tout en nous offrant, presque à chaque pas, des « images du monde flottant ».
Mystique de la Ferme et Mon âme en sabots, deux livres publiés en 1933 par cette écrivaine aujourd’hui oubliée sont analysés dans une perspective écopoétique. Une capacité d’observation exceptionnelle, servie par une écriture au rythme très maîtrisé, permet à cette écrivaine de ressusciter le monde des campagnes d’avant 1914-18. L’analyse est l’occasion de montrer comment dans l’entre-deux-guerres des écrivains ont pu s’inspirer du monde rural sans tomber dans le régionalisme et en ne taisant pas les réalités moins plaisantes des campagnes. L’originalité et l’intérêt de Jeanne Bemer-Sauvan qui, enfant, a fait l’expérience émerveillée de la nature, réside en ceci que son écriture des sens, éminemment attentive aux réalités concrètes de la nature, sert de point d’appui à une vision mystique du monde.
