French

La Philologie romane, nee en Allemagne dans le sillage de l'ideal humboldtien, a rayonne en Europe a partir de la fin du XIXe siecle de facon variee, mais constante. Les onze contributions reunies ici explorent le role joue en Europe par les premiers Neuphilologen allemands des origines jusqu'en 1945. Romance philology was born in Germany in the wake of the Humboldtien ideal, and flourished throughout Europe from the end of the nineteenth century onwards in a way which was varied, but constant. The eleven contributions united here explore the role played by the first German “Neuphilologen” in Europe from their beginnings until 1945.

A la recherche du temps perdu, the last great pre-Freudian novel of the mind, has attracted much attention from psychoanalytic critics since its publication. This article explores the analysis of Proust’s novel by critics, with a particular focus on the representation of the conscious and unconscious mind. It follows the history of such criticism through the rise of psychoanalysis in the humanities to the waning of its influence in the early years of the present century. The article argues that our postpsychoanalytic present is the ideal moment to reexamine the parallels and divergences between Proust’s and Freud’s understandings of consciousness and to measure them against the rival philosophical and psychological theories developed during the twentieth century. The current pluralism in the humanities’ approach to analyzing representations of the mind allows the literary author’s implicit understanding of mental life to assert itself more clearly.

Echenoz's crime-fiction-related novels occupy an equivocal position with regard to their source material, being neither crime fiction themselves nor outright parodies of the genre. The article explores this relationship as one of pastiche, and in doing so considers the various, often negative critical views of pastiche as a literary form. Fredric Jameson's pessimistic opinions are of particular interest, and the article sets out to discover how his views are justified or refuted by Echenoz's work. Closely examining some of the novels' incorporations and distortions of the tropes of crime fiction, and looking especially at Echenoz's handling of the crime fiction denouement, the study seeks out the aspects of textual play and implicit critique inherent in the pastiche. The picture that emerges is of an intertextual relationship that is both celebratory and deconstructive, a necessarily complex attitude towards a genre which can be at the same time formulaic and intensely self-conscious.

Questions of perception have for a long time held a central place in French intellectual life, from investigations into perception and consciousness by Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, through a psychoanalytic focus on self-image, to more recent preoccupations with photography and the moving image.1 This interest has been echoed by several writers of literary fiction, and the relationship between visual theorists and literary writers has been a topic of critical interest. The author's argument here, though, concerns popular fiction. The author claims that the treatment of perception in the detective story is a special case in literature, that the perception of the physical world in crime fiction is qualitatively different from that usually represented in other literary forms. It is also the author's contention that crime fiction's unique approach ranks it among the influences that have informed the representation of perception in French literary fiction of the later twentieth century.

From Naissance des fantômes onwards, Marie Darrieussecq's representation of the self draws heavily on the materialist mind/brain model of cognitive science. Her fiction makes use of the discipline's discourse with and against the grain, creating micro-narratives of the mind's surface level and present moment which contrast sharply with more familiar psychoanalytic perspectives. Narrative form in Darrieussecq, I argue, can be characterized as a stream-of-consciousness, which, while failing to conform to the literary model set by Dujardin and Joyce, is in fact closer to the original psychological conception of the term. The article concludes by examining Darrieussecq's model of the mind in the context of France's current ‘guerre des psys’ between cognitive science and psychoanalysis.

Henri Bergson's theory of the emotions claims that the intensity with which an emotion is felt results from a reciprocal feedback system between mind and body. We clench our fists from anger, and the muscle tension of our clenched fists shows us the strength of our anger. This article demonstrates not only that Bergson's intuitive philosophy is closely reflected in the cognitive neuroscience of Antonio Damasio, but also that it is plausibly illustrated in Le Scaphandre et le papillon, Jean-Dominique Bauby's celebrated memoir of locked-in syndrome. Bauby's striking equanimity in the face of his paralysis accords closely with both Damasio's and Bergson's theories.

The apogee of the French Catholic Novel in the first half of the twentieth century coincides with a period of unprecedented cultural interest in the workings of the mind, with a variety of artistic, scientific, and philosophical ideas on consciousness prominently employed by major French writers of the period. This article explores how the Catholic novel participates in this debate, presenting its own detailed conception of consciousness derived from theological principles, finding echoes with certain contemporary theories of the mind and contrast with others, and, in particular, coming into sharp conflict with both the existentialist and psychoanalytic models.

Stories go places. It is impossible to talk about narrative without using spatial terms, such as “plotline,” “narrative thread,” “twists and turns,” “pacing,” or “circularity.” In such metaphors, the two essential elements of narrative, time and meaning, are consistently replaced by distance and direction. Drawing on Bergson’s ideas on the spatial representation of time and Boroditsky’s cognitive research into spatial metaphors in abstract thought, and using literary digression in Sterne and Diderot as illustration, I consider the pervasiveness of these metaphors in narrative theory, and the consequences of such spatial mediation in the discipline’s analysis of narrative form.

Seeing Things explores all matters visual within the field of French studies. It brings together writings on French literature, philosophy and the visual arts, both from established critics and the new generation of young academics. From post-Freudian psychoanalysis through postmodernist theory to cognitive science, questions of vision have gained an unprecedented prominence in contemporary discourse. Seeing Things looks at the intersections of these questions with the concerns of Romance studies, and discovers fertile new territory in the crossover. Whether investigating the correspondences between photography and the novel, philosophy and perception, or time and film, the studies included here offer a radical exploration of western culture’s kaleidoscope of images.

Le roman policier était un objet de fascination pour les Nouveaux Romanciers. La liste des ouvrages qui s’approprient les thèmes, les personnages ou la structure narrative du polar est longue, et comprend des textes de Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Pinget et Butor. La forme fixe du polar, et le thème dominant de la restitution de l’ordre à l’aide de la raison et de la vérité, se sont avérés irrésistibles pour un mouvement littéraire qui visait à remettre en question toute présupposition esthétique ou épistémologique de la fiction romanesque. Comment caractériser ce rapport d’imitation entre le Nouveau Roman et le roman policier, qui ne semble pas être une parodie hostile, mais qui n’est pas exactement non plus un éloge du genre ?

This article explores the impact of the behaviorist theory of mind on French literature and culture, and in doing so uncovers a significant mismatch between the "behaviorist novel" as it has been narrowly conceived and the broader theories of behaviorism as a movement within psychology. Understanding this disparity permits us to reconsider the validity of the label "behaviorist" with regard to mid-twentieth-century authors, and notably among European writers, Camus, Sartre, and Sarraute.