Les figures à l’épreuve du discours: dialogisme et polyphonie ed. by Frédéric Calas, et al (review)

Reviews 287 more feminized, resistant, and unified, to combat extremism, and to stop harm to the earth. Each time the earth feels threatened—it is a living, breathing, verbal entity in this novel—whether being “drained” of its oil or incessantly overpopulated—the earth in turn strikes back with plague, tornadoes, or nuclear reactor meltdowns, just to name a few. Werber tries to create a delicate balance between the earth and its inhabitants, making use of “L’Encyclopédie du Savoir Relatif et Absolu”that he so successfully used in Les fourmis, and giving voice to a planet exhausted by man’s tendency towards violence, waste, and ruin. How original to“hear”the earth complain about drilling its surface, to wonder how it will combat the meteor bits hurling at it, to sense its loneliness vis-à-vis the lack of life on other spheres. The author uses italics for the earth’s speech; the Encyclopedia excerpts, incredibly accurate and informative, are all done in bold print. In addition to these techniques, the author has given us characters we can root for, especially in David Wells (like he who fought great Goliath), and his colleague Aurore Kammerer (like the dawn of a new age).His ability to tell of the earth’s checkered past, to paint a world making the same mistakes today, and to attempt a future free of error is monumental. Synergy, transformation, and respect: these are lessons to be learned if we wish to go forward. David, Aurore, Nuçx’ia Nuçx’ia, Penthésilée Kéchichian, Lieutenant Janicot, and Colonel Ovitz are the six partners of the team able to guide us feeble earthlings onward, and enable us to better communicate with earth mother Gaïa. Werber wins our interest from the very beginning and he creates a relationship between the reader and his novel that never wanes; all that remains is waiting for part two to discover whether the Emach creations can stymie any other threats to the earth or seek revenge for what they see is unfit or unjust behavior towards them. We cannot go smaller: with the “troisième humanité,” we are roughly at five to six inches in height; however, with Werber’s brilliant capacity to use sciencefiction to alter our reality, who knows? Santa Rosa Alliance Française (CA) Davida Brautman Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns Calas, Frédéric, Catherine Fromilhague, Anne-Marie Garagnon, et Laurent Susini, éd. Les figures à l’épreuve du discours: dialogisme et polyphonie. Paris: PU de la Sorbonne, 2012. ISBN 978-2-84050-828-1. Pp. 168. 17 a. This volume contains twelve studies that explore figures de style as they are used in different types of discourse. The variety and breadth of contexts analyzed are impressive in such a compact collection. It extends the study of stylistics beyond traditional approaches, which, as the editors indicate, are often essentially typological. The studies in this volume do not treat la figure as something that is linguistically marked. Instead, their aim is to consider “la complexité du potentiel sémantique des énoncés figuraux dans son double versant interne et externe, sans qu’il soit besoin de poser comme base un énoncé ‘neutre’ ou un degré zéro, donc une ‘déviance’ de l’expression” (7). As the editors note in the preface, these studies all center around four main areas of inquiry:“l’articulation entre dialogisme et polyphonie”,“la sémantique”, “la saillance figurale”, and “la pratique stylistique” (9–10). Another positive aspect of this collection of studies is the treatment of figures de style that have been studied exhaustively (for example, allégorie, litote, euphémisme, ironie) and others that have received much less attention (for example, aposiopèse, énallage, étymologie, interrogation rhétorique, hypallage, réduplication, syllepse). The first part of the volume includes four studies that have been categorized as perspectives théoriques. In the first of these chapters focusing on theoretical perspectives, Soutet anchors his discussion of la polyphonie pré-énonciative in the theoretical framework of Gustave Guillaume. Next, Jaubert also takes up the notion of polyphonie, tracing its origins, evolution, and relevance . In the third study of this volume, Bonhomme...