Project MUSE®: French Forum - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in French Forum.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 26 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: French ForumTWOProject MUSE®French Forum1534-18360098-9355Latest articles in French Forum. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Parler chinois: the Invention of the Fake “Chinese Princess” in Seventeenth-Century Paris
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983938
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In the August 1693 issue of the Mercure Galant, a curious histoire is related in the customary format of an anonymous letter addressed to a female recipient. “Il est vray, Madame,” the letter begins, “que nous avons icy une Chinoise.” This Chinese lady by the name of Ina is described as a 24-year-old woman with Asian physiognomy and refined manners. She claims to be of noble birth, born in Peking to the Treasurer of the Chinese Army and raised in the bosom of the imperial palace. The appearance of a whirlpool along the Grand Canal,1 the habitual route for inland travel, compelled her to travel by sea on a voyage to Nanking. The worst fears of this risky decision materialized, when the ship was assaulted by a Dutch
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallParler chinois: the Invention of the Fake “Chinese Princess” in Seventeenth-Century Paris2026-02-26text/htmlen-USParler chinois: the Invention of the Fake “Chinese Princess” in Seventeenth-Century Paris2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®665082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Georges Perec’s Lieux as Physical and Rhetorical Sites of Memory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983939
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After his untimely death in 1982, Perec left a rich literary legacy, a great part of which consisted of projects for works to come. Some were partly realized, others not at all (Lejeune 1991). One of the most extensive ones is Lieux. Although it was left unfinished, he worked on this autobiographical project for six years (1969–1975). It consists of 238 texts and numerous other documents, including photographs. Due to its fragmentary and unfinished character, it stayed unpublished for over forty years and thus acquired a nearly mythical status among the general public, till it was finally published in 2022, on paper and online. The title Lieux refers to physical, Parisian places as well as rhetorical places (or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallGeorges Perec’s Lieux as Physical and Rhetorical Sites of Memory2026-02-26text/htmlen-USGeorges Perec’s Lieux as Physical and Rhetorical Sites of Memory2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®575832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Personhood Will Not Protect You: The Children’s Literature of the Post-Exotic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983940
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The name Antoine Volodine is a pseudonym (along with five others of the same author1) that is well-known in France. These “heteronyms” have published altogether 48 original works over the last four decades as well as many translations from Russian and Portuguese. While originally published by a science fiction editor, he is more suited to the wider label of “speculative” fiction, as, although the majority of his works take place in the future, they share characteristics with the fantastic, including mutant and talking animals and explorations of the porous boundaries between the real and imaginary, life and death. Nearly all his writings can be classified as “post-apocalyptic,” with some of them being
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallPersonhood Will Not Protect You: The Children’s Literature of the Post-Exotic2026-02-26text/htmlen-USPersonhood Will Not Protect You: The Children’s Literature of the Post-Exotic2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®526952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Écrire l’enfance: Scrabble, mode d’emploi
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983941
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Quatre mots, Michaël Ferrier choisit quatre mots pour la dédicace de son roman Scrabble. Le premier est un nom propre, celui d’une jeune femme. Les trois suivants sont des noms communs, dont l’un contient la lettre x, pour un meilleur score. Au Scrabble, avec ces mots-là, les points s’accumuleraient vite, si seulement le nom propre était autorisé… Car ce sont des mots qui utilisent sept lettres quand même, ils peuvent assurer le bonus à chaque coup! Et avec leurs lettres communes, ils se placent sans difficulté sur le plateau du jeu. Mais la vraie richesse de ces mots tient en ce qu’ils ont été choisis par l’écrivain, c’est à ses yeux qu’ils ont le plus de valeur. Alors pourquoi ne pas inventer son propre Scrabble
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallÉcrire l’enfance: Scrabble, mode d’emploi2026-02-26text/htmlen-USÉcrire l’enfance: Scrabble, mode d’emploi2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®617572026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Les images du moi: les cas de L’Africain de J. M. G. Le Clézio et d’Autoportrait en vert de Marie NDiaye
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983942
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Grâce à Philippe Lejeune, qui a renouvelé l’analyse du genre de l’autobiographie, l’écriture de soi a connu un regain d’intérêt auprès de nombreux écrivains. Le rôle de Serge Doubrovsky a été non moins important dans cet engouement des écrivains pour l’écriture de soi. Ce dernier, ayant relevé le cas manquant dans le pacte autobiographique, a façonné la notion de l’autofiction ouvrant ainsi un nouvel horizon pour l’écriture de soi. On constate que la narration autobiographique s’épanouit à nouveau après une période de silence relatif dans les années 1960. Cette époque a été marquée par la supériorité du textualisme et du structuralisme exerçant une menace de disparition, voire de mort, envers le sujet ou l’auteur.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallLes images du moi: les cas de L’Africain de J. M. G. Le Clézio et d’Autoportrait en vert de Marie NDiaye2026-02-26text/htmlen-USLes images du moi: les cas de L’Africain de J. M. G. Le Clézio et d’Autoportrait en vert de Marie NDiaye2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®452952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26The Bodily Grotesque: Monstrosity as Social Critique in Ananda Devi’s Manger l’autre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983943
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This essay explores the treatment of monstrous corporeal excesses as mirroring a grotesque social order, which consumes itself in compulsive self-indulgence and nihilistic excesses. To this end, I propose a critical reading of Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s Manger l’autre (2018). Arguably, Devi’s novels have garnered recognition and critical acclaim for their unique blend of outside-the-norm female protagonists and abusive social norms as twinned thematic preoccupations, which course through the quasi-totality of her oeuvre. Her most recent novel pushes these themes to new heights by portraying a teenager, whose corporeal dimensions defy the horizons as they expand beyond the limits of the “normal” and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallThe Bodily Grotesque: Monstrosity as Social Critique in Ananda Devi’s Manger l’autre2026-02-26text/htmlen-USThe Bodily Grotesque: Monstrosity as Social Critique in Ananda Devi’s Manger l’autre2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®589472026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Une philosophie poétique du langage ordinaire: Cécile Mainardi avec John L. Austin et Ludwig Wittgenstein
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983944
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Il y a comme une “présence” de Ludwig Wittgenstein et de la philosophie du langage ordinaire dans cette poésie française contemporaine qui explore de manière explicite le fonctionnement du langage.1 Emmanuel Hocquard fait figure de proue dans l’incorporation poétique de cette philosophie, et Une grammaire de Tanger synthétise nombre de ses réflexions à propos et à partir de Wittgenstein et John L. Austin entre autres. Cette présence peut être constatée par l’utilisation de certaines notions spécifiques à cette tradition philosophique, telles que “jeu de langage,” “forme de vie,” ou encore “acte de langage” ou “performatif.” Outre Emmanuel Hocquard, dont les œuvres foisonnent de références à Wittgenstein et Austin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallUne philosophie poétique du langage ordinaire: Cécile Mainardi avec John L. Austin et Ludwig Wittgenstein2026-02-26text/htmlen-USUne philosophie poétique du langage ordinaire: Cécile Mainardi avec John L. Austin et Ludwig Wittgenstein2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®677182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Making the Bible French: The Bible historiale and the Medieval Lay Reader by Jeanette L. Patterson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983945
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If words on the page are any indication, today’s medieval French scholars don’t think nearly as much about the Bible as medieval vernacular writers did. Guyart des Moulins’s late thirteenth-century Bible historiale (1295) was one of the most copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Though not the first translation of the Bible into French, the Bible historiale was perhaps the best-known French version of the Bible in the period between its emergence and the first decades of the sixteenth century. The popularity of this vernacular work over a two-hundred-year timespan has not, however, found a correlative in the scholarly attention devoted to it in modern times. To date, there is no complete modern
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallMaking the Bible French: The Bible historiale and the Medieval Lay Reader by Jeanette L. Patterson (review)2026-02-26text/htmlen-USMaking the Bible French: The Bible historiale and the Medieval Lay Reader by Jeanette L. Patterson (review)2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®93242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Toward a Premodern Posthumanism. Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France by Chad Córdova (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983946
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With this intriguing title, Córdova signs a true work of comparative literature about early modern French texts and their inescapable presence in modern theory and philosophy. Nobody expects a premodern posthumanism; at the very least, a posthumanism should take place and be thought of after the movement we call Humanism. This is precisely the assumption that this book calls into question. In some ways, Toward a Premodern Posthumanism is exactly what one would expect: a historically-driven argument about the early modern roots of Kant’s, Derrida’s, and Heidegger’s thought on aesthetics and nature—that is to say, a detailed account of their readings of early modern theorists like Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallToward a Premodern Posthumanism. Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France by Chad Córdova (review)2026-02-26text/htmlen-USToward a Premodern Posthumanism. Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France by Chad Córdova (review)2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®85182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature by Morgane Cadieu (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983947
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This is a wide-ranging, deeply resourceful, intellectually bracing study of the social dimension of contemporary French literature. Arguing that events such as the financial crisis of 2008 and the gilets jaunes movement of 2018 served to put the notion of social class back into French national debate, Morgane Cadieu invokes the figure of Rastignac in order to stage her discussion of social climbing. Calling him “a shapeshifing archetype endowed with a dual social class” (43), she shows how broadly Rastignac’s example has ramified in literature since the first half of the nineteenth century. And not only in literature, but also in other forms of social discourse. In doing so, Cadieu calls upon a pleasing diversity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallOn Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature by Morgane Cadieu (review)2026-02-26text/htmlen-USOn Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature by Morgane Cadieu (review)2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®76372026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983948
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In the introduction to Spirals in the Caribbean, Sophie Maríñez positions her study as a response to the 2013 Dominican Constitutional Court Ruling 168–13 that retroactively stripped hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican nationality, and to the myriad questions surrounding what became essentially overnight a human rights crisis encompassing issues of national identity, migration, constitutional law and the longstanding history of violence between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Maríñez structures her book on the premise that the blatant anti-Haitianism at the heart of the 2013 ruling is rooted in three “foundational episodes of violence” (1) in the island’s history—the Haitian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallSpirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)2026-02-26text/htmlen-USSpirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Sophie Maríñez (review)2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®95672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Balzac chercheur by José-Luis Diaz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983949
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In his extensive and rigorous study, Balzac chercheur, José-Luis Diaz contends that relentless inquiry lies at the heart of Balzac’s literary enterprise. The figure of Balzac as philosopher or thinker has long been a focus of Balzacian scholarship—from Per Nykrog’s La Pensée de Balzac dans la Comédie humaine (1965) to Francesco Spandri’s collective volume Balzac penseur (2019). While Diaz also mobilizes such labels, he ultimately privileges the generative posture of the chercheur—understood both as “chercheur de l’absolu” and as an experimenting “chercheur en sciences humaines” (12), a prescient “docteur ès sciences-sociales,” and “docteur en médecine sociale” (138; 219). What emerges is less a codified science
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/63/image/coversmallBalzac chercheur by José-Luis Diaz (review)2026-02-26text/htmlen-USBalzac chercheur by José-Luis Diaz (review)2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®87032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26