Revue du Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma de l’Université Laval, Études littéraires est à l’avant-scène de la recherche universitaire nationale et internationale depuis sa fondation en 1968. La revue, qui se distingue par sa vocation généraliste et multidisciplinaire, publie des dossiers thématiques, des articles libres et des débats. Elle peut compter sur la contribution de chercheurs de grande renommée et valorise pleinement la publication d’articles d’étudiants aux cycles supérieurs. Publiée trois fois l'an, elle rejoint un imposant lectorat et bénéficie d’une grande visibilité. Études littéraires est indexée dans les banques de données bibliographiques de renommée mondiale, en plus d’être largement diffusée par la Société de développement des périodiques culturels québécois (SODEP), par le réseau des SUP (Sorbonne Université Presses) et par la plateforme Érudit où 98% de ses numéros sont en libre accès.
Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma de l’Université Laval
Introduction. Silences of Gender, Truths of Sex in the Nineteenth Century
The Translations of Newton’s Works in Eighteenth-Century France
All eighteenth-century scholars fell under Newton’s spell. While Madame du Châtelet is best remembered as the translator of the Principia into French, Diderot also inserted into his Mémoires a Latin text by Newton – preceded by his own French translation – together with footnotes. This article first examines the cultural and scientific context in which these revolutionary discoveries were received in France, before turning to the selected translations and their accompanying paratexts. Although not exhaustive, this investigation reveals the permeability between disciplines and points to further possible connections for future research.
From the Already Said to the Unspoken: Repetitions and Inversions in Les Demi-sexes by Jane de la Vaudère (1897)
According to the norms of the sapphic novel – which, from the libertine novels of the late eighteenth century to fin de siècle writings, developed its own set of stylistic, aesthetic, and narrative conventions – Les Demi-sexes, published in 1897 by Jane de la Vaudère, does not, at first glance, appear to depart. Yet this register of the “over-said” cannot be considered apart from what it conceals: a set of dissonances within the tightly woven narrative fabric shaped by the Decadent tradition and, above all, a complex play around plagiarism. This depth of the said and this work of reiteration-with-a-difference open a breach toward what the discourse itself denies.
Poetics of Suggestion and Sexual Subtexts of Gendered Violence in Monsieur Vénus by Rachilde (1884) and Bruges-la-Morte by Rodenbach (1892)
This article examines the sexist and sexual subtexts in two fin de siècle novels depicting femicide: Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892). Returning to the genetic development of the works, it outlines the key features of the poetics of suggestion and the suggestive at play in both novels, highlighting the hybridization of Decadent and Symbolist aesthetics. The textual analysis, in turn, reveals the paradoxical inversion of the semantic field of eroticism within the discourse of violence as a means of subverting established codes.
Failures of the Sexual Order : “Male Brutality” and Female Dissatisfaction in Selected Sandian Texts from 1832
This article examines, in the novel Indiana and the short story “La Marquise” – both written and published in 1832 by George Sand – the disruptions in the sociocultural construction of sexuality in relation to the expectations of conjugal duty in the early nineteenth century. By studying certain sexual scripts that shape identities, it identifies the ways in which Sand’s texts (un)veil sexual taboos (incontinence and male violence) and articulate female desire (and its dissatisfaction).
This Unnameable Desire: Incest as Apocalypse in the Decadent Novel (1884–1897)
The end of the nineteenth century left its mark on literary history through its taste for excess, emphasis, and transgression. In their portrayals of consensual incestuous relationships within the same family, Élémir Bourges, Rachilde, and Catulle Mendès draw on the taboo to sharpen the boundary between the licit and the illicit. While Decadence was preoccupied with staging its own demise, its literary treatment of incest shows it on the brink – aware of its self-destruction, yet equally conscious of an imminent return to order.
Metamorphosis of Genres : Misgendering the Reading in Novembre (1842) and Madame Bovary (1857)
In his 1857 interpretation, Baudelaire is the first to misgender Emma Bovary, opening the way for a reading of the play of gender inversions rarely taken seriously by literary criticism. This article therefore seeks to demonstrate, question, and unsettle the ambiguities of gender in Flaubert’s writing, positing that there is a major unspoken element in his poetics : from Novembre (1842) to Madame Bovary (1857), one can discern an ambivalent weaving of desire and identification. Postmodern in spirit and inspired by queering, this reading aims to reveal the family resemblance between the two works.
Seeing Male Homosexuality Differently: L’Autre vue by Georges Eekhoud (1904)
Although male homosexuality is never explicitly named in L’Autre vue (1904) by Belgian author Georges Eekhoud, numerous clues suggest that it is the novel’s central subject and that it can be reread from a queer perspective. Theories of the unreliable narrator reveal the presence of not one but two homosexual characters : Paridael and Bergmans. Once unmasked, the latter provides access to a militant discourse in favor of legitimizing homosexuality in the novel’s central section – Paridael’s diary – by merging two levels of reading : an explicit social and political discourse that conceals an implicit homosexual one.
When the “White Flight of Lesbians” Passes By: Writing Without Saying, or the Suggestion of Lesbianism in La Curée (1871)
While the association between naturalism and pornography predominates in the nineteenth century, addressing sexuality is a real balancing act for Zola. He even stated that he did not wish to devote a novel to homosexuality. Yet in La Curée, allusions to sapphism abound. To understand the construction of lesbianism in the work, as well as the implications of such a portrayal, this article analyzes Zola’s language, his place within the social discourse of his time, and – through a genetic study – his hesitations regarding the sexuality of his characters.
Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse’s “La chasse aux papillons”, or the Ambiguities of the Unspoken in the Female Erotic Novel (1807–1809)
Although Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse’s work – still largely overlooked by literary historians – openly explores the sexual lives of female characters, the author’s erotic novels devote considerable attention to the unspoken dimensions of female sexuality. This article examines the narrative and poetic functions of these silences, notably in Julie, ou j’ai sauvé ma rose (1807). The aim is to interrogate their literary and ideological implications to better understand the specificities of women’s erotic fiction emerging at the turn of the Enlightenment.
“So, You Are Never Ailing ?” : The Silences Surrounding Oophorectomy in Les Demi-sexes by Jane de la Vaudère (1897) and Les Florifères by Camille Pert (1898)
This article examines the unspoken dimensions surrounding oophorectomy in the novels Les Demi-sexes and Les Florifères. The female characters in these works seek, through the operation, to free themselves from purely reproductive sexuality. Drawing on discursive and narrative analysis, we show that these characters ultimately find themselves at the mercy of men who threaten to expose their secret. Even when the unspoken becomes temporarily half-spoken, then spoken within the closed circle of those who have undergone the operation, these women still suffer from this silence, reproduce it, and are themselves its product.
The Art of Satire, or the Marksman’s Aim: Notes on Baudelaire’s “Le Galant Tireur”
The prose poem “Le Galant Tireur” exemplifies the dual phenomenon – witnessed by modernity – of the satirization of poetry and the artialisation of satire. More specifically, this late composition offers the particular interest of reflecting the pragmatic “logics” that inform most of the satirical poems in Le Spleen de Paris, logics through which Baudelaire appears to have deliberately sought to address different categories of readers and to catalyze various questions related to reading. This is what we propose to demonstrate here, while also enriching the general commentary on the poem.
De l’exaltation à la métamorphose : les relations du sujet à la nature en littérature québécoise contemporaine
Les préoccupations croissantes pour l’environnement et le désir de dépasser l’anthropocentrisme poussent les auteurs contemporains à développer différentes modalités de représentation leur permettant d’exprimer des rapports sensibles aux altérités autres qu’humaines. Le sujet ne se situe plus seulement dans une relation de domination, de maîtrise ou d’observation de la nature perçue comme arrière-plan à ses actions : il est à envisager dans un rapport de co-existence, souvent de co-dépendance, avec ces altérités autres qu’humaines. Sa posture change, délaissant les schèmes verticaux de la domination pour ceux indiquant une expansion et une ouverture à la nature : extase, exaltation, désir de communion ou de fusion, voire de métamorphose. Le sujet découvre des analogies entre les différents règnes, métaphorise certains éléments, en personnifie ou en érotise d’autres. Plus encore, ce renouvellement des relations à la nature l'ancre solidement dans un espace ou un territoire concret et l’encourage à être attentif à des processus, des déplacements, des transformations qui s’inscrivent souvent dans la durée. Ces motifs déplacent les frontières entre l’humain et son environnement telles qu’elles ont été pensées dans les sociétés occidentales jusqu'ici.
Transport in L’Automne à Pékin : Bus or Nothingness ?
This paper focuses on a novel by Boris Vian, L’Automne à Pékin, whose complexity still allows for new approaches – in this case, transportation. Means of transport are omnipresent in the novelistic framework which sees a bus, an automobile, a bicycle, and an airplane, even a scale model. So are amorous transports, which will be the focus of the second part of this article, where new and relatively intimate sources will be revealed, which will be quite spectacular, after a few revelations, which are no less astonishing, concerning the enigmatic numbering of a bus and an airplane. The conclusion, open to the fictional work of Boris Vian, will try to live up to the challenge of words.
Boris Vian – Georges Delerue : Le Chevalier de Neige, Opera in Three Acts
Le Chevalier de Neige is an opera that has lost its music. The only real success by Boris Vian during his lifetime “under his own name as a sizable artistic project” (Marc Lapprand and François Roulmann, our translation), is today only known in the textual form of the libretto, which has continuously been published since 1974. This article is the result of research undertaken in public and private archives on the work and its intermediate stages. Among those, the handwritten scores by the composer Georges Delerue, to establish “the adventure of its conception” (Boris Vian, “Quelques mots sur Le Chevalier de Neige”), and to allow us to reconsider Le Chevalier de Neige such as it was conceived.
“Poethics” in Vian. Sketch of a Philosophy of International Relations
The present contribution considers the Traité de civisme and seeks to identify a certain form of internationalism in Vian’s thought. The main argument seeks to locate influences on political matters that are inseparable from both the international context and the way the debate on the Cold War was framed by the French intellectual sphere. From the study of the library of Traité de civisme, the contextualist approach offers an insight on the evolution of this internationalist thought during the period 1946-1959.
What if Boris Vian’s Poetry Was Merely a Film Effect ? : A Mediagenic Reading of Michel Gondry’s Adaptation of L’Écume des jours
This paper proposes a reflection on the film adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours by filmmaker Michel Gondry. Taking up the concept of “poetic narrative” developed by Jean-Yves Tadié, our analysis seeks to demonstrate the poetic specificities of Vian’s novel untranslatable in cinematographic terms, and especially how Gondry was able to find formal equivalences to create a new aesthetic equilibrium in his film, which remains inspired by the Vianesque style. Gondry’s mediagenic solution is essentially based on an exacerbation of ostentatious film effects, which re-mediatizes Vian’s narrative poetry within a specific filmic form.
Boris Vian 2.0 : Digital Humanities and Traces of Auctorial Plurality
2020 marks the centenary of Boris Vian’s birth, and the celebrations around this event have emphasized the ways in which the name Vian hides a multifaceted oeuvre grounded in the use of multiple signatures. The dawn of Vian’s second century also coincides with the rapidly increasing availability of digital tools and methods enabling us to approach and analyze texts in a new light, and to explore aspects of Vian’s work that had until now been entirely speculative. We propose to harness these methods to offer new avenues to shed light on the founding idea of multi-authorship in Vian’s oeuvre.
Towards a Typology of Oneiric Spaces in the Novels and Dramaturgies of Boris Vian
Because of his creative prose, Boris Vian’s work has often been analyzed in terms of nonsense and oddity, or from a poetic or stylistic viewpoint, leaving its oneiric qualities a rather unexplored avenue in the realm of Vianesque studies. Yet, Vian’s work evokes surrealist, absurdist, and fantastic movements, and reveals in the texts universes that are similar to dreamed worlds, in that they are displayed as spaces of the in-between. This article first proposes to define the notion of oneiric space, then to observe its effectiveness as well as its diversity within the plays Les Bâtisseurs d’empire (1959) and L’Équarrissage pour tous (1950) as well as the novels L’Arrache-coeur (1953) and L’Herbe rouge (1950). We will also take this opportunity to examine Vian’s work in relation to contemporary onirism theories in literary and theatrical studies, which we consider more than relevant to “rereading Vian, today”.
Elles se rendent pas compte Intertextual and Paratextual : Can One Chink Hide Another ?
Boris Vian’s work has often been described as being heavily reliant on its paratext, be it the famous inclusion of members of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés set as characters, the Affaire Vernon Sullivan or, quite simply, the larger-than-life presence of Vian the man (in his various and multiple roles) behind the text. At the same time, it is also a highly referential body of work, riddled with intertexts, some more apparent, some more carefully concealed. Drawing on the work of Ross Chambers, this article investigates the ways in which the paratext and the intertext interfere with each other in Vian’s work, to the point of merging, becoming effectively indistinguishable. Put simply, we consider how the paratext can hide the intertext, and vice versa. This game of hide-and-seek will also extend to other aspects of the text. For example, Peter Cheyney will be shown to hide James Hadley Chase, and vice versa. More importantly, this leads us to question whether Vernon Sullivan hides Boris Vian, whether Boris Vian hides Vernon Sullivan, or whether, to think along Chambers’s lines, the difference between the two is not rather a question of différance, and thus, arguably, not a difference at all.
Was Boris Vian a member of Oulipo ? Obviously, from a strict historical standpoint, this assertion sounds extravagant – if not counterfactual. As a matter of fact, Vian died in 1959 and the Ouvroir officially started its activities one year later. Yet, Queneau and his (soon-to-be Oulipians) friends took charge of the damaged writer’s ethos whose many key-elements (biographical visibility, auctorial strategies…) nearly prevented the requisites of literary posterity. After an in-depth analysis of these efforts, we will take a look at his membership to the Collège de ’Pataphysique and the obvious traces that Vian left in Oulipo’s DNA.
Lesser Arts and Bad Genres : Of which conspiracy is Mr. Boris Vian The Name ?
This article focuses on correlating Boris Vian’s work and, beyond that, his double life as an anthologist and posthumous artist, to cultural structures specific to the France of his time, starting with a new configuration of both media (written press and publishing houses) and art (Left Bank cabarets, jazz cellars, small theaters, young companies), characteristic of the post-war period. We recall at this point that one of the French cultural originalities was - and still remains today - to function as an international center of legitimization (“artification”) of the forms until then judged illegitimate – alias “bad genres” – : cinema, detective novels, science fiction, song, jazz, rock… On this ground we highlight the original role of the pataphysics’ network and refine the chronology of the kairos of Vian’s posthumous legitimization around the sequence 1963-1968 – including through a personal testimony of the author of this paper.
Ce dossier Vian aux Études littéraires effectue une mise à jour salutaire des avancées de la critique de cet écrivain, y compris sur des adaptations qui continuent de fleurir dans son oeuvre. Il ne s’agit de rien de moins que d’une nouvelle relève, dont nous ne pouvons que nous réjouir. On y découvrira d’innovantes théories de la lecture et de l’herméneutique en général : on n’a pas encore fini de lire et d’interpréter l’oeuvre de Bison Ravi. Nous ne lirons en l’occurrence ici que du neuf, tant sur le plan de l’exégèse que sur celui de documents de première main jamais auparavant utilisés. Pourrait-on même avancer que l’adaptation inattendue de L’Écume des jours au cirque démontre encore et toujours l’inépuisable vitalité de ce roman[3] ? Rappelons qu’il a déjà été adapté plusieurs fois au cinéma, à l’opéra et au théâtre. À cet égard, l’analyse du film de Michel Gondry que proposent Thomas Carrier-Lafleur et Guillaume Lavoie est tout à fait inédite, d’autant plus que le relatif insuccès de cette adaptation cinématographique n’a pas généré les études qu’on aurait pu en attendre. Et que dire de la sortie en 2020 d’On n’y échappe pas, roman policier commencé par Vian (55 feuillets manuscrits) et achevé par une demi-douzaine d’enthousiastes oulipiens ? Boris Vian serait bel et bien devenu un membre anthume de l’Oulipo, si l’on extrapole un tant soit peu la démonstration de Christophe Reig.
Fenestrology and the Bio-Poetics of Attention in the Works of Dominique Fortier and Hélène Dorion
This article examines how a bio poetics of attention—understood as the art of shaping attention toward living beings—manifests in the texts of Dominique Fortier and Hélène Dorion. It draws a parallel between the concept of attention and the figure of the window, a device that has historically served in literature to contemplate the relationship with the outside world. Although Dominique Fortier and Hélène Dorion use this motif differently, they converge on two observations: other-than-humans partake in the attentional process, and literature can be a means of reflecting on attention to the living world.
Le Lieu de l’archive (IMEC) : (Re)Writing the Archive Between Walls and Display Cases
Since the opening of its new exhibition space in 2016, the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC, France) has launched a series of exhibitions titled Le Lieu de l’archive [The Place of the Archive], where the concept of the archive is transformed into a living space for creation. This innovative approach has since allowed nine writers, artists, and philosophers to curate a carte blanche guided by the principle of « bringing a new reading, a new perspective » to the archives preserved at the Abbaye d’Ardenne. The aim of this study is to present this series and explore the personal exhibition of the archive space through narrative processes that unfold the making of the work and the creative literary gesture on walls and under display cases. Beyond these reflections on the museum space as a unique narrative environment, this paper seeks to examine the role of the writer-curator and the editorial series accompanying the exhibition cycle as a potential « curatorial » space. This involves an in-depth and comparative analysis of various case studies, including the works of Valérie Mréjen (Soustraction, 2019), Jean-Michel Alberola (Le Fleuve, 2021), and Georges Didi-Huberman (Tables de montage, 2023), as well as the publications associated with these exhibitions.
Countryside, River, Women, and Beasts in Expo Habitat (2018) and Mouron des champs (2022) by Marie-Hélène Voyer
Nature is increasingly present in literature, and this is accompanied by a rich theoretical framework, including numerous studies on landscape, such as those by Michel Collot (La Pensée-paysage) and Antonio Rodriguez (Le Paysage originel). These authors emphasize the relational dimension of landscape : as a mental representation of nature shaped by the human mind, landscape allows for the integration of humans into their environment. This horizontal dynamic also evokes Arne Naess’s ecosophy. In this article, we will examine how these ideas unfold in the work of Rimouski poet Marie-Hélène Voyer, in Expo Habitat (2018) and Mouron des champs (2022).
Reclassifying the Secondary Character in Contemporary French and Quebec Literature : A Study of Narrative and Thematic Secondariness
Focusing on the secondary character, this study seeks to illustrate the principal formal and thematic explorations involved in their foregrounding in contemporary French and Quebec literatures. Based on the distinction between narrative and thematic secondariness, the article examines the ideological and ethical stakes of these explorations and aims to identify their specifically contemporary features, especially in relation to the major realist novels of the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that the narrative and thematic strategies for recategorizing the secondary character, which characterize today’s literary production, extend – and at times radicalize – the democratic project of high realism (Lukács).
contemporary French and Quebec literature
Care Put to the Test of Heterotopic Places and Good Intentions in Les Enfants du sabbat by Anne Hébert and Soigner, aimer by Ouanessa Younsi
Les Enfants du sabbat (1975) by Anne Hébert and Soigner, aimer (2016) by Ouanessa Younsi raise the question of the effects of heterotopic spaces on human beings. More specifically, they invite us to reflect on the impact of certain places – sacred or secular – on the beings who seek refuge there, work within their confines, and are subjected to their rules, constraints, and prohibitions, and who carry out the tasks assigned to them. Despite their differences in genre and publication context, Anne Hébert’s novel and Ouanessa Younsi’s narrative draw our attention to understanding the influence of heterotopic spaces on the practice of « caring for the other » (Fabienne Brugère) and on modes of caregiving that extend beyond simple good intentions. In this analysis, I will merge the perspective of care ethics with Michel Foucault’s concept of « other spaces », often reserved for « individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm » (Michel Foucault). This will allow us to explore the triad of « care for others, female characters, and spaces of care ». We will demonstrate that care is not reducible to mere benevolence, an essentializing injunction traditionally imposed on women in Western societies ; that solicitude (affective care) and caregiving (material care or service care often linked to physical tasks) are not exclusively feminine responsibilities ; and that, in addition to their beneficial effects, caregiving practices often come with ambivalences, dead-ends, or pitfalls.
This postface presents the main conclusions and limitations of this collection, born from a sense of wonder at the recurrence of certain motifs (exaltation, fusion with the elements, eroticization of nature, metamorphosis of the subject) in Quebec literature depicting the relationships between the subject and nature. Through these topoi, the relationship between humans and other forms of life is restructured.
Of Exhilaration : An Ecofeminist Reading of Two Novels by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette
In Femme forêt (2021) and Femme fleuve (2022) by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, a narrator immerses herself in a natural environment where she experiences moments of profound exhilaration. This paper offers an ecofeminist reading of these two novels, highlighting how Barbeau Lavalette’s writing “recycles” common metaphors to give them new meanings and integrates them into a rhetoric of porosity between the subject and their environment. Additionally, she develops images of metamorphosis that show life forms transforming within their natural surroundings. By valuing the cyclicality and porosity of beings, these novels challenge biological hierarchies and call for new epistemological approaches.