Search

An essay is presented concerning French poet and writer René Char's wartime journal titled "Feuillets d'Hypnos" in France. It examines how Char's journal featured opposition against the rapid and postwar repression of memory in the country, and demonstrated how forgetting extends to the act of writing. It discusses the journal's two forms of forgetting and how Char's writing denotes the continuation of past being into the present.

In this article the author explores the polytextual songs of the Medieval French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut in an attempt to examine the relations between music and verbal meaning. She focuses on polyphonic songs that align several texts for simultaneous delivery to examine the potential importance of the dimension of performance. She also presents musical notations of several songs composed by Guillaume.

The article examines the poetry of French poet Aimé Césaire. Césaire's own belief that much of his poetry was related to his feelings of cultural displacement as a resident of Martinique, a French colony which was politically integrated into France, is discussed. A translation is presented of Césaire's poem "Parcours," written in the late 1980s, and analyzed in terms of Césaire's thoughts on the meaning of poetry and his life as a poet. The author presents personal reminiscences of her experiences with Césaire and a poem of her own composition on the experience of reading his poetry.

The article examines a political controversy in France over the burial of poet Aimé Césaire after his death on April 17, 2008. The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy wished to have Césaire's remains placed in the Panthéon, the national monument in Paris, France in which many of the country's celebrated historical figures are buried. This plan was strongly resisted by the residents of Martinique, the island in the West Indies of which Césaire was a native and had resided for over 60 years prior to his death. Césaire was eventually buried in Fort-de-France, Martinique, and was given a French state funeral, one of only four French authors so honored. The presence of both Sarkozy and members of the opposition French Socialist party at the funeral is considered in terms of the political dispute in France over the country's colonialist past. Martinique's status as a part of France proper is discussed.

The article examines the decision by French poet Aimé Césaire to resign his membership in the French Communist Party, which he did on October, 23, 1956 in a letter to party leader Maurice Thorez. Friends of Césaire from the period are cited to support the contention that Césaire's resignation came after at least several years of increased alienation from the party. Examples are presented of occasions when Césaire, when still a party member, refused to follow the party's policies on cultural issues, particularly those relating to poetry. Césaire's belief that Communism did not account for the cultural effects of colonialism on native peoples is examined. Césaire's political career in his native Martinique, where he was a legislator and public officer, in the immediate aftermath of his resignation is discussed.

An interview conducted in 1982 is presented with poet Aimé Césaire, who was also a legislator and public officer in his native Martinique. Césaire states that economic development in Martinique will remain almost impossible so long as it is a department of France rather than an independent country, as it is a developing entity integrated into a developed country. Césaire says that the policies of then-President Francois Mitterand may ameliorate economic and social problems in Martinique.

The article discusses the poetry of French poet Aimé Césaire. Césaire's relationship with his friend and fellow black poet Léopold Sédar Senghor is examined in terms of the two men's shared poetic theme of emancipation from the cultural policy of assimilation within France's colonies. Césaire's influence on African poets in the period immediately before and after national independence for most African countries in the 1960s, including David Diop, is considered. Césaire's influence on Caribbean intellectual life, both in his native Martinique and elsewhere, is examined. It is posited that Césaire's poetry was a significant factor in the work of social theorist Frantz Fanon.

The article focuses on the attempt of 19th century German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine to preserve "barbarie native" in the French culture through his works instead of civilized French elegance. The preface of the French translated version of Heine's "Reisebilder" presents this message. The French stereotypes were lampooned by this self-characterization. Heine's translation policy was inseparably joined with the progressive socio-political views. Heine and his texts had a significant function within French culture and society. The French translated version "Reisebilder. Tableaux de voyage," was part of a bigger reformist movement in France itself. Most reviewers and critics of the preface were positive either about the approach to translation described in the preface or the resultant French text.

The article presents information about poet George Oppen. Oppen was the author of a slim volume of poems entitled "Discrete Series," published back in 1934. Few of Oppen's contemporaries, however, would remember him now as a poet. Making an early escape from his wealthy background, Oppen and his wife spent an idyllic period hitchhiking around America, and then moved to France where they set up a press to print the work of Pound and the original group of poets who came to be known as the Objectivists, and who included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikof and Louis Zukofsky.

The synesthetic quality of timbre—referring to the "color" of an instrument or voice—held special appeal for French symbolist poets in the years before 1900. This essay explores the writings of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, as well as those of their younger disciples, to ponder the meaning of timbre, and what it might have to say about the "music" of French poetry. If the concept of timbre encourages us to hear a different kind of music in the poem, it also encourages us to rethink song. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the poetic music produced by French composers of the same generation, in the form of mute and expressionless mélodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the existence of at least twenty women poets who lived in southern France from about the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century. Their participation in the highly conventionalized poetic system created by the troubadours; Trobairitz; Tensos (debate poems) and cansos; Domna, possibly the Comtessa de Dia; Castelloza; More.

This article examines the failure of French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire to recognize in Edouard Manet the painter of modern life so fervently hopes for in the last sentences of the Salon of 1845. In the Salon of 1846 Baudelaire sees in Eugene Delacroix the leader of the modern school and equates modern art to Romanticism. Yet he ends that same Salon with a strong appeal for a different kind of art, rooted in modern times, in a way that the art of Delacroix was not, for though his art was modern in sensibility, it was not in subject-matter. The strictures of Baudelaire on the decadence of modern art are a continuing theme in his criticism from 1846 onwards and the point about decrepitude serves to set Manet in the context of a more or less universal decline. One assumption is that the fixation of Baudelaire with Delacroix made him oblivious to the greatness of other modern artists. There must have been much in the painting of Manet which Baudelaire would have disliked or by which he would have been puzzled or left cold, the lack of drama and of social or psychological depth in La Musique aux Tuileries, in which objects are foregrounded and take on as much importance as the figures who in spite of their prestige, appear as a decoration on an equal footing with the objects.

This article discusses the literary works of French poet Jean Lemaire de Belges. It is a prime characteristic of his works that pairs of opposites or complements are set up in order to dramatize the interplay and coordination of their basal cultural attributes. Throughout the extensive reach of the most ambitious prose text of Lemaire, an eventual genealogy of mankind with Troy and Gaul as bookends was not the only thing witnessed but also a coordination through myth of poetry and history, of appearance and reality, divine and mundane attributes, the three moments of time, parts of the body politic, and so on. In other words, the quasi-allegorical moral, political, poetic, historical and mythic dimensions in the liber mundi. Hence, the design of the work has much more in common with the architectonic of the Aeneid than with the Homeric poems. It is equally apparent that the anticipated wedding of differences in the final pages of the works of Lemaire are their least engaging feature and that the true lesson is to be found in the play of countercurrents and competing principles that crosshatch each text.

The article presents views of the author on the works of Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Pushkin and Dostoyevsky make an unlikely combination, and it is difficult to see how in 1861 Dostoyevsky could have claimed that he saw in Pushkin a corroboration of all his thought. As artists and as individuals the two were poles apart. Pushkin was an aristocratic man of letters, temperamentally if not chronologically an eighteenth-century litterateur, whose writing, in its elegance, precision, and polish, reflects the conviction that art, if it is not well executed, is nothing at all. Dostoyevsky on the other hand was a nineteenth-century middle-class intellectual whose art often served an aim outside itself and for whom the idea conveyed by a work could justify that work's inelegance. Pushkin was the product of an established aristocratic society, the cultural roots of which went back much further than the eighteenth century when they were imported ready-made from France. Socially too he was secure and established in his 600-year-old lineage.

The article discusses the role of poet Aimé Césaire in the black community of Paris, France and his influence on that community even after he left Paris in 1939 to return to his native Martinique. Césaire is considered one of the founders of the négritude movement among blacks in Paris in the 1920s, a racial identity movement for a community which included black immigrants from the French West Indies, the U.S., and France's colonies in Africa. Césaire's subsequent career as a legislator for Martinique in France's National Assembly is said to reflect the emergence of Paris as a center for black culture from all parts of the world.

The article offers information on poet Enrique Fidel Verástegui Peláez. It states Pelaez published his first book of poems "En los extramuros del mundo," while studying Economics and Business Administration at the University of San Marcos in Lima. It states in 1976 Pelaez traveled and studied in Spain and France, with the support of Guggenheim Fellowship. Other poetry books of Pelaez includes "El motor del deseo," and "Yachay hanay."