Abstract: In 1939, following the Nationalist capture of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, a wave of over 450,000 refugees fled to southern France. Among them was Montserrat Monclus Arjona: the mother whose coming-of-age story Lydie Salvayre fictionalizes in her 2014 novel Pas pleurer . Salvayre pieces together her mother's experience of the war using numerous narrative voices—at times difficult to separate and identify—as well as a French-Spanish hybrid language she calls "fragnol." Though the narrative deals more with the war and its fragmented politics than with Montse's migration, the latter comes out constantly through these stylistic choices: indeed, Montse's one-way geographical border crossing gives way to, and is mirrored by, the continuous crossing of more fluid linguistic and narrative borders. This article uses the motif of translation, from its linguistic connotations to its looser application in the sociocultural sphere, to analyze Salvayre's representation of her main character's exile and its aftermath. With its ubiquitous multilingualism and polyphonic narrative structure, Pas pleurer is a text that embodies plurality and in-betweenness, providing salient parallels to conceptions of translation as an intermediary yet generative phenomenon, one that bridges supposedly fixed boundaries between languages and cultures to give way to new, hybrid ones. Drawing upon thinkers including Walter Benjamin, who speaks of the mutually constitutive, "pure" language stemming from translation, and Homi Bhabha, whose concept of "cultural translation" focuses on hybridity rather than a unilateral shift between poles, will help us to read Salvayre's characters' idiosyncratic language and narration as a translational process.

Abstract: In Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière , the narrator's voyeuristic act of undressing Albertine in a bid to decipher her becomes a manifestation of his suspicions and anxieties about her fidelity and sexuality. Despite being laid bare, Albertine's body is resistant to easy interpretation, repelling the narrator's attempts to read her like a text. Her breasts and genitals, once exposed, defy categorization and understanding, leaving the narrator at a loss. It is only when she turns, revealing specific physical features like her hooked-nose and the bend of her leg, that the narrator seizes upon these details as potential clues to deciphering her body. He likens Albertine's hooked nose to espionage, an observation influenced by fin-de-siècle anti-Semitic propaganda, and the bend of her leg which resembles a swan's neck is correlated with mythological and biblical allusions. These seemingly disparate connections point to the fact that the narrator fears ascertaining most: Albertine has sexual relations with other women. They also point to a quintessentially Proustian logic in which associations, even if misattributed, serve as the condition (though not necessarily the cause) for a given discovery or revelation.

Abstract: Robert Guédiguian's cinema comes across, on several levels, as a practice of solidarity. His works have been built on a close and unusually stable cinematographic community over decades. This social practice of filming is connected with a content-related political orientation that can be understood as having a Marxist foundation. If one defines friendship as the practice of living in solidarity, which connects familial bonds to their living environment and the world, then the two tendencies of a local and collective-historical exploration of friendship observed here can undoubtedly be noted in Guédiguian's work, which spans five decades. Looking at Guédiguian's oeuvre, it is striking that friendship is not only closely linked to a political understanding of the world but also to the Mediterranean region. As the son of an Armenian father and a German mother, themes of historical exile and contemporary migration from the Mediterranean play an important role in many of his Marseille films. Against this background, I contend that Guédiguian's cinema not only negotiates social practices of friendship and solidarity, it also brokers notions of belonging to the Mediterranean region. In this article I will elucidate Guédiguian's understanding of Mediterranean friendship. To this end so, I will focus on the unusually optimistic and playful film, À l'attaque! (2000), which has been often overlooked internationally. This film negotiates Mediterranean friendship as a solidary, sensual principle of life—not through a spatial opening of l'Estaque but in the form of a conte, in other words, through numerous transmedial references.

Abstract: With L'art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter and La guerre, la guerre, la guerre (2020) by Leïla Slimani, this article examines two contemporary novels in which a trans-Mediterranean space of memory is created in different ways. In particular, it discusses the extent to which this Mediterranean space of memory is significant in a narratological sense against the background of the question of the narratability of memories implicitly and explicitly raised in the two novels. Although the two works are based on very different spatial poetics, the narrated space is of particular importance for both. This significance arises from the fact that the space reflects the mnemonic structure underlying each novel. For Leïla Slimani, the Mediterranean represents a kind of blind spot, as the story at best circles around it, but never explicitly describes it. On a structural level, the directness of the narrative serves as an equivalent to this "empty" center: it is not staged as a mnemonic search for traces, but rather produces the narrated past in its supposed immediacy and presence. In contrast, Alice Zeniter's Méditerranée functions as a space of movement whose elementary components are revealed in the characters' continuous physical and mental journeys from one side to the other. Accordingly, the movement of the narrative itself becomes clear in the traverses set in motion by the characters in the space of movement of the sea, which are traced by the multitude of crossings.

Résumé: Les tableaux descriptifs et les récits de voyage des écrivains de ces deux ouvrages citent très souvent la mer Méditerranée. Ces renvois constituent un fil rouge caractérisé par une manière commune de regarder la mer. Ils offrent une approche de la Méditerranée sans bornes : cette mer apparaît comme un lieu sans frontières spatiales, temporelles et mentales. Les descriptions de la mer Tyrrhénienne, Ionienne et Adriatique présentent des caractéristiques communes ; de plus, l'observation de la mer et/ou l'allusion à la mer fournit aux auteurs l'occasion de songer au passé dans une optique historique et mythologique voire réelle et imaginaire. La mer dans ces textes est ainsi à la fois un lieu du paysage entourant la plume de l'auteur et un lieu créé par la plume poétique autrement dit une source créant des paysages mentaux si ce n'est une mer-mère de merveilles.

Abstract: The Algerian writer Y.B. (Yassir Benmiloud) originally established himself as a satirical journalist and critic of the Algerian regime before publishing his first novel, L'Explication , from exile in Paris in 1999. Although it was met with a relative lack of critical attention, reserved more for his third novel Allah Superstar (2003), which examines the place of Muslims in post 9/11 France, L'Explication is a dynamic reimagining of noir that "others" the classically Western genre. While respecting many of the tropes of detective and noir fiction, including the gradual unveiling of the criminals and their motives for murder, an investigator-focused narrative, temporal doubling, and sassy one-liners, L'Explication deviates from reader expectations with its autobiographical elements, hybridity, and its refusal to provide a rational resolution to the investigation. The novel is imbued with a Sufi mystical structure and ideology that exist uncomfortably alongside, and call into question, French rationalism, the underpinning of a classical detective story. Y.B.'s criminal investigation proceeds along unexpected lines to become an esoteric interpretation of the history of Islam in North Africa and the rise of Algeria's cabinet noir during the 1990s civil war. This article will show that L'Explication is at once a detective novel and a parody of both that genre and of Islamic exegesis. The parodic elements allow Y.B. to circumvent censure, while offering an indirect means of giving voice to national trauma as he endeavors to explain the seemingly inexplicable Algerian civil war.

Abstract: The history of the reception of Foucault in China (1989-2019) is part of the process of China's reconstructing of its academic tradition after the reform and opening-up, when the control of Marxist ideology was loosened and when Western modern thought flowed into the Chinese academic community in large quantities. The Foucauldian reception can be best understood not so much in relation to previous domestic Marxist or conservative discourses, but in its competition with the thought of other Western thinkers who were introduced around the same time, such as Marin Heidegger, Max Weber, and Leo Strauss. This article studies on the one hand the broad influence of Heidegger in Philosophy, Weber in social theory and Strauss in political philosophy since the 1980s, and on the other hand how Foucault's reception has to be situated and viewed in relation to the reception of these other thinkers, negotiating its position and image in a competition that involves not only several disciplines of social sciences but also changing political positions such as the New Left, liberalism and culture conservatism in the history of China in the past forty years.

Abstract: In the late 1930s, literary critic Albert Béguin traced the poetics of Symbolism and Surrealism back to German Romanticism, in his influential doctoral dissertation L'Âme romantique et le rêve. Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française (1937). The understanding of poetry as a genuine means to acquire knowledge, as developed by the German Romantics, proved extremely influential in French poetics from the 19th century onwards. The central thread of this approach is its 'revelationism', i.e. the idea that the artwork does not merely copy exterior reality, but reveals its hidden sense. Due to the popularity of Béguin's work, and because of certain biographical details, it is interesting to examine the influence his doctoral dissertation had on French 1940s-1950s ontological film theory. The way in which, most eminently, the film critic André Bazin, yet also the filmmaker Robert Bresson, understood cinema has much in common with the revelationist poetics of German Romanticism. Furthermore, Béguin's review of Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) established an influential 'symbolist' reading of the filmmaker's oeuvre. This reading was not only adopted by Bazin, but seems to have left its mark on Bresson, too. The scope of this transfer can be better grasped by situating this movement within the legacy of German Romanticism.