Faculté des Langues

In his 1993 novel Crossing the River, Kittitian-British novelist Caryl Phillips both pays tribute to and displaces Conrad's work to create new and sometimes ironical perspectives. This palimpsestic writing often takes on a chiasmic dimension, blurring interpretative lines and entangling the positions of the same and the other. Like Conrad's famous novella, Crossing the River forbids any easy, univocal interpretation, and the echoes of Heart of Darkness participate in the many-tongued chorus created by Caryl Phillips around the trauma of slavery which, like the halo around the kernel of horror in Heart of Darkness, "is only made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." The complex narrative structures of both works call at once for empathetic listening and critical distance from the reader, creating, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's words, "an emotion of thought."

Many critics have pointed out the ambiguities of Atonement, a postmodernist anti-nostalgic novel that brings to the fore all the traditional topoi of Englishness in order better to denounce them as sham. In Atonement, the nostalgic longing is linked to the desire of Briony (the protagonist/narrator) for a return to a state of innocence which, I will argue through a close analysis of the text and its recurring images, is as much an atoning for her crime as a longing to be at-one in a state of harmony. Literally utopian, this nostalgic longing appears as a fantasy of omnipotence by an immature ego. Yet Briony’s being born into a writer entails a facing of the other within the self, an atoning for her nostalgic bias, not by erasing it, but by acknowledging her full responsibility in it, a process the reader is also invited to go through. From a regressive quest, nostalgia thus turns into an opening to otherness and to new potentialities. The unbridgeable gap between nostalgic desire an...

Ce numéro réunit les communications données lors d'une journée d'étude organisée par le département d'études anglophones de l'Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3 et consacrée au programme de l'Agrégation d'anglais, session 2014. Couvrant les nouvelles questions mises au programme cette année en linguistique, en civilisation et en littérature, ces articles ont pour ambition tout à la fois d'aider les candidats à mieux maîtriser les questions au programme et d'ouvrir de nouvelles pistes d'étude sur ces sujets. C'est donc autour des trois grands axes du concours que s'articule le présent recueil.

Les articles réunis dans ce numéro ont, à une exception près, été donnés sous forme de communications dans le cadre d'une journée d'étude consacrée au programme de l'Agrégation d'anglais, session 2012 1. Cette journée, organisée par le département d'études anglophones de l'Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3, s'inscrit dans la continuité des précédentes proposées en 2007, 2008 et 2009 par Denis Jamet, alors responsable des concours. Les articles ici rassemblés ont pour ambition d'apporter aux candidats des compléments d'information mais aussi de nouveaux éclairages sur les questions au programme. À la visée pédagogique s'ajoute donc un désir d'ouverture sur la recherche, ces deux dimensions ne cessant de s'alimenter. Le recueil s'articule autour des trois grands axes du concours : la linguistique, la civilisation et la littérature.

« I think I've got the wrong way of looking at Life » [183] ; sur ces mots, prononcés par la narratrice de « My Last Story », se clôt le premier recueil de nouvelles de Janet Frame, The Lagoon and Other Stories. Ainsi il existerait une bonne façon de regarder la vie, la mauvaise condamnant d'emblée l'écrivain au silence ; l'écart à la norme 1 interdirait l'accès au discours. « Prendre la vie du bon côté » ne va en effet pas de soi pour Janet Frame qui, jusqu'à l'âge de trente ans, a plutôt été du mauvais côté : du côté des pauvres et des marginaux d'abord, puis du côté des malades mentaux. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas ici de prendre la vie du bon côté, mais de la regarder de la bonne façon : tout en effet est question de point de vue, et l'on perçoit bien toute l'ironie de la fin de la nouvelle où la narratrice, comme cela arrive très souvent chez Janet Frame, fait mine de reprendre à son compte les clichés, ces pensées « clefs-en mains » qui véhiculent la norme, pour mieux prendre ses distances avec elles, l'ironie venant subrepticement se glisser dans la majuscule du mot « Life ». Tout au long de la nouvelle, la narratrice s'est attachée à décliner les divers lieux communs de la littérature, thèmes ou techniques narratives, pour les récuser définitivement avec ce leitmotiv : « I'm never going to write another story », « I'm not going to write any more stories like that » [181], déclarations que l'oeuvre prolifique de Janet Frame vient fort heureusement démentir. Si la norme s'ancre dans le discours, c'est également celui-ci qui, chez Janet Frame comme chez tant d'autres écrivains, permet de l'interroger et de la subvertir. La norme est alors peut-être ce qui, au contraire, alimente le discours littéraire, notamment celui de la littérature post-coloniale à laquelle l'oeuvre de Janet Frame peut être en partie rattachée. En s'érigeant contre l'autorité de la norme, l'oeuvre de Frame,

The name of Devabodha is well-known to specialists of Mahābhārata textual traditions: author of the Jñānadīpikā or " Lamp of Knowledge " , the earliest extant commentary on the Great Epic, he has been duly referred to by the critical editors of this text along with his successors such as Vimalabodha, Arjunamiśra and Nīlakaṇṭha. Yet Devabodha remains an almost complete mystery regarding the period or the place he lived in, or even the conditions that urged him to compose a commentary. Since he commented on a version of the Mahābhārata belonging to the Northern recension and was quoted by Vimala-bodha between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he has been approximately assigned to eleventh-century Northern India or Kashmir, but till now no positive evidence has been brought forth to validate this opinion. The purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this important author by proving that, contrary to a prejudice rehearsed in every history of Indian literature, he is one and the same person with a medieval poet and dramatist called Devabodha or sometimes Devabodhi. Then follows a critical and synthetic account on what we can know about Devabodha's life and career from all the available sources.

From the eleventh century AD onwards, some Indian dramatists began to derive the plot of their plays from contemporary events, such as the military achievements of their patron, despite the prohibition of this kind of subjects by theoreticians. As the neighbouring Afghan and Turkish rulers of Ghazna and Ghūr were threatening India then, Muslim characters made their appearance in some of these historical plays, like Somadeva's Lalitavigraharāja (c. AD 1153) and Jayasiṃhasūri's Hammīramadamardana (c. AD 1227–30). Consequently, these texts constitute a counterpoint to the Persian chronicles and give us the unique opportunity of ascertaining how Muslim invaders were perceived by Indian people during the political upheavals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. The article first analyzes how Muslim characters are reviled and even demonized by means of specific dramatic languages as well as other literary devices, and then demonstrates that Muslim people were far from being the only target of this process of demonization: according to the circumstances, it was also used by devotees of Viṣṇu against Jains, Jains against followers of Śiva and even between rival sects of one and a same religion. Furthermore the plays betray a genuine acquaintance of their authors with the realities of the Islamic world. Though portraying Muslim characters in a more virulent way than Somadeva, Jayasiṃhasūri transposed foreign names into Sanskrit rather carefully and gave a faithful account of the political, military and cultural particularities of Muslim people.

Essays in Honour of Prof. Hampa Nagarajaiah's Promotion of Jain Studies, edited by Christine Chojnacki and Basile Leclère, Bengaluru: Sapna Book House (Proceedings of the international workshop "The Constitution of a Literary Legacy and the Tradition of Patronage in Jainism" organized by Christine Chojnacki and Basile Leclère at Lyon 3 University, France,  15-17 September 2016).

After his conversion to Jain faith due to the influence of his spiritual teacher the famous Śvetāmbara monk Hemacandra, the Caulukya king Kumārapāla (r. 1143-1173) ordered Jain sanctuaries to be erected throughout his dominion. This ambitious monumental programme was duly praised by Hemacandra in the concluding section of the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra. Indeed, in that work, he made Mahāvīra himself predict that Kumārapāla, “with unlimited power, will make this earth adorned with temples of the Jinas in almost every village” (translation Helen Johnson).

Many other Jain writers from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries extolled Kumārapāla as a great builder, and some of them, in order to insist on his lavish patronage, even described in detail the most impressive temples set up on his order, beginning with the great religious complexes of his capital city Aṇahillapāṭaka.

Trained as they were in the subtleties of Sanskrit and Prakrit poetics, these authors undoubtedly unleashed their imagination and pictured the temples with many conventional embellishments for the sake of their glorification. However, as shown in this paper, they also made use of technical terms which hint at a genuine knowledge about architecture and make their descriptions reliable to some extent and possibly more accurate than the theoritical ones which can be found in slightly later treatises. In sum, these poems give us an insight into the features of the Jain temples from the middle of the twelfth century all the more precious since, according to the Jain chronicles, most of them were destroyed within the years following Kumārapāla’s death.

Since they are intended to recall to their audience the pious actions of illustrious members of the Jain community from a more or less remote past, the medieval Prabandhas devote an important space to the activity of temple building as it is probably one of the most expensive donations that could be made to the community. Thus, biographies of prominent Śvetāmbara laymen such as the Caulukya king Kumārapāla or the ministers Vastupāla and Tejaḥpāla include lists of religious edifices erected or renovated at their behest. As regards the sums spent on these constructions, however, it appears that they have not received the same attention from the authors.  While there is only sparse information about funding issues in the chronicles dating back to the fourteenth century, later sources from the fifteenth century record precise amounts of money as well as other details unknown otherwise. Moreover, none of them clearly states where the money exactly came from. It might be assumed that laymen financed religious foundations with their personal wealth, but positive evidence is lacking to prove it. On the contrary, it is said in several stories of temple construction that the funds were miraculously obtained through the intercession of a deity. What can account for this supernatural motif seems to be the need of a divine sanction for the Jain sanctuaries dealt with, either because they rose to prominence at a comparatively late date or because they were located at a site claimed by other creeds. Another motivation would be to extoll the merit of the human founders of the temples inasmuch as the deities choose them on account of their good fortune and pious conduct.

One well-known and striking particularity of theatre from ancient India is that it is written in several languages, Sanskrit being assigned to male characters of higher status while men of lower status and most women speak various Prakrits specific to the stage. These artificial languages being very different from the actual vernaculars, the Prakrit lines came to be associated with Sanskrit renderings called chāyās or 'shadows' in many manuscripts and most modern editions. However, there is a great deal of uncertainty about who authored these chāyās, under which circumstances. In order to provide some clues, this paper analyses how chāyās appear in the only extant manuscript of a hitherto unpublished drama from the twelfth century, Devabodha's Satyavratarukmāṅgada. Indeed, an examination of the document reveals that the elaboration of chāyās was an ongoing process at the moment it was copied down: some Prakrit lines are totally deprived of any Sanskrit rendering, while in other places the translation is left incomplete. Besides, chāyās can be more or less integrated into the dramatic text: here, they appear in the margins, there, they stand in the body of the text immediately after the lines they translate. These variations are considered with regard to the types of Prakrit spoken by the characters and in relation with the commentarial techniques.