The French fragment

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

The Journal of Modern History, 2003

The French Revolution and the grotesque belong together like two peas in a pod – that is, if we rely on eyewitness accounts of the 1790s and their aftermath. It may come as something of a surprise how little sustained reflection this linkage has invited so far, particularly since its study can serve as a springboard for a social and cultural theory of the age of Revolutions. Those who lived through the Revolutionary era perceived their age as one of form failure, and the grotesque was the exceptionally supple, pliable medium through which these anxieties could be expressed. Since the 1790s, the grotesque turned into a site of contestation where the frontiers between the self and the other, above and below, as well as between civilization and barbarism were constantly redrawn, collapsed, and subjected to playful travesty.

Yale Journal of Law the Humanities, 2013

According to a contemporary account describing the festival of Simonneau, which took place in Paris in June of 1790, the "most curious item in the procession as a whole was a kind of shark raised aloft on the end of a pikestaff; the sea animal had its mouth open and was showing its teeth; on its body was written, 'Respect for the law'."' Later in the procession, a "sword of the law" was held aloft, and concluding the procession was a "colossal statute of the law" with an inscription reading: "Truly free men are the slaves of the law." 2 If these symbols seem rather artificial-we learn that the sea monster 433 1. This account is provided in REVOLUTIONS DE PARIS, quoted in MONA OzouF, FESTIVALS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 70 (1988). 2. Id. at 71. 3. Id. at 70. 4. JONATHAN P. RIBNER, BRoKEN TABLEis: THE CULT OF THE LAW IN FRENCH ART FROM DAVID To DELACROIX (1993). 5. Id. at 1. 6. Id.

2013

© 2 0 1 3 b y t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e b r a s k a P r e s s Nineteenth-Century French Studies http://ncfs.unl.edu is an independent journal published twice a year in two double issues. Th e pages of NCFS provide readers with the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising research fi ndings, and become better acquainted with professional developments in nineteenth-century French studies. Students and scholars of nineteenth-century French literature and culture who are interested in becoming reviewers for the journal are invited to write the editor outlining their specifi c fi elds of interest.

This study centres on classicizing portrait busts of French philosophers created during the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on Diderot's claim that a sculpture, unlike a painting, requires the viewer to communicate with it, I suggest that the portrait bust of that period should be redefined as a conceptual platform of human interaction. The main observation in this study is that portrait busts of French contemporary philosophers constituted a unique case in art because they epitomized main discourses pertaining both to the French society (as a collective idea) and to the individual. I show that such duality, wherein a collective and patriotic identity is expressed synchronically with the rise of the individual, is most acute in representations of philosophers, who sought to be perceived both as ideal figures and as enlightened individuals. In an era characterized by the flourishing of concepts such as unique self, one and only truth, and authenticity, the use of a classicizing style engendered what seems to be, at first sight, a significant conflict between opposing values. The portraits examined in this essay not only surface this idea but also offer an opportunity to reflect upon the performative role of the busts, considering the communication of the viewer with the works. Prompting a conceptual conversation, portrait busts of philosophers made during the second half of the eighteenth century are thus scrutinized here to delineate the intricate interrelations between the self and the society, between simplicity and virtue, and between the concept of 'here and now' versus eternality.

Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 2007

The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 2020

, 122 pp < https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01794385/document > is a collection of cultural and literary studies by a range of junior academics, mostly doctoral students of the Centre d'Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines, that enriches our understanding of the history of the body seen through a variety of contexts and methodological lenses. While Marie Kawthar Daouda, 'La Ver de terre amoureux du cadavre : sublimation du corps putride dans l'héritage romantique du finde-siècle' (81-92) draws insightfully on construals of the dead body in fin-de siècle literature, the essay by Marion Simonin 'Corps sensible, corps imaginaire. La poésie de Jules Supervielle et Henri Michaux' (62-70) explores from an illuminating philosophical perspective how evolving concepts of the body had an impact on Supervielle's and Michaux's poetic depiction of corporeal reality. Portraits dans la littérature: De Gustave Flaubert à Marcel Proust, ed. Julie Anselmini and Fabienne Bercegol, Garnier, 472 pp. is a collection of studies that came out of an international conference on the same topic held at Cerisy in August 2016. The essays provide a broad panorama of the relations of portraiture to French literature in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, thereby bringing under scrutiny a literary reference point that is seldom mentioned by critics or historians of literature. Of particular interest is Stéphane Chaudier, 'Proust et l'art du portrait' (53-79) which evokes P.'s uses of the literary portrait no longer with respect to its artistic equivalent but now in its own right. Paradoxically, as he argues, P.'s portraits are not what they seem from the perspective of representativity, their very ambiguity being only one of the author's many subtle devices.

re-published in a modified version as The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression in Toward the Postmodern, ed. R. Harvey and M. Roberts (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, 1993, pp. 2-11). Opposing itself to various other psychoanalytic approaches to art and literature (approaches that Lyotard criticises along the way), the paper argues that because artistic and literary works are laden with figure, which operates according to a different logic than that of language, artistic expression must be understood as having properties different from those of spoken or written commentary. Expression is thus set off from meaning, and is shown to reveal a very specific kind of truth: the trace of the primary process, free for the moment from the ordering functions of the secondary process. Its formative operations not only leave their mark on the space in which artistic works appear, but produce new, plastic, figures. Lyotard argues that the artistic impulse is the desire to see these unconscious operations, "the desire to see the desire." Attention to this function of truth and to the role of artistic space in giving the artwork its "play" brings attention back to Freud's analysis of expression in tragedy and its link to the results of his own self-analysis -and thus to the very constitution of psychoanalysis itself.