Category Archives: French literature

What did French kids read in the nineteenth century?

April 27, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Alina Ruiz

Typical title page of the Magasin d’éducation et de recreation, the era’s most popular children’s periodical.

What kind of books defined your childhood? In Canada where I’m from, it was all about Robert Munsch, but I personally also enjoyed Franklin, Horrible Harry, Goosebumps, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and of course Harry Potter. When you’re a Master’s student in literature at university, you can feel nostalgic about your childhood reading practices; mostly the fact that you didn’t feel compelled to analyse every passage until all pleasure was lost from reading! Remember when going to the library was part of the class schedule in elementary school and for literally two hours a week the librarian would read to you? Yes, you didn’t even have to read the books yourself! Those were the days!

Fast forward to 2016, and yours truly needed to find a nifty topic for her History of the Book project. I combined my nostalgia with my period of specialization and BAM! the topic ‘Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ was born. It was a good thing I’m a nineteenth century enthusiast, because as I conducted my research, I found out that Children’s literature didn’t even exist prior to this period. ‘But how is this possible,’ you ask? Surely kids were reading before then? The answer is yes – but they were reading books that were originally destined for adults! Even the Fables by Lafontaine were written for adults (if you ever get a chance to read Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he goes on quite the spiel about how inappropriate it is for children to read the Fables).

Remember this song from when you were a kid? They were teaching it in the 19th century too!

At the end of the eighteenth century, the literature available to children ranged from school books dealing with arithmetic, grammar and history, didactic short stories and dialogues written by (mostly) governesses, or whatever kids could find in their parent’s library (they took a strong liking to Robinson Crusoe). Among the literary circles of high society, it was generally accepted that children were not worth writing for. Furthermore, those authors that did write stories for children were not considered ‘real’ writers, and were often ridiculed for their incompetence or shunned from literary gatherings.

Learn about France’s heritage in this segment called ‘Vues et monuments de France’.

Two things happened in the nineteenth century that were to change the way people perceived children and writing. Firstly, the literacy rate amongst the young was skyrocketing due to the introduction of new education laws that established new schools, subsidized the costs of supplies, secularized the curriculum and introduced mandatory attendance. Children suddenly became thirsty for new books, and publishers took the opportunity to monetize on the phenomenon. This brings us to point number two: industrialization. Thanks to inventions of new presses and cheap paper, books could now be mass-produced at lower costs. A new network of railways made transporting these inexpensive books to eager children all over France much easier and sooner than later, books for children were the era’s top bestsellers.

Issue in memorial to P.-J. Hetzel, following the editor’s death.

During my research, I kept coming across the name of one specific publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Out of all the publishers specializing in children’s book, he stood out for me due to his respect, genuineness, and compassion for his audience. Remember how I said that children’s authors were perceived as ‘inferior’ to other writers? Hetzel worked very hard to change that consensus in France. As a publisher of books destined for adults as well, Hetzel commissioned some of the greatest writers of the period to write children’s stories for his first magazine: Nouveau magasin des enfants. Surely you’ve heard of George Sand, Alfred de Musset, and Balzac, but did you know that they wrote stories for children too? Yup! And it may have never happened without Hetzel’s determination to change the face of children’s literature in France.

Notice the footnotes designed to help the young readers with new vocabulary.

Hetzel was a fascinating man and I encourage you to read about his life. For the purpose of my study, I concentrated on what is arguably his greatest accomplishment as an editor: the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation. The title says it all: Hetzel wanted to create a publication that would combine practical information with entertainment. He wanted it to be a high quality project written by renowned authors and academics, and illustrated by the best artists in France. It is important to note that while children’s literature was expanding as a genre, most publishers were purely profit-driven, using the smallest fonts, the cheapest paper and certainly not spending the money to commission illustrations. But not Hetzel. He felt that children deserved better and would be more inclined to learn if you gave them quality material. The paper he used was thick and glossy. The size of his books was large in-8^o and hundreds of pictures were featured in each volume. Hetzel’s books were literally works of art.

So what could you read about in this magazine, you ask? Literally everything regarding the arts and sciences. Top academics from the nation’s most reputable schools were invited to contribute factual articles and entertaining fiction. Over the course of nearly forty years of existence, the Magasin included numerous topics including architecture, astronomy, anatomy, geography, family life, history, chemistry, folklore, charity, poetry… you name it! One thing you wouldn’t find, however, was detailed discussion about God and religion. This was demonstrative of Hetzel’s republican values, and his promotion of a secularized society long before the Ferry Laws made it common practice. Another unique aspect of this magazine was that it contained content for all reading levels, meaning that the whole family, from newborns to parents, would enjoy and benefit from it. The most successful writer Hetzel discovered was undoubtedly Jules Verne whose scientific novels first appeared in the Magasin in serials before later becoming classics in their own right. Verne was a perfect example of an author who could appeal to both younger and more mature audiences.

Typical title page of the Magasin d’éducation et de recreation, the era’s most popular children’s periodical

Short poems to teach the letters of the alphabet. Can you see the letters hidden in the pictures?

As you can probably imagine, the Magasin was an immense project that consumed Hetzel until the day he died. But why did he care so much about it? Why did he personally check every manuscript submitted and rework it until he thought it was absolutely perfect? Considering the success of the publication, he probably could have retired early and moved to some exotic, sunny place, right? Well, that was inconceivable for Hetzel. The man was a fervent republican and truly believed in the progress of humanity through literature. He saw that science and knowledge were the avenue through which people would make the world a more comfortable and just place to live in. He also saw that children, if given a good education and taught to respect and help each other, would be the ones capable of bringing real change in the world. Sounds like someone should be giving this man a peace prize!

I’m not sure about you, but to me this magazine seems pretty downright cool! Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era and fear for my own future kids who will be reading books on tablets! They will never know the joy of unwrapping a beautifully illustrated keepsake book on Christmas day (and actually being happy to receive it) or waiting by the mailbox for the next chapter of a Jules Verne novel. Or maybe you think I’m crazy and just want to surf the internet. Regardless of how you read literature, hopefully this little post has enlightened you on children and their literature in nineteenth century France. Don’t forget to let us know your favourite book from your childhood by leaving a comment!

P.S. If the Magasin d’éducation et de recreation sounds really neat to you, you may wish to check out Volume I available for free online through Google Books. While you’re at it, why not check out the Bodelian Library Special Collections website to find out what other gems of the past are hiding in the basements of Oxford.

Alina Ruiz is a postgraduate student in French at Oxford University. This post was developed from her research into the History of the Book as part of her Masters degree.

French literature

Who owns Le Petit Prince ?

February 24, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

50 francs St Ex

posted by Catriona Seth

It is one of the best-loved tales in the world, translated into more than 270 languages, and with over 150 million copies sold. First published in 1943, Le Petit Prince has been turned into musicals, films and pop-up books, spawned T-shirts, mugs, dolls and pencil-cases… Its hero figures, with pictures of a plane, a map and the writer, on the last 50 franc note issued by France before it joined the euro.

The book’s author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, was a pilot with the French Air Force (the ‘Armée de l’Air’) during his military service. He continued to fly on his return to civilian life, and worked for companies delivering mail from Toulouse to Dakar in Senegal and then within South America. He drew on his experience with the ‘Aéropostale’ in novels like Courrier Sud (1929—Southern Mail) and Vol de Nuit (1931—Night Flight)—and indeed in Le Petit Prince with its aviator-narrator who is alone in the desert. He was in the ‘Armée de l’Air’ at the start of the second world war—Pilote de Guerre (1942—Flight to Arras) is based on his memories of the period during which he earned the ‘Croix de Guerre’, a war service medal for his bravery in landing a damaged aircraft. He joined the resistance. After spending time in North America, he returned to France, via Algeria, Morocco and Sardinia, and became part of a unit charged with photographic missions to prepare detailed maps for the allied landings in the South of France (the ‘débarquement de Provence’). His unarmed plane, in which he was flying alone, went down just off Marseilles on July 31^st 1944. Though the wreckage was located and brought up to the surface at the beginning of this century, no-one knows, even now, whether it was an accident or whether the aeroplane was shot down.

Vol de Nuit

The question of who owns intellectual property (texts, tunes etc.) was raised seriously just before the French Revolution by Beaumarchais, who is most famous nowadays for two plays: his 1775 Barbier de Séville and his 1784 Mariage de Figaro, the basis for Rossini and Mozart’s operas. The Revolutionary government sought to protect the rights of creators. There were discussions over the decades about the duration of exclusive ownership and what happened after an author’s death. The law has changed over the centuries. The French distinguish two types of ‘droits d’auteur’ or authors’ rights. The ‘droit moral’ or ‘moral right’, for instance, for Saint-Exupery to be considered the author of his books, for all eternity; the ‘droit patrimonial’ of his descendants to receive revenue generated by his works for a set number of years according to legal dispositions.

In much of the world, currently, heirs to a dead author enjoy rights associated with his or her works for 50 years, after which the writings are considered to be in the public domain. In the European Union, the term is 70 years, as a result of legal harmonisation agreed upon in 1993 but only applied in France since 1997. As Saint-Exupery died in 1944, his works should have become freely available on January 1^st 2015—though they were already considered to be in the public domain in countries like India or Morocco which are not as generous in their protection of literary property rights as European law. In the U.K. or Ireland for instance, Le Petit Prince, like Vol de Nuit or Courrier Sud, has indeed been out of copyright for over a year. The same does not hold true for France. Before the EU came to an agreement regarding the time during which works would be protected, France applied a duration of 50 years post mortem but also had a special clause for those who had lived through one or other of the world wars (or both): the war years were deemed to count twice, so for ‘Saint-Ex’ as he is affectionately known, you need to add 8 years and 120 days to the 50 years everyone was granted. In addition, as Saint-Exupery was engaged in active service, he is deemed (like Apollinaire in 1918) to have died for his country—‘mort pour la France’ is the official designation—which means a 30 year gratification is granted. Result: (50+8+30) years+120 days, added to 1944, means that, as there is no retroactive application of the 70 year rule, Saint-Exupery’s texts will only come into the ‘domaine public’ in France in… April 2033.

50 francs St Ex revers (1)

Here is a brief news film (some of which is in English) about a recent adaptation of Le Petit Prince carried out with ‘la bénédiction’ (the blessing) of the Saint-Exupery family. A short series of questions follows. You may need to listen to the French voiceover two or three times before you can answer them. Answers are given first in French, then in English.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO

De quelle nationalité est Mark Osborne ?

Où se diffuse et se diffusera le film d’animation tiré du Petit Prince ?

Pourquoi Osborne avait-il d’abord refusé de travailler sur Le Petit Prince ?

Pourquoi est-il difficile d’adapter une œuvre comme Le Petit Prince ?

Quand le DVD du Petit Prince sortira-t-il en France ?

Réponses

Mark Osborne est américain.

Le film est à l’affiche au Chili et en Colombie. Il sera bientôt diffusé au Mexique.

Osborne avait refusé de travailler sur Le Petit Prince car il pensait qu’il serait difficile de rester fidèle à l’histoire

Il est difficile d’adapter une œuvre comme Le Petit Prince car chacun s’en fait une interprétation personnelle.

Le DVD sortira en France le 2 décembre.

Answers

Mark Osborne is American.

The film is being projected in Chili and Colombia. It will soon be shown in Mexico.

Osborne initially refused to work on Le Petit Prince because he thought it would be hard to remain true to the story.

It is difficult to adapt a work like Le Petit Prince because everyone has their own personal interpretation.

The DVD will be available in France from December 2^nd.

Quelques petites remarques. Un film est à l’affiche quand il est donné dans les cinémas (qu’on appelle parfois aussi les salles obscures) : les affiches devant les cinémas indiquent ce qui se joue à ce moment-là.

Le film sera diffusé à partir du 2 décembre prochain indique que le clip d’animation a probablement été réalisé peu avant le mois de décembre. Il y a donc un effet d’annonce.

French literature, Recommended Reading

Bookshelf Book Club: Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud

February 17, 2016 simonrkemp 1 Comment

livre-en-gros-caracteres-meursault-contre-enquete

posted by Simon Kemp

Last summer, Waterstones bookshops in the UK found themselves with an unlikely bestseller among their holiday beach reading. It was the English translation of the French-language debut novel of an Algerian journalist. What’s more, it was a novel that would make almost no sense to you unless you’d previously read a mid-twentieth-century French philosophical novel by a writer who’s been dead for over fifty years. The novel is Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud (translated as The Meursault Investigation), and it’s our choice for the Bookshelf book club.

The novel has caused a great kerfuffle on the French literary scene. It’s been showered with accolades and prizes, including the Prix Goncourt for the best first novel of the year. It has also earned its author an islamist death threat for its outspoken criticism of the role of religion in Algerian life since independence. If you’d like to read a novel in French from outside France, you won’t find one with more impact, culturally and politically, than this one.

Meursault, contre-enquête has a simple, brilliant idea at its heart: what if Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, perhaps the most famous French novel of the last century, was non-fiction? What if it was the autobiography of a real person called Meursault, who really did shoot an Arab man dead on the beach in the 1940s? And what if that Arab man had had a brother…?

Camus’s novel tells us almost nothing about the man Meursault kills, not even his name. Daoud’s novel starts out by setting us straight on that score, sketching a hazy portrait of the dead man through the eyes of the child his brother was, and the memory of the old man he has now become. Haroun, the narrator, starts out by condemning Meursault for leaving his murdered brother’s name out of the story. It looks a little like Daoud the author might be condemning Camus for the same omission. But if you know Camus’s work, you can see there’s already something odd going on. The set-up of Daoud’s novel, as if the reader were being button-holed by an old man in a bar to listen to his story, is the exact same premise of another of Camus’s novels, La Chute. It seems a strange kind of homage in an novel meant as an attack on its subject.

And things are indeed more complicated than they first appear. As the years go by, the ‘investigation’ stagnates, and Algeria changes around Haroun beyond all recognition, Haroun finds himself starting to resemble Meursault in unexpected ways…

This recommendation comes with a few provisos. Meursault contre-enquête, although it’s short, is quite a challenging read, in French or English, so don’t let the ‘investigation’ of the title fool you into thinking you’re in for a page-turning detective story. It’s also not scared of controversy where religion is concerned, although its thoughtful critiques are a world away from the inflammatory provocations of 2015’s most notorious novel about Islam, Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission. And thirdly, as I said at the beginning, there’s no point at all in reading it unless you read L’Etranger first. If you think you can deal with all that, though, you have a remarkable reading experience in store for you.

French literature

Renaissance Theatre in France

January 27, 2016 simonrkemp 1 Comment

posted by Lucy Rayfield

When thinking about the Renaissance, one of the first figures to
come to mind is Shakespeare. Most of us can name several of his
plays and even quote a few of his most famous lines: ‘Wherefore art
thou Romeo’, ’To be or not to be’, ’Now is the winter of our
discontent’. Sound familiar? Well, how about Robert Garnier? Jean
de la Taille? Étienne Jodelle?

Probably not. People are often surprised to learn that France also
had its Shakespeares. This is not to say, however, that French
playwrights were unimportant. Théodore de Bèze was one of the
first European authors to use theatre as a vehicle for political and
religious propaganda, with his polemical tragedy Abraham sacrifiant
(c. 1550). Figures such as Jean-Antoine de Baïf worked tirelessly to
popularise Plautine and Terentian drama in the early modern period,
producing and circulating modern translations of classical plays.
Pierre de Larivey wrote a sellout collection of comedies in 1579,
which continued to be reprinted throughout the century, and
Parisian dramatist Alexandre Hardy (c. 1569-1631), is said to have
written around six hundred plays.

Farce was a well-known genre in France even before the dawn of
the Renaissance. Le Garcon et l’Aveugle, telling the tale of a young
boy who tricks his master out of a large sum of money, was written
in the thirteenth century, at least a hundred years before the first
farce appeared in Britain. The anonymous Farce de maître Pierre
Pathelin (c. 1457), recounting the fate of a cunning lawyer, was then
the first European farce to generate widespread interest: it was
translated into several languages and published all across France
for well over two centuries. French playwrights also produced many
acclaimed mystères (portraying scenes from the Bible), moralités
(depicting a fight between good and evil), and was also renowned
for its sermon joyeux: a parody of the sermon from a Catholic mass,
narrated by a comic actor.

With the arrival in the French court of eminent Italian figures such
as Catherine de’ Medici and Ippolito d’Este, France was exposed to
neoclassical drama, which had started to be produced by Italian
humanists during the last years of the fifteenth century. This was to
be a turning point in French theatre. In 1554, the queen Catherine
de’ Medici commissioned a translation of Giangiorgio Trissino’s La
Sofonisba, which was to be the first humanist tragedy to appear in
the French language. The play encountered great success and
many French playwrights endeavoured to retranslate or to imitate it.

Catherine also sponsored the first neoclassical comedy (known as
commedia erudita) to appear in France: the Cardinal Bibbiena’s La
Calandra. This was the first time that France had seen a comedy
with a real stage, musical interludes, lavish costumes and a
professional acting troupe: it was enjoyed by thousands of
bewitched spectators and set an entirely new standard for theatre.
In fact, Catherine enjoyed the performance so much that in later
productions she often joined in the acting herself!

Later French monarchs were eager to enrich this new theatrical
tradition. King Henri II ordered the dramatist Jacques Grévin to
write La Trésorière, a widely successful comedy based on the
Italian style, and Henri’s successor, King Charles IX, was a great
supporter of the many Italian acting troupes who sought work in
France. Marguerite de Navarre, princess of France, also helped
introduce the writings of Matteo Bandello into the rest of Europe.
Bandello was to compose a novella elaborating a tragic love-story
between two young Italians, Romeo and Giulietta. Any guesses as
to what this later inspired?

In short, it is a shame to gloss over this rich theatrical past, which
formed an innovative and exciting part of sixteenth-century French
literature. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at
lucy.rayfield@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. I am always pleased to talk
about Renaissance drama!

Events and Competitions, French literature, Recommended Reading, Translation

Tolerance: Beacon of the Enlightenment

January 13, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Caroline Warman

You might have seen that in the vigils and marches that followed the Charlie Hebdo assassinations on 7 January 2015, posters of Voltaire like this one appeared everywhere, along with some of his polemical slogans about the importance of religious tolerance.

Dozens of university lecturers in France who teach Voltaire and other eighteenth-century writers, and who were all as distressed by the events and by the increasingly polarised politics that followed as anyone else, decided to put together an anthology of texts from the Enlightenment. This anthology would make available to everyone what writers of the time said about liberty, equality, and fraternity, about the importance of religious tolerance, about the rights of women, about the abomination of slavery, about the exploitation created by a system of global capitalism, and so on. It would contain the original text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrined in the French Constitution since 1789, and it would also contain the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen drawn up by Olympe de Gouges, which was roundly rejected in an atmosphere of general hilarity. Some of the extracts would be witty, some would be serious or even tragic, some might even seem objectionable to us now, but all would be arguing their point with great passion, and the collection as a whole would shine a light onto a world and a century which have many more connections with us than we would ever have thought. This anthology, entitled Tolérance: le combat des Lumières, was published in April 2015 by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle.

We in the UK wanted to support and applaud this initiative, and we wanted to extend its readership. So we decided to translate it. And we thought, who better to translate this texts than our students? They are the citizens, female and male, of today and tomorrow, they are deeply engaged in our world, and they are brilliant at languages.

At Oxford we do a lot of translation anyway – we translate about half a page of French into English, and the other way round, every week. We do that because it develops our language skills immensely – it challenges us to be linguistically inventive while never letting us off the hook in terms of grammatical accuracy and syntactical fluency. It is quite hard, but we love it, not least because we all do it together in college classes. You’d never believe how many different ways of translating a single sentence there are. Translation is also a particularly intense way of reading, because to translate something you really have to get inside the text. It’s incredibly stimulating, because you’re both reading and writing at the same time.

So, one hundred and two of us – tutors and their second-year students (who don’t have any exams) from lots of different colleges – translated the anthology this past summer term. And we published it on 7 January 2016, the first anniversary of the shootings. We launched it at the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which supported the project, and it has received some nice coverage in the press and online. On the first day it was downloaded more than 4000 times. We were amazed!

So here it is, free to download. Every single text has a link to the original French, sometimes in the original eighteenth-century edition. Have a look! Because if there’s one audience we really want to reach, it’s you! You are our future, and our future needs open-minded thinkers, and it needs linguists. Go for it!

TOLERANCE: BEACON OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

French literature, Recommended Reading

Discovering Simone de Beauvoir

July 29, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

posted by Simon Kemp

One of my favourite French writers to teach is Simone de Beauvoir, the twentieth-century writer and thinker who more or less kick-started modern feminism with her monumental essay, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex). A startling amount of what she says about the roles women are expected to play in society, in childhood, marriage and motherhood, retain a lot of truth more than sixty years on. Her analysis of how women are represented in literature, art and folk culture is eye-opening. Read it, and you’ll never watch the female characters in a Hollywood movie in quite the same way again. Some students are provoked by Beauvoir’s ideas; others are inspired. Nobody is indifferent to them.

But enough from me. The writer and comedian Nathalie Haynes is a fan of Beauvoir, and recently wrote in The Independent about her experience of discovering the writer for the first time. The full article is here, and here’s a short extract.

“I hesitated for a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new.” That’s an audacious way to begin your masterwork. And this witty, astringent tone pings throughout Beauvoir’s writing.
No wonder, when you consider who she was reading. On the second page [of Le Deuxième Sexe], Beauvoir quotes one of my favourite lines from Dorothy Parker: “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women. My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.”If I had to summarise my own feminism, it would boil down to this: women are the same thing as people. That’s it. They aren’t a weird, incomprehensible sub-group, they’re just people. This is why Freud’s ponderings on what women might want have always annoyed me: women don’t all want the same thing any more than men do. Why on earth would we? We’re not members of some bizarre cult, we’re just people. So we tend to want the same thing as some other people would want. In this particular instance, I wanted to go on reading The Second Sex, because it’s hard not to like someone who likes the same bits of Dorothy Parker as you do.

We’re so used to seeing austere photographs of Beauvoir, her eyes slightly hooded and her mouth set in a straight line, as though she was thinking high-minded thoughts about a complicated thesis. She was half a head taller than Sartre, and she had the slight stoop of a woman who didn’t want to use her height to intimidate. Why bother, when you had a brain that could crush a person without breaking a sweat? But there are a couple of pictures of her where she was caught in a less formal pose, and a smile rearranged her features. The hooded eyes crinkled with merriment and – in her later years especially – there was something joyously expectant about her. It reminds you that she was probably a lot happier than Dorothy Parker, even if Parker was funnier.

If you’re interested in discovering Beauvoir for yourself, I have three recommendations for you. Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée [Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter] is her celebrated autobiography of her childhood and adolescence, using the example of her own life to show the social and familial pressures on women to conform. If you’d prefer to try her fiction, and to start with something shorter, the title story of the collection, La Femme rompue [The Woman Destroyed] is a good place to start: it tells of what happens when a woman who’s defined herself as a wife and mother finds that neither role is needed by anybody any more. Lastly, if you want to tackle her ideas directly, the Mythes section at the end of the first volume of Le Deuxième Sexe is her take on how society’s view of what women are and how they should behave has been shaped by images, myths and stories from the Virgin Mary to D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

French literature

Literary Treasures Online

June 17, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Jessica Allen

Digital Humanities are certainly a very modern invention. They are a way of creating a copy or a version of a text, literary or otherwise, and putting this online so that it is available to a wider audience than it would be if only the physical, printed format were available. Whilst looking at a screen is no substitute for having the actual material object in front of you, it’s certainly good to be able to continue reading or researching whilst you are away from university, or to look at rare books without having to journey deep into some stacks. Browsing is also very easy and often free so readers tend to discover a few unexpected treasures along the way.
The web is home to an ever increasing number of Digital Humanities projects, so it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. As part of my year abroad I was lucky enough to intern on a Digital Humanities project in Tours, France. The Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, often known simply as the BVH, is dedicated to 16th Century French literature and provides Renaissance fans with a treasure trove of manuscripts and first edition printed books in pdf format, as well as searchable transcripts and image databases. The online database is divided into several sections, so I’m going to write about my favourite bits here:

MONLOE (MONntaigne à L’Œuvre)

Michel de Montaigne was a 16th Century French thinker whose three volumes of essais provide the basis for what we consider to be an essay today. In writing his essais, one of his main aims was to offer a portrait of a self which was constantly changing and developing. The online editions are particularly magical because the pdfs allow us to see his marginalia and additions (or his allongeails, as he called them) in their original state, so therefore the development of this self, as well as those added by his editor and fille d’alliance (adopted daughter) Marie de Gournay. The MONLOE corpus also contains books owned by Montaigne himself and sources which inspired the Essais, so it is a must for any Montaigne fan. You can access this part of the library here: http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Montaigne.asp

ReNOM Renaissance

This project focuses on the work of Renaissance writer François Rabelais, most famous for the ground-breaking collection La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, and of the poet Ronsard, the most prominent member of the Pléiade. Both writers’ texts are peppered with place names, so ReNOM provides surfers with an interactive map which allows them to browse extracts from the books whilst matching them to their real location. This is a brilliant way to make the most of a sightseeing trip and to really make literature come alive. Looking at the map shows just how geographically wide-ranging these texts are: http://renom.univ-tours.fr/fr/cartographie

There’s no better way to discover the Renaissance than by looking at authentic materials, so definitely check out the BVH. Don’t forget that there are online resources to suit all tastes, so if the Renaissance isn’t your cup of tea, perhaps try looking at Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/), which is run by the National Library of France in Paris and covers all periods of literature. Your next literary adventures are just a few clicks away…

French literature

Magneto! Gandalf! Grandet!

March 11, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

Someone at the BBC likes French literature, since they’ve barely finished their dramatization of Marie NDiaye’s Trois femmes puissantes and they’re already starting on Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Eugénie Grandet.

And this time, they have Gandalf.

Yes, Sir Ian McKellen is currently appearing as Grandet, the monstrous father to the luckless Eugénie, in a two-part radio production that you can stream (if you’re in the UK) here.

McKellen throws himself into the role with gusto (in fact, he’s just won an award for Best Actor in an Audio Drama for the performance) as the rich, miserly wine-grower who hoards his wealth while accusing his wife and daughter of turning their home into a bordello if they light too many candles in the living room. (Candles cost money, you see.) Eugénie puts up with his eccentric ways, while patiently waiting to be married off to one of the many provincial bourgeois families buzzing around her and the rumoured fortune that she’ll inherit on her father’s death. Then, cousin Charles from Paris turns up on the doorstep, hoping to move in with the family now that his father has lost all his money and, we shortly discover, his life. The prospect of another mouth to feed sends Grandet into a huge fit of grumpiness, but what he doesn’t yet know is that a much bigger problem is brewing up as the charming, handsome and sophisticated Charles catches his daughter’s eye.

Trouble lies ahead…

Eugénie Grandet is perhaps the best-loved of all Balzac’s many stories. In his prolific output and his lively storytelling he’s French literature’s closest equivalent to Charles Dickens, except that — whisper it — he’s actually better than Dickens, because all his stories take place in the same fictional universe, which means that the same characters pop up in different novels, and you can trace a single character’s life across a dozen books, now a background extra in someone else’s story, now centre-stage in their own. All Balzac’s work is available in English translation as well as in French, lots of it has been filmed (including a great version of Le Colonel Chabert with Gérard Depardieu), and it’s definitely worth your time to check some of it out.

French literature, Recommended Reading

Bookshelf Book Club: Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Strong Women) by Marie NDiaye

February 11, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

One of my very favourite French authors writing today is Marie NDiaye. Her stories of ordinary people and everyday situations heading disturbingly off-kilter are like a gradual slide from reality into anxiety dreams. (If you’re familiar with the work of the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, like the novel or film Never Let Me Go, you have some idea of what I mean).

I was planning on putting NDiaye’s La Sorcière in the book club at some point, since it’s short and accessible, funny and terrifying by turns, and has the most chilling pair of teenage girls in it that you’re ever likely to come across. I will do at some point, but since NDiaye is currently making rather a splash in the English-speaking world with a more recent novel, let’s start instead with her 2009 best-seller, Trois Femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women).

Trois Femmes puissantes won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in the year of publication, and its translation was a runner-up for the Man Booker International Prize. It’s not so much a novel as three interlinked stories. The three women of the title, Norah, Fanta and Khady Demba are connected tangentially but lead very different lives. Norah is a successful French lawyer who visits her estranged father in Senegal to find her brother accused of murdering her stepmother. Fanta’s story is seen through the eyes of her husband, haunted by another Senegalese murder and the disintegration of his marriage. And Khady Demba, glimpsed in the first story as Norah’s father’s maid, sets out in her own story to start a new life in Europe.

The plots of the three stories are less important than their atmosphere, which builds a sense of foreboding that terrible things may occur, and disorients the reader with unexplained events, such as the sudden appearance of Norah’s French family in Senegal, or hints of magic in the uncanny behaviour of birds that may or may not betray the presence of a human soul.

The particular reason for mentioning the novel now is that an adaptation of it is currently being broadcast on UK radio. BBC Radio Four has turned the book into an audio drama in two parts. If you’re based in the UK, Episode One is available to listen to here for the next four weeks, and the second and final episode will be broadcast next Sunday, and available on the iPlayer after that. I’m not entirely sure why they’ve gone for a two-part adaptation, which gives you one-and-a-half strong women per episode. If I were you, I’d reconstitute it into its three stories (each story is about 40 minutes long), and iPlayer them to yourself one by one. The adaptation is very faithful (unlike certain current BBC adaptations of great French literature we could mention…) and will give you an idea of what makes NDiaye such a major figure in contemporary French writing. It may even inspire you to seek out more of her work.

French life, French literature, Recommended Reading

Bookshelf Book Club: Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

January 21, 2015 simonrkemp 2 Comments

posted by Simon Kemp

As promised, a reading recommendation from the works of France’s newest Nobel laureate. Unusually for Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (1997) is actually non-fiction, but it reads so much like his novels that many of its early readers thought it was one.

The story begins when Modiano comes across a brief article in an old French newspaper, dated 31 December 1941, at which point France was under Nazi Occupation. The article was a plea for information about a missing girl, with a description of her appearance and the clothes she was last seen wearing. Here it is:

PARIS
ON RECHERCHE une jeune fille, Dora Bruder, 15 ans, 1 m. 55, visage ovale, yeux gris marron, manteau sport gris, pull-over bordeaux, jupe et chapeau bleu marine, chaussures sport marron. Adresser toutes indications à M. et Mme Bruder, 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris.

PARIS. A young girl, Dora Bruder, is missing, 15 years old, 1 m. 55, oval face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports coat, dark red jumper, navy blue skirt and hat, brown sports shoes. Any information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

For some of Modiano’s readers, this petite annonce was already familiar, since it had appeared in an earlier novel of his, with no indication at that point that it was a genuine newspaper article. As Modiano explains in Dora Bruder:

Je n’ai cessé d’y penser durant des mois et des mois. (…) Il me semblait que je ne parviendrais jamais à retrouver la moindre trace de Dora Bruder. Alors le manque que j’éprouvais m’a poussé à l’écriture d’un roman, Voyage de noces.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months and months. (…) I felt that I would never manage to find the slightest trace of Dora Bruder. So the lack that I was feeling pushed me into writing a novel, Honeymoon.

In returning to Dora’s story in non-fiction, Modiano isn’t simply writing her biography. Indeed, the story of the troubled Jewish girl who runs away from home, returns, and some months later is arrested, interned in Paris, and finally sent to her death in a concentration camp, has left so little mark on history that Modiano struggles to find the barest details of who she was and what she experienced.

Rather, he gives us the story of his investigation, exploring archives for mentions of her name, revisiting the places she lived to absorb their atmosphere. In the course of his research, he discovers police reports on the arrests of French Jews, desperate pleas in letters from the relatives of those taken, and letters home from the internment camps on the eve of deportation. Many of these find their way into Modiano’s book verbatim, so that at some points Modiano’s own account fades behind a collage of documents from the Occupation. And intertwined with these strands of Dora’s story, the story of Modiano’s research, and the fragments of other stories of those caught up in the Holocaust, comes one further narrative strand, which is Modiano’s own story, and the roots of his obsession in his own troubled family background. Modiano’s father, we learn, was a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust through his close association with a band of collaborationist thugs, the Rue Lauriston Gang, who at one point intercede after he has been arrested to save him from deportation to the death camps. This difficult legacy of a father who was both Jew and collaborator, victim and accomplice in the Holocaust, lies at the root of all Modiano’s writing, but rarely as clearly shown as here.

Like all Modiano’s books, Dora Bruder is short, written in simple, accessible French, and a very powerful piece of writing.You’ll find no better introduction to France’s années noires, and the uneasy memories of those years in contemporary French society. Here, to finish, is a short extract from the book, in which Modiano visits the military barracks where Dora was held with other Jewish people, before being sent to Drancy, and thence to Auschwitz:

Le boulevard était désert, ce dimanche-là, et perdu dans un silence si profond que j’entendais le bruissement des platanes. Un haut mur entoure l’ancienne caserne des Tourelles et cache les bâtiments de celle-ci. J’ai longé ce mur. Une plaque y est fixée sur laquelle j’ai lu :

ZONE MILITAIRE

DÉFENSE DE FILMER

OU DE PHOTOGRAPHIER

Je me suis dit que plus personne ne se souvenait de rien. Derrière le mur s’étendait un no man’s land, une zone de vide et d’oubli. Les vieux bâtiments des Tourelles n’avaient pas été détruits comme le pensionnat de la rue de Picpus, mais cela revenait au même.

Et pourtant, sous cette couche épaisse d’amnésie, on sentait bien quelque chose, de temps en temps, un écho lointain, étouffé, mais on aurait été incapable de dire quoi, précisément. C’était comme de se trouver au bord d’un champ magnétique, sans pendule pour en capter les ondes. Dans le doute et la mauvaise conscience, on avait affiché l’écriteau « Zone militaire. Défense de filmer ou de photographier ».

The boulevard was deserted that Sunday, and lost in such deep silence that I could hear the rustle of the plane trees. There is a high wall around the former Tourelles barracks which hides its buildings. I walked along this wall. There’s a sign on it, on which I read:

MILITARY ZONE

NO FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY

I said to myself that nobody remembers anything any more. Behind the wall stretched out a no-man’s-land, a zone of emptiness and oblivion. The old buildings of Tourelles hadn’t been destroyed like [Dora’s] boarding school in the Rue de Picpus, but it came down to the same thing.

But under this thick layer of amnesia you could still feel something now and then, a distant, stifled echo, although you couldn’t say what exactly. It was like being on the edge of a magnetic field, without a pendulum to capture its waves. In doubt and troubled conscience, they had put up the sign: “Military Zone. No Filming or Photography.”

Dora Bruder is available in French, as a paperback or e-book, or in English translation.

A blog for students and teachers of Years 11 to 13, and anyone else with an interest in Modern Foreign Languages and Cultures, written by the staff and students of Oxford University. Updated every Wednesday!