Intercâmbio: Revue d’Études Françaises=French Studies Journal

Editorial

2025-02-26T10:25:16+00:00

Silvia Baron Supervielle

2025-02-26T10:29:18+00:00

If there is one theme that provides Silvia Baron Supervielle’s poetry with a solid grounding in both the imagination and the materiality of discourse, and whose analysis allows us at the same time to highlight the metapoetic dimension of this work, this is specifically silence; not as absence of noise, but as absence of speech. Whether it appears as the place of the poem (the blank page), as an inner space, or as a distant place, silence is often represented spatially. This article explores the modalities of this spatialization of silence.

Les Textes liminaires des différentes régions du Ciel

2025-02-26T10:33:13+00:00

In the most recent texts of Les différentes régions du ciel, Christian Bobin refers to the search for silence that marks all his writings and is constitutive of his poetics. The aim of this study, based on Bobin's selected works, is to offer an analysis of the place of literature in the experience of silence. It seeks to identify the literary processes involved in the search for silence, to define the different types of silence through which the author presents his texts, and to expose the transformative powers he attributes to them.

Déploiement d'un silence rhizomatique dans quand je ne dis rien je pense encore de Camille Readman-Prud'Homme

2025-02-26T10:39:16+00:00

In her poetry book Quand je ne dis rien je pense encore, Camille Readman-Prud’homme shows us the other side of the story: what is manifested in the walls of silence and what is erased when it is broken. This article examines, on the one hand, how the absence of speaking leads to the deployment of heterotopic spaces (Foucault, 2004) allowing the subject to map in a heterogeneous cartography her memories, her encounters and her questions. On the other hand, it analyzes the lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) traced by the voice, leaving in a non-linear way this multiple place that is the imaginary. These lines highlight the incompleteness of things, while granting the poetic subject the possibility of defining herself.

Nel blu

2025-02-26T11:06:31+00:00

This article aims to analyse the connection between contemporary dance, poetry, and sound. The contemporary dance solo Nel Blu by Valentina Citterio illustrates this fusion by drawing inspiration from the poetic work of Dominique Fourcade to create a choreography where the poetic breath is translated into dance movements. Musical composition and silence play a fundamental role, structuring movements and allowing the body to express itself. Breath connects these arts, creating a space where silence, movement, and artistic creation coexist.

De l’indicible et de l’ineffable ou les voix du silence dans l’écriture de Benfodil et de Toumi

2025-02-26T11:24:55+00:00

The French-speaking Algerian writers Mustapha Benfodil and Samir Toumi have two different approaches to silence: one explores the abundance and exuberance of language, the other cultivates the aesthetic’s minimalism. In Bodywriting, two voices echo and resonate through an effervescent language that reveals the anguish and trauma of the main character, the writer Fatimi, as well as the pain and impossible mourning of his widow Mounia. In L’effacement, Toumi describes a nameless character who sees himself without reflection on his 44th birthday. We intend to study the writing strategies of Benfodil and Toumi, who seem to elaborate a poetics of silence ranging from the unspeakable to the ineffable, from profusion to mutism in the face of unspoken history and memory to suggest a “voice coming from elsewhere” inviting us to “watch in silence”.

Le Silence du Président ou le Dialogisme en Péril dans Monsieur le Président de Hamid Skif

2025-02-26T12:59:20+00:00

In his epistolary novel, Monsieur le Président, the Algerian writer Hamid Skif paints a black picture of the political situation in Algeria marked by censorship and a breakdown of communication between the rulers and the ruled. The main character attempts to exercise his right to free expression through letter writing: he writes forty letters to the president, all of which go unanswered. We will analyze the president’s silence by deconstructing the subversion of epistolary writing codes, the dialogism that permeates this exchange—despite being nonexistent—between a talkative sender and a taciturn recipient. Then, we will interpret this political silence in light of the philosophy of the absurd.

Silences des Pères Chez Faïza Guène et Alice Zeniter

2025-02-26T13:04:51+00:00

Born in the mid-1980s, Faïza Guène and Alice Zeniter are two writers with very different backgrounds. One was born in the Paris suburb of Pantin and became an early public darling thanks to her writings in the language of the streets, while the other, the granddaughter of a Harki, is the heiress of an unspeakable H/history. Mental illness (Du rêve pour les oufs) or resignation from the role of father and head of the family (Un homme, ça ne pleure pas and Kiffe kiffe demain), these are two situations in which Guène's patriarchal characters are rendered mute. In Zeniter's novel L'art de perdre, a painful secret past, impossible to unravel and pass on is the trigger for mutism among the father-characters. In our contribution, we propose to analyze these declensions of silence in the novels of the corpus, their – always damaging – impact on family relationships and the “collision” of non-communication on the identity development of the characters’ descendants.

Génocide des Tutsi

2025-02-26T13:09:26+00:00

In three months, from April 7 to July 17, 1994, nearly a million Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, were massacred. Survivors of mass crimes are often subjected to an intolerable injunction to silence. In Rwanda, in 2001, some 750 gacaca inspired by the old village assemblies were set up to try all the alleged perpetrators of the genocide. But do victims and witnesses, accomplices and culprits dare to speak? Two Belgian and French-speaking novelists were able to overcome the astonishment and break this silence. But how do you write to overcome shame and horror? Monique Bernier, with Le Silence des Collines (2001), and Dominique Celis, with Ainsi pleurent nos hommes (2022), embark on a story of the genocide, between testimony and novel, between raw language and “literarisation”, two decades apart. By analyzing and comparing the texts of these two women, by confronting them with real events, by trying to understand why and how each succeeds in breaking the silence and what all the silences they evoke mean, we try to show that the two novelists are in chorus to do justice to the victims and, perhaps, to make Rwandans "move on", in a way that is specific to the female gender.

Lutter contre le silence

2025-02-26T13:12:54+00:00

This paper focuses on the thematization and functions of silence in Marie Darrieussecq's 2013 novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes. In a narrative about the development and filming of a cinematic production of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, the ambivalent love affair between a white actress and a black director brings to light issues regarding the possibility of speech and constrained silence. Power issues related to gender and race are constantly intertwined, raising questions that were already present in Conrad's novel, which is here rewritten and rethought, giving a voice to female characters who were largely devoid of the right to speak.

Écrire, raconter, redonner voix

2025-02-26T13:22:08+00:00

Hélène Frappat in Le Gaslighting, Elise Turcotte in L’Apparition du chevreuil and Stéphanie Dupays in Un puma dans le coeur intend to analyze the mechanisms that permit to make women and their words vanish from the intimate and public spheres, but they also work to reintroduce them into the democratic conversation. Indeed, this lack of words is first and foremost a political question which these three books tackle. What is at stake here is the capacity of literature to give again a voice to those that have been deprived of it, to fight against a unique narrative and to offer other ones that are more likely to drive to emancipation.

Texte complet

2025-02-26T13:27:17+00:00