Meridian Critic

This article focuses on Martha Bensley Bruère’s utopian novel Mildred Carver, USA (1919) and compares it to a well-known utopia by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. The novel, sometimes seen as a feminist revision of Bellamy’s utopia, uses some of the same strategies to shroud its radical, arguably socialist ideas and to make them appealing to a middle-class readership of the time. The article argues, however, that, while relying on some of the same devices, Bruère’s novel presents a definite change in the attitude toward women and labor as compared to Bellamy, who maintains the status quo by presenting it as a positive state of being.

In this paper, I look at the critical and utopian aspects of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. This novel, as a critical and utopian project, has lead to confusions and debates amongst Musil scholars, with a tendency to seek a proper sequence and hierarchy for the different utopian proposals and a presumed final normative conclusion. As opposed to the explorative-utopian aspect of the novel, I propose a second utopian aspect, namely a critical-utopian ethos, which is not concerned with finality, but with the conditions of possibility.

Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001), a novel set in the postindustrial era, dramatizes how the emergent nexus between technology and capitalism fashions a hyperreal socio-cultural environment, characterized by a proliferation of simulated media images. For Malik Solanka, the protagonist, such an unbounded mediascape offers an opportunity to construct an alternative reality through his art of puppetry, until he finally confronts the dystopian implications of simulated reality itself. In the light of the cultural theories of Jean Baudrillard, this essay seeks to unravel the ideological affiliations of the hyperreal world depicted in Fury.

How to define the identity - or the identities - of the contemporary political theater and where are the borders of its territory? We shall discuss the notion of political and try to rehabilitate it in a different way than as a synonym of dogmatic. Our conclusions reveal that the contemporary political theater does not reflect politics but questions it. It takes particular care to display the limits of politics - of its omnipotence or of its negation -, and to show how politics tries to eliminate the political. As a French representative of this theater, Claude Régy builds a non-dogmatic and, thus, deeply subversive theater. He carries out an esthetic revolution by changing the order of the theatral representation and particularly the relation between the speakable and the visible. Indeed, he creates utopia, heterotopia and atopia, considering theater as a possible advent of discording spaces. So doing, he allows the spectator to be in touch with the Real without reducing or controlling it. Thus, his theater belongs to this Art described by Godard when he said that “Art lets you go back and see Sodome and Gomorrhe without dying”.

From proposals by intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy or Charles Fourier, this paper will analyze the end of utopia as an existential alternative to the present moment. Specifically, the analysis will deal with the work of the Spanish poet Aurora Luque (Almería, 1962). On the other hand, assuming that poetry is an “incubator of utopias”?that is, the only possible refuge for the creation of visionary societies in the future?this paper will also be concerned with the dichotomy between the surviving hope in a utopian future and the apocalyptic feelings surrounding her poetic creation today.

By associating theatre and utopia, we are aiming both to remotivate theatre’s critical function and to reflect on the relation between theatre and utopia beyond issues related to space, looking for a new model that has the power of fiction and prospection. This four-handed text is both the chronicle of an experiment and a critical meditation, going back and forth between theory and practice, text and stage. The idea is to explore how the critical power of utopia can be used for a teaching project. This exploration, carried out during an applied dramaturgy workshop, was based on two practices: a writing workshop based on the introduction of constaints, and a stage writing workshop based on improvisation. This confrontation within a two-fold theatrical act of writing and staging highlights a series of constants, which can be used to observe what utopia does to theatre, what theatre does to utopia, and what utopia can still do to the world.

In the production of Jean-Pierre Ponelle, Puccini’s opera is faithfully re-read ; we may notice both the butterfly metaphor ­whose frail wings will be broken by Pinkerton, the “wandering Yankee,” and the star metaphor, dealt with in “triple key”: the America forever in the Pinkerton-Sharpless duet, the geisha’s dream of following her beloved some day and being accepted by his world (a dream which is recurrently hypostatised by cinematographic insertions), and the starry sky presiding over the night of love in the famous duet which closes the first act of the Puccinian opera.

The aim of the following paper is to examine the function performed by the dystopian elements as they are utilized by Tom Stoppard in his Jumpers (1986). The play has a highly intertextual status and dystopia proves to be one of the voices enriching its textual polyphony. Stoppard places the action of the play in the non-defined future under the regime of the party whose beliefs and aims are reminiscent of logical positivists. The playwright utilizes the format of the dystopia and manipulates with the convention of detective fiction to examine the possible effects the hegemony of logic might have on individuals and society. All in all, Jumper leaves both the philosophical debate and murder inquiry unresolved. In this way the play refuses to give privilege to any truth over another, embraces the multiplicity of opinions and discourses and opens the text on to experiences that neither detective fiction nor logical positivists were ready to acknowledge.

One thing Native Americans had to learn after the coming of the white man was the fact that myth could not always control history. When the tribal myth-based censorship of history ceased to function, the Native American concept of time faced its own end. Faced with boundary situations beyond the healing power of traditional literatures, the inevitable occurred: historical time prevailed over myth. Cultural response came almost immediately, as numerous tribes resorted to a recipe which functioned adequately on so many occasions: the coming of Euro-Americans began to be explained in mythical terms, as something that was supposed to happen. But this was no match for the fragile structures of individual and local systems of histories.

Assia Djebar`s literary work is a permanent mixture of individual and collective memory and identity. The novel Les Nuits de Strasbourg presents us a continuous battle of the Muslim woman with the consequences of the Independence War. This study proposes to analyze the problem of the identity quest in Assia Djebar`s novel Les Nuits de Strasbourg and the case of Thelja, the main character of the novel. Thelja is an Algerian young woman who has chosen to live in Paris and in Strasbourg, far away from her son and her husband and close to her French lover.

In this study our focus is centred upon the Acadian exodus and the relationship between central and peripheral aspects of the fascinating literature representing it. Antonine Maillet describes Acadian history in the most detailed manner, focusing on the literary quality of the ancient words. Pélagie’s trip to his country is represented in Maillet’s masterpiece like a return to his Troy in order to rebuild it. This masterpiece is also the reader’s trip, who is thus able to discover the tragic adventure of the Acadian people. Pélagie can be compared to the legendary Ulysses. The symbolic aspect is also evoked, the barrier between Life and Death being a sort of beginning and of ending, respected by the carriage of Death. Pélagie’s carriage is the carriage of life, of the rebirth of mankind. This woman is a symbol of the unlimited power which can join a people together. Broussard is the antagonistic force of Pélagie, their mission being opposed like “the earth and the water”, like “the sun and the moon”. The lesson given by the author is that everybody possesses in their heart their own land. The language used by Antonine Maillet is a savage one, she reinventing thus a whole forgotten universe, a space that requires its own place Québéc literature.

Every literary period has its clear vision upon reception materialized in a number of works that bring into discussion the very problematic of reading, while at the same time giving birth to a certain reader. This is the case of Al. Odobescu’s Pseudo-cynegeticos, one of the prominent figures of the Romanian romantic age whose preoccupation with the question of reading and the definition of a certain reader marks the passage to another literary sensibility. The purpose of this work is to reveal the game that a text like Pseudo-cynegeticos inscribes for its reader. On the one hand, the paper underlines the (re)reading of the traditional poetics that the authorial voice realizes throughout the writing exercised in the pages of Pseudo-cynegeticos, bringing its reader at the encounter with a new textual space, while on the other hand it follows the game with the three positions of reader that the text proposes. Thus at the encounter with the new textual space, the text gives birth to a Model Reader, one that is supposed to accept the values that the text proposes.

L’article se propose une analyse des fonctions et des formes de l’emploie de l’ironie dans les œuvres de Proust et de R. Musil (A la Recherche du temps perdu et, respectivement, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), à l’instar des figures fictionnelles des servantes: Françoise et Rachel. Une importance particulière acquiert le phénomène de l’ironie en passant par la notion de perspective: soit au niveau du contexte socio-culturel du début du XXe siècle, soit au niveau des perspectives ironiques abordées dans les textes romanesques et qui se concentrent surtout sur les deux personnages en observation, la question de l’optique se voit toujours mise en discussion.

This article studies images of water and its benefits in the novels of author Anne Hébert. Invested more often with evil attributes, water gets positive connotations when it becomes synonymous with life, motherhood and power regeneration. Thus, water becomes the symbol of a new beginning, which inevitably leads to death.

Translation is concerned with moral and factual truth. This reference requires definitions and illustrations of the term “translation” and of some terms related to it, like “translation studies” or “translator”. The article analyses the process of translation from various points of view, trying, at the same time, to emphasize that translating tales for children can be more difficult than translating texts for adults.

Le roman La Peau de chagrin est considéré par la critique une étude de mœurs, une peinture de la société contemporaine de Balzac. Nous essayons dans notre article de faire une analyse comparative entre l’original et quelques versions roumaines du roman mentionné, en mettant l’accent sur les référents culturels.