C. Bourne-Taylor, S.-L. Cooper (dir.), Variations on the Ethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French

Compte rendu publié dans Acta Fabula (avril 2022, vol. 23, n°4) : "Dire, écrire, figurer le deuil : esthétique & éthique", par Denise Ginfray.

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Carole Bourne-Taylor, Sara-Louise Cooper (dir.),

Variations on the Ethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French

[Variations sur le deuil et ses enjeux éthiques dans la littérature moderne et contemporaine de langue française]

Coll. Modern French Identities

Oxford, Peter Lang, September 2021

334 p. — ISBN 978-1-78997-273-3 — £42

How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation-state? Essays on texts from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning contests the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance.

Table of contents

Dominique Rabaté - Préface ix

Dominique Rabaté: Translation by Stephen Romer

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xv

Carole Bourne- Taylor - Introduction 1
 

Part I Unmournable Revolutions

Benjamin Thurston - Impossible Mourning: Funeral Orations for Louis XVI (1814– 1815) 57
Rachel Benoît - Unmourned Histories in Gustave Flaubert’s
L’Éducation sentimentale 85

Part II Inconsolable (Af)filiations

Jennifer Rushworth - The Rhythm of Mourning in Proust (with Barthes and Derrida) 109Henriette Korthals Altes -

Mourning their Mothers: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and the Gift of Tears 129

Khalid Lyamlahy - With Barthes and Derrida in ‘the Margins of a Funereal Song’:

The Poetics of Maternal Mourning in the Work of Abdelkébir Khatibi 153

Sara- Louise Cooper - ‘Mourning the Mother, Mourning the World:
Patrick Chamoiseau’s La Matière de l’absence’ 183

Part III Poéthique: Between New Elegy and Anti- Elegy

Ariane Mildenberg - ‘The Door Pushed Back the Light’: On a Phenomenology of Mourning in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Roubaud 205

Daisy Sainsbury - The Ends and Beginnings of Language in Valérie Rouzeau’s
Pas revoir 227

Carole Bourne- Taylor - Poethic Justice: Re- incarnations in Emmanuel Merle’s Poetry 249

Sara- Louise Cooper - Conclusion: Mourning in Motion from Ireland to the Caribbean 271
Notes on Contributors 287
Index 291