Kenzan, potier ermite – regard sur un artiste japonais de jadis
Yasuko Ôno-Descombes
Paris, L’Harmattan, 2011. [The work is part of a French-language interpretation of traditional Japanese art and artists.]
Who was Ogata Kenzan, the Japanese ceramist? Little known outside Japan, his name alone is enough to evoke in the Japanese public an entire body of work and an entire aesthetic universe, which, according to experts, represent the very essence of the uniquely Japanese conception of beauty in art. Kenzan liked to sign his works with his own name, followed by the words “hermit-potter”. This makes him an artist in his own right, for he was as much a scholar and calligrapher with a poet's heart as he was a potter. Born into a family of kimono merchants, first wealthy, then in decline, he sought his path in both Zen Buddhism and pottery-making. Even today, his works - both ceramics and paintings - continue to touch the hearts of local enthusiasts. This essay is one of the first attempts to present this artist and his aesthetic in French (back cover).
Quevedo et la poétique du burlesque au XVIIe siècle
Samuel Fasquel
Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2011, 404 p.
The recognition of the aesthetic and ethical value of wit in Golden Age Spain profoundly altered the forms of literary facetiousness, as well as its artistic status. As a scholarly and often erudite poetry, poetry in which we encounter the most ridiculous characters as well as mythological heroes, poetry in which facetiousness sometimes seems to compete with restrained reflection, the burlesque must surprise a reader who is invited to take up the interpretive challenge launched by the poet. The thousand detours taken to formulate the right word are as many enigmas offered to the reader's sagacity and complicity. Burlesque poets of the 17th century set themselves the task of letting the reader hear without quite saying it, of letting the reader glimpse without directly showing, of surprising by the obscenity of the line or its depth. This book sets out to establish and interpret the coherent set of procedures that constitute a true poetics in their works.
This book has been the subject of two reviews: Rodrigo Cacho Casal, Criticón, 119, 2013, p. 262-265. Juan Matas Caballero, Lectura y Signo, 7, 2012, p. 366-368.
La langue plurielle
Le bilinguisme franco-espagnol dans la littérature hispano-américaine (1890-1950)
Marcos Eymar
With a foreword by Daniel-Henri Pageaux
Paris, L’Harmattan, Recherches Amériques Latines collection, 2011.
From the end of the 19th century to the Second World War, more than a dozen Hispano-American authors of very different nationalities adopted French as their literary language, without renouncing Spanish. Starting with the symbolic domination that France exerted over young Hispano-American republicans, the author traces the main historical and literary elements that establish the existence of a truly bilingual tradition, emphasizing the authors' dual reception.
http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=34256
École et religion
Hiérarchies identitaires et égalité citoyenne en République d'Irlande
Karin Fischer
Caen, Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011, 347p.
Over the past twenty years, the Republic of Ireland has undergone a true social and cultural revolution, opening up to international influences, embarking on a process of secularization and, for a time, becoming the “Celtic Tiger”, a country of immigration (until the economic crisis that hit it from 2008 onwards). While the traditional weight of the Catholic Church explains why it is still today the main institution structuring an Irish education system founded on religious segregation, the reality of an increasingly obviously multicultural and multi-religious population explains the intensity of the political and public debate on the question of the control and management of Irish schools during the years 2000.
This book explores the links between school, culture and religion in the Republic of Ireland and their contemporary ideological, political and social implications (Christian Ireland, Republican Ireland?), which echo many European and international debates. The question of religion's place in schools is examined from the angle of human rights, particularly children's rights, and the ways in which the existing education system legitimizes discriminatory or unequal practices in matters of religion are analyzed.
Si loin si près : l’exotisme aujourd’hui
Françoise Aubès & Françoise Morcillo (editors)
Paris, éditions Klincksieck, 2011, 190p.
Exoticism, both literary and artistic, is sometimes suspected of being a mere refuge for the idealization of different civilizations, coloring foreign worlds to better deny their specificity. However, in a period of extraordinary intensification of exchanges between the various regions of the world, at a time when new relationships to the colonial past are being established and as we can speak of a “world fiction”, or even a “world republic of humanities”, exotic literature and representations have become very important and are experiencing a revival of critical interest. Indeed, it is now rare for a slightly ambitious work of fiction not to confront the question of travel and encounters with other cultures, and in the process to take an interest in images of the exotic, even if it is to combat or play with them. Through the vitality of its forms, past and contemporary, exoticism has always affirmed itself as a place of transformation for literature and the arts. This volume focuses on some of these prerogatives, both in the colonial age and in the post-colonial era. While the focus is on Hispanic and Latin American literature, other cultural areas are not overlooked, notably the Caribbean and the Far East. Exoticism is studied here in its past or contemporary forms, according to certain spaces, certain figures of dreams that once dominated representations of other cultures. Along the way, literary and aesthetic continuities are affirmed, as is the importance of Victor Segalen, who at the turn of the 19th century fixed an unfortunately unfinished program for the rehabilitation of exoticism, opening the way to an “aesthetics of the Diverse”. It is this exotic complexity, stripped of ordinary tourist clichés and prejudices, that the contributions in this volume invite us to consider in some remarkable literary texts. (back cover: Jean-Marc Moura)
Texts by: Émilia Ndiaye, Clotilde Jacquelard, Yasuko-Ôno-Descombes, Françoise Aubès, Paloma Moreno Diaz, Marie-Thérèse Richard Hernandez, Valentina González, Daniel-Henri Pageaux, Yohan Haquin, Thomas Barège, Françoise Morcillo, Marie-Claire Zimmermann.
https://www.klincksieck.com/livre/2622-si-loin-si-pres-l-exotisme-aujourd-hui
