About the Journal
Hosted by the Bucharest University Press, Revista Cercurilor studenţeşti ale Departamentului de Limba şi Literatura Franceză (RCSDLLF) – ‘The French Department’s Student Research Group Journal’ – is a yearly publication of the French Language and Literature Department (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest), founded in 2012 and opened to contributors among the students of all 3 education degrees the Department provides (bachelor’s degree – licence, master’s degree and doctorate). The journal gathers the best papers authored by members of the Department’s five student scientific research groups: French Literature, Culture and Civilization; French theoretical and applied linguistics; ContrasTER (Contrastive analysis, specialized translations and terminology), CENTRAL (literary translations), and The extreme contemporary literature: the Prix Goncourt. Selections by Romanian Students (a research group organized around the works of the Bucharest Jury that designates the Romanian laureate of the Prix Goncourt, an international cultural event the French Language and Literature Department is part of since 2013). Other contributions presented by our students in all kinds of national or international scientific events are also included. Each contribution is validated by an expert who officially endorses its coordination as well as by a prestigious international scientific committee.
During the past years, RCSDLLF – a unique undertaking in student scientific research on the international level – set rather high standards of excellence for the youngest generation of true researchers, and it was recognized as such not only in Romania, but also abroad. In effect, the journal gained more and more international visibility due to the direct involvement of the French Language and Literature Department, through some elite student teams, in the Jury for the Goncourt Prize. Since 2017, the journal is also open to contributors from other French departments in Romanian universities.
RCSDLLF is a special presence in the landscape of Romanian humanities journals due to the young age of both its authors and of its target audience (bachelor’s degree students, master students or doctoral students). While still very young (most of them just earned their bachelor’s degree), the authors exhibit exceptionally mature analytical and hermeneutical skills, and their papers set genuinely top standards in scientific research that benefit all their colleagues (the main readership of the journal).
All contributions are written in French.
Current Issue
The journal gathers the best papers authored by members of the Department’s five student scientific research groups: French Literature, Culture and Civilization; French theoretical and applied linguistics; ContrasTER (Contrastive analysis, specialized translations and terminology), CENTRAL (literary translations), and The extreme contemporary literature: the Prix Goncourt. Selections by Romanian Students (a research group organized around the works of the Bucharest Jury that designates the Romanian laureate of the Prix Goncourt, an international cultural event the French Language and Literature Department is part of since 2013). Other contributions presented by our students in all kinds of national or international scientific events are also included. Each contribution is validated by an expert who officially endorses its coordination as well as by a prestigious international scientific committee.
Full Issue
Articles
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L’écriture du corps malade ou un royaume pour ma mémoire : le personnage Cioran de Matéi Visniec
Abstract
This article aims to analyse and to comprehend the complexity of a fictionalized character such as Emil Cioran in Visniec’s play, A Paris attic overlooking death, now, an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s, on the edge of death, having to endure not only his memory loss, but also an incessant whirlpool of thoughts and emotions of his past, now fragmentary, inaccurate, and inconclusive. Wandering in a labyrinth of mirrors and fragilities, we get to contemplate Cioran the human instead of Cioran the philosopher, therefore, to that extent, we’ll dismantle and immerge in his deconstructive and nihilist philosophy and his well-known paradoxes, but mostly, we will focus on how the play reveals a short story of decay, of a gradual disappearance into oblivion, contrary to the nirvanization of illness and lyricism of flesh so praised in his writings.
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La pratique de la lecture, un jeu pour la connaissance de soi. Étude de cas : Simona Popescu et Annie Ernaux
Abstract
Reading is a true indicator of the social history of literary reception, with great heuristic value. The evolution of the female act of reading translates the evolution of the practices which found the emancipation of a whole social category, but also the evolution of the relationship of a person to herself, therefore the access of the individual to his interiority through the paradoxical discovery of otherness.
This article will study the different stages of the transformation of the female reading gesture over the centuries, with the aim of showing how the historical-cultural reorganization – represented by the two waves of female literacy and the important social movements of the 18th century – has fundamentally influenced the reading practices and the reception activity. It will also insist, thanks to a case study, on the transsubjective valences associated with the act of reading, which allow the conversion to oneself of the individual by the readjustment of the initial socio-cultural capital and the access to a form of transpersonal truth, a self-reflective approach that combines reading and playing. -
Jeux autour d’un débordement poïétique dans La Clef des langues de Valère Novarina
Abstract
The work of Valère Novarina continues to express a very interesting reflection on the complex and heterogeneous dynamics of French contemporary literature. In his hybrid, both poetic and dramatic apparatus, but also in his performances or the context of his personal art exhibitions, Novarina develops a compound symbolic dialogue between text and image, thereby undermining the traditional frontiers between different semiotic systems. Furthermore, this inter-semiotic, even intermedial nature of the novarinian oeuvre is an obvious technical characteristic of the latest book of Novarina, La Clef des langues. In this article, we aim to analyze the strategies and the symbolic takes of what Novarina understands as a poetic débordement, namely an effort to break all thematical and practical limitations in the process of artistic creation. Our study focuses on the metadiscourse and we will examine the novarinian quest for a new poetic formula, as well as his endeavor to redefine the expressive literary discourse in the context of actual intermedial practices.
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Ce qui se cache derrière un nom de famille : les biais de genre en français
Abstract
This article presents a sentence completion task in French, which allows us to measure speakers’ preferences regarding the interpretation of surnames. The results show the weight of a sociolinguistic factor, namely gender bias, which causes speakers to unconsciously transgress the biases imposed by the two semantic types of verb (subject bias and object bias). The participants use all the mechanisms at their disposal to associate a surname with a male rather than a female individual. This shows the existence of a real bias for the masculine in the use of different structures in a language, and more generally, the link that exists between language and social prejudice. As our study replicates the same results for French as those observed for English, we can put forward the hypothesis that this bias is not specific to one language, but rather a general trend that manifests itself across languages. This study should be continued in other languages to validate our hypothesis.
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L’alternance entre le sujet nul et pronominal en roumain dans une perspective romane
Abstract
This article focuses on the differences in the comprehension and the production of null and pronominal subjects in Romanian. It shows the importance of an empirical approach (experiments and corpus investigation) for the study of syntactic alternations, such us the null pronominal subject alternation in prodrop Romance languages, which cannot be described by the classical categorical syntactic constraints (cf. grammatical vs. agrammatical dychotomy), but rather by soft constraints, that reflect the preferences of the speakers for one structure or the other. This research allows us to observe (micro)variations within prodrop Romance languages. It also shows that an adequate analysis of such an alternation should be based on a multifactorial analysis, that takes into account factors from various linguistic levels (in particular syntax and discourse).
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TERMINOLOGUE (DCU Dublin) – un outil de gestion terminologique pas comme les autres
Abstract
The purpose of this contribution is to present the main challenges of a localization project currently being finalized – the localization, into French and Romanian, of the open-source terminology management tool TERMINOLOGUE. The main point is to assert and assess a specific algorithm for the research of interlingual equivalents of terminological units lato sensu (terms, collocations, idioms, standardized text)
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La littérature mise en échec(s). La Liste Goncourt – le Choix de l’Université de Bucarest 2023
Abstract
Vivre en lisière du réel afin d’affronter la violence du silence, la violence de l’absence ou celle du rejet et de l’abandon, saisir la distance entre mal faire et faire le mal, marcher comme un funambule sur la frontière entre deux mondes ou sur le fil de sa destinée, voici autant d’invitations que nous lancent les 16 romans se trouvant en lice lors de la onzième édition de « La Liste Goncourt – Le Choix de la Roumanie », événement organisé sous le patronage de l’Académie Goncourt.
Book Reviews
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Jean-Philippe Toussaint, L’Échiquier Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2023
Abstract
Constitué sur la métaphore du jeu d’échecs, auquel il emprunte la structure de soixante-quatre chapitres, le roman de Jean-Philippe Toussaint offre à ses lecteurs un mélange d’autobiographie, de journal et d’essai partant du besoin pascalien du divertissement, sur le fond de la pandémie et du confinement ayant occasionné de longues heures de désoeuvrement (p. 24) que l’auteur a cherché à remplir.
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Neige Sinno, Triste tigre Paris, P.O.L, 2023
Abstract
Une affirmation tranchante, que Neige Sinno place en exergue de son récit, frappe le lecteur comme un coup de marteau sur la tête : « La littérature ne m’a pas sauvée. Je ne suis pas sauvée. » (p. 2). Dès le début de Triste tigre, l’auteure nous avertit sur l’échec de toute poétique sotériologique et avance un travail littéraire au sein duquel, en parallèle avec la réflexion sur l’abjection, se tisse en filigrane une véritable enquête métalittéraire.
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Neige Sinno, Triste tigre Paris, P.O.L, 2023
Abstract
Comment raconter la souffrance d’exister ? La littérature peut-elle nous débarrasser du fardeau d’un abus qui nous suit comme une ombre jusqu’à la fin de notre vie ?
Entre vérité et invention, obscurité et lumière, fiction et autobiographie, le dernier livre de Neige Sinno peut être placé dans une sorte de huis clos littéraire et social dont elle tente d’ouvrir les portes de l’intérieur vers l’extérieur. -
Cécile Desprairies, La Propagandiste Paris, Seuil, 2023
Abstract
La Propagandiste marque la parution d’un nouveau roman familial où l’auteur (en l’occurrence l’auteure) explore l’expression de l’indicible et des non-dits auxquels une enfant de six ans (la future narratrice/ auteure) est confrontée dans son milieu familial et qui engendrent dans son esprit confusion, peur et interrogations sans réponse.
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Dominique Barbéris, Une façon d’aimer Paris, Gallimard, 2023
Abstract
Comment donner corps et existence au silence des choses, des mots et des êtres ? Voici le leitmotiv qui traverse le dernier livre de Dominique Barbéris.
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Mokhtar Amoudi, Les Conditions idéales Paris, Gallimard, 2023
Abstract
Quelle échappatoire proposer à un enfant élevé dans un monde aux codes brouillés par l’absence du socle familial ? Et comment éviter que sa destinée, tracée d’avance par son enfermement dans un milieu délétère où l’abjection côtoie le vice, ne s’accomplisse ? Ce premier roman de Mokhtar Amoudi est un véritable Bildungsroman au soubassement autobiographique confirmé, dont la dimension picaresque et l’humour tendre séduisent le lecteur dès les premières pages, malgré l’impression d’une narration prévisible en raison du sujet traité, tant débattu : les affres du déterminisme social.
Literary Criticism
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Makenzy Orcel, Une somme humaine Paris, Rivages, 2022
Abstract
Comment exprimer, voire réparer les fêlures de la conscience humaine devant la souffrance ? Cette question traverse en filigrane le dernier roman de Makenzy Orcel : véritable kaléidoscope littéraire et ontologique, Une somme humaine se construit comme une réflexion très lucide sur le monde et sur la littérature.