Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Tradition

The study of Maïssa Bey’s novel Surtout ne te retourne pas allows to examine how the Francophone novel represents an earthquake as a poetic, metaphorical and political shockwave. The novel is part of a literary tradition but also shows the singularity of the writing and the engagement of the Algerian novelist Maïssa Bey. It allows to examine the feminine agentivity in the context of the disaster camps in Algeria: from the ravaged space/country emerge the voices of women who enter into resistance to improvise, invent their lives and their identities. The earthquake allows them to free themselves, to take a subversive point of view at society and their status as women in an oppressive patriarchal society. The staged female characters arrogate to themselves the right to reread history and take their destiny back.

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The Romantic Grotesque of George Gordon Byron

Tekstualia ◽

10.5604/01.3001.0013.6435 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (59) ◽

pp. 27-40

Author(s):

Mirosława Modrzewska

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Don Juan ◽

Miguel De Cervantes ◽

Critical Tradition ◽

The World ◽

Poetic Style ◽

The Grotesque

The article explores the affi nities between Byron’s works with the seventeenth-century literary tradition of carnivalesque discourse. These affi nities can be traced in his comical burlesque writings, such as The Devil’s Drive (1813), Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–1824). There is a well-established British critical tradition which sees the author of Don Juan as a continuator of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century mock-heroic convention, but his use of the grotesque mode makes him the heir of Miguel de Cervantes or Francisco Quevedo. Byron’s literary identifi cation with the poetic style of the seventeenth-century baroque can be detected in his predilection for a comical deformation of characters, images and meanings. The poet uses the language of monstrosity and transgression to achieve political and religious provocation and to lure his reader into the world of a liberated language, freed from conventional connotations.

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A gender-stereotyped representation of Marie in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s tetralogy M. M. M. M. (2017)

Neophilologus ◽

10.1007/s11061-020-09652-8 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 104 (4) ◽

pp. 469-483

Author(s):

Greta Brodahl

Keyword(s):

Historical Perspective ◽

Methodological Approach ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Representation Of Women ◽

Second Sex ◽

Patriarchal Society

Abstract This article examines the portrait of Marie in Toussaint (M.M.M.M., ed. de Minuit, Paris, 2017) and asks how Marie is represented as a woman in the tetralogy. The study shows that although Marie is portrayed as a modern, independent woman, she is also presented with different gender-stereotyped characteristics. The theoretical and methodological approach to this topic will be based on Simone de Beauvoir’s The second sex (1949), in particular the chapter “Myths” that focuses on women and myths in a historical perspective. Another question the article raises is what may be the author’s intention by playing with stereotyped characteristics. I will argue that the author exposes a modern woman’s ambivalent situation in our patriarchal society. Furthermore, that he writes within a literary tradition that gives a stereotyped representation of women as part of the collective myths.

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