Actualité, événement et histoire dans L’Été 80, de Marguerite Duras

Romancière, Marguerite Duras configure peu ses histoires, tout en accordant une place centrale à l’événement comme rupture et entrave ; femme d’engagements, fidèle à un « communisme de pensée » (pour reprendre l’expression de Dionys Mascolo), l’auteur délaisse cependant dès 1950 toute pensée doctrinaire. Depuis 1968, seule l’utopie l’intéresse. Lorsque en 1980 le directeur de Libération, Serge July, lui demande d’écrire pour son journal des chroniques qui se consacreraient à l’« actualité parallèle » délaissée par l’« information d’usage », Duras accepte. Deux mois durant, à raison d’un mercredi par semaine, elle arrête ou épouse le « passage du temps » : on y suit « la grève calme des ouvriers du chantier naval de Gdansk », l’amour fou d’une jeune monitrice de colonie de vacances pour un enfant à qui elle donne rendez-vous à sa majorité, « le 30 juillet à minuit », l’arrivée auprès de la chroniqueuse du « vous » qui deviendra à l’automne « Yann Andréa », le dédicataire du livre. Cet été-là, « sur Gdansk j’ai posé ma bouche et je vous ai embrassé », nous apprend Duras. Écriture du présent, et au présent, la chronique de L’Été 80 fabrique l’événement tout comme elle rejette son historicité en sa réécriture, douze ans plus tard, sous le titre de Yann Andréa Steiner.As a novelist, Marguerite Duras does not configure her stories much, giving central importance to the event, as a break and as an obstacle: a politically-committed woman, faithful to a ‘communism of thought’ (to cite the expression of Dionys Mascolo), the author abandoned all thought which was doctrinaire from 1950 onwards. After 1968, she was only interested in utopia. Then in 1980, the editor of Libération, Serge July, asked her to write a column for his paper, which would be devoted to ‘alternative news’ neglected by the ‘mainstream press’. Duras accepted. For two months, every Wednesday, she stopped or embraced the ‘passage of time’: one could follow stories about ‘the peaceful strike of the Gdansk shipyard workers’, ‘the mad passion of a young holiday camp supervisor for a child, whom she has arranged to meet for a date when he is no longer a minor’, ‘the 30th of July at midnight’, and the arrival at the sides of the columnist of the formal ‘you’, of the person who would become ‘Yann Andrea’ in the autumn and to whom the book was dedicated. That summer, ‘on Gdansk I rested my mouth and I kissed you’, she tells us. Writing the present, and in the present, the column L’Été 80 fabricates the event, all the while projecting its historicity and rewriting twelve years forward, under the title of Yann Andréa Steiner

Fundamental Parameters of He-Weak and He-Strong Stars

We carried out low resolution spectroscopic observations in the wavelength range 3400-4700 A of 20 He-weak and 8 He-strong stars to determine their fundamental parameters by means of the Divan-Chalonge-Barbier (BCD) spectrophotometric system. For a few He-weak stars we also estimate the effective temperatures and the angular diameters by integrating absolute fluxes observed over a wide spectral range. Non-LTE model calculations are carried out to study the influence of the He/H abundance ratio on the emergent radiation of He-strong stars and on their Teff determination. We find that the effective temperatures, surface gravities and bolometric absolute magnitudes of He-weak stars estimated with the BCD system and the integrated flux method are in good agreement between each other, and they also agree with previous determinations based on several different methods. The mean discrepancy between the visual absolute magnitudes derived using the Hipparcos parallaxes and the BCD values is on average 0.3 mag for He-weak stars, while it is 0.5 mag for He-strong stars. For He-strong stars, we note that the BCD calibration, based on stars in the solar environment, leads to overestimated values of Teff. By means of model atmosphere calculations with enhanced He/H abundance ratios we show that larger He/H ratios produce smaller BD which naturally explains the Teff overestimation. We take advantage of these calculations to introduce a method to estimate the He/H abundance ratio in He-strong stars. The BD of HD 37479 suggests that the Teff of this star remains fairly constant as the star spectrum undergoes changes in the intensity of H and He absorption lines. Data for the He-strong star HD 66765 are reported for the first time.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

NGC 2401: A template of the Norma-Cygnus Arm's young population in the Third Galactic Quadrant

Based on a deep optical CCD (UBV(RI)_C) photometric survey and on the Two-Micron All-Sky-Survey (2MASS) data we derived the main parameters of the open cluster NGC 2401. We found this cluster is placed at 6.3 $\pm$ 0.5 kpc (V_O - M_V = 14.0 \pm 0.2) from the Sun and is 25 Myr old, what allows us to identify NGC 2401 as a member of the young population belonging to the innermost side of the extension of the Norma-Cygnus spiral--arm in the Third Galactic Quadrant. A spectroscopic study of the emission star LSS 440 that lies in the cluster area revealed it is a B0Ve star; however, we could not confirm it is a cluster member. We also constructed the cluster luminosity function (LF) down to $V \sim 22$ and the cluster initial mass function (IMF) for all stars with masses above M \sim 1-2 M_{\sun}. It was found that the slope of the cluster IMF is $x \approx 1.8 \pm 0.2$. The presence of a probable PMS star population associated to the cluster is weakly revealed.Comment: 10 paginas, 11 eps figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

L’altitude ralentit le déclin ? 40 ans de présence des épiceries dans les communes rurales

Le questionnement a été décliné à trois échelles : à l’échelle d’une comparaison entre espaces ruraux de plaine et de montagne, la contrainte qu’exerce le relief sur la vitesse de déplacement a favorisé le maintien des épiceries en montagne ; à l’échelle d’une comparaison entre massifs montagneux, les disparitions d’épiceries ont été plus fréquentes dans les massifs anciens ; à l’échelle du massif alpin, l’orientation de l’activité communale vers le tourisme pourrait avoir ralenti le processu..

Physical parameters of IPHAS-selected classical Be stars. (I. Determination procedure and evaluation of the results.)

Reproduced with permission from Astronomy & Astrophysics, © 2016 ESOWe present a semi-automatic procedure to obtain fundamental physical parameters and distances of classical Be (CBe) stars, based on the Barbier-Chalonge-Divan (BCD) spectrophotometric system. Our aim is to apply this procedure to a large sample of CBe stars detected by the IPHAS photometric survey, to determine their fundamental physical parameters and to explore their suitability as galactic structure tracers. In this paper we describe the methodology used and the validation of the procedure by comparing our results with those obtained from different independent astrophysical techniques for subsamples of stars in common with other studies. We also present a test case study of the galactic structure in the direction of the Perseus Galactic Arm, in order to compare our results with others recently obtained with different techniques and the same sample of stars. We did not find any significant clustering of stars at the expected positions of the Perseus and Outer Galactic Arms, in agreement with previous studies in the same area that we used for verification.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

On the evolutionary status of Be stars. I. Field Be stars near the Sun

A sample of 97 galactic field Be stars were studied by taking into account the effects induced by the fast rotation on their fundamental parameters. All program stars were observed in the BCD spectrophotometric system in order to minimize the perturbations produced by the circumstellar environment on the spectral photospheric signatures. This is one of the first attempts at determining stellar masses and ages by simultaneously using model atmospheres and evolutionary tracks, both calculated for rotating objects. The stellar ages ($\tau$) normalized to the respective inferred time that each rotating star can spend in the main sequence phase ($\tau\_{\rm MS}$) reveal a mass-dependent trend. This trend shows that: a) there are Be stars spread over the whole interval 0 \la \tau/\tau\_{\rm MS} \la 1 of the main sequence evolutionary phase; b) the distribution of points in the ($\tau/\tau\_{\rm MS},M/M\_{\odot}$) diagram indicates that in massive stars (M \ga 12M\_{\odot}) the Be phenomenon is present at smaller $\tau/\tau\_{\rm MS}$ age ratios than for less massive stars (M \la 12M\_{\odot}). This distribution can be due to: $i$) higher mass-loss rates in massive objets, which can act to reduce the surface fast rotation; $ii$) circulation time scales to transport angular momentum from the core to the surface, which are longer the lower the stellar mass.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, A&A, in pres

Stellar archaeology: the evolving spectrum of FG Sge

Over an interval of 120 years, the extraordinary object FG Sge has been transformed from a hot post-AGB star to a very luminous cool supergiant. Theoretically, this evolution has been associated with the reignition of a helium-shell during the post-AGB stage. A series of studies of the chemical composition of the photosphere have suggested that this evolution has been associated with a dramatic increase of approximately 3 dex in the abundances of s-process elements between about 1960 and 1995. The problem with this apparent change is that it occurred at a time when the surface convection zone, which is governed by the star's effective temperature, could not have developed sufficiently to dredge processed material from the stellar interior to the surface. We have reviewed the chemical evolution of FG Sge by means of modelling the time-varying spectrum under a range of assumptions. By comparing these models with published observational data, a self-consistent picture has emerged. In particular we find that surface hydrogen has been depleted during the interval in question. In contrast, the s-process abundances have generally maintained a steady enhancement of around 1 - 2 dex, although some modest changes may have occurred since 1950. This implies that FG Sge has not just completed dredging up freshly-produced s-process isotopes. However, there remains a contradiction between the observed hydrogen-depletion, the age of the associated planetary nebula, and current evolutionary models for a pre-white dwarf suffering a late thermal pulse.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, A&A in pres

Marguerite Duras : les noms de Yann

Marguerite Duras, née Marguerite Donnadieu, celle qui, par un nom de plume, a relégué le nom du père de sorte que son nom de naissance ne trouve nulle inscription en l’œuvre, a introduit dans ses textes la présence « illégale » du jeune homme qui partagea les quinze dernières années de sa vie. C’est par la nomination, en ses variantes onomastiques, que nous rendrons ici justice à cette présence dans une œuvre où la subjectivité n’est pas affaire d’intériorité. Depuis L’été 80 jusqu’à la mort ..