Direction et éducation genrée dans Les Lettres du pape Clément XIV de Caraccioli

L’auteur étudie la figure du maître dans la supercherie épistolaire conçue par Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli autour du défunt Clément XIV. Y sont étudiées les lettres pédagogiques de ce recueil dans la configuration d’ensemble où elles prennent place (direction et éducation), mais également sous l’angle des thématiques spécifiques qui y sont déployées : éducation des filles, des garçons ; lieu des études ; nature et modalités de celles-ci ; choix d’un état, etc. Il s’agit de mettre en lumière une éducation marquée par un certain conformisme, ne récusant jamais l’alliance indéfectible de la religion et de l’éducation, mais ouverte à la modernité, au moins sur le plan pédagogique. L’analyse a aussi pour but de montrer que cette figure du maître est un rouage essentiel de la réussite de la supercherie de Caraccioli, mais aussi de son éventement.The article speaks about the “topos” of Master in the apocryphal collection about the Pope Clement XIV published by Caraccioli. The letters on upbringing are considered to evaluate their places in the collection (direction and education). Their main topics are specified to: what are the views of those letters about girl’s and boy’s upbringing (gender education?)? what place of study for pupils? How to do to select a condition and a trade? etc. The conformism of this positions has been highlighted: religion and education are always interconnected; the social order of France’s old regime is never contested, but the pedagogy is modern. At last, the authoress demonstrates that the topos of the Master is essential for the success of the mystification (credibility) but also his failure

"Compensations of poverty" : la féerie urbaine ou la modernité en question dans "On Third Avenue" et "Ephemerid" de Mina Loy

This paper explores the poetics of metamorphosis in "On Third Avenue" and "Ephemerid" by Mina Loy. Her ambivalent response to modernity comes to the fore in the representation of an urban fairyland influenced by the works of Baudelaire, surrealist writers as well as the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. Modernity’s indebtedness to an unacknowledged past is at the heart of the aesthetic experience staged in these two poems

Femmes des anti-Lumières, femmes apologistes

This book questions the place occupied by women, reputed to be "quarrelsome" according to Richelet, in the polemical exchanges supposed to guarantee their faith and put a mute to the words of "philosophy" of the Enlightenment

Comparing Notes: Recording and Criticism

This chapter charts the ways in which recording has changed the nature of music criticism. It both provides an overview of the history of recording and music criticism, from the advent of Edison’s Phonograph to the present day, and examines the issues arising from this new technology and the consequent transformation of critical thought and practice

Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since the Second World War

This chapter provides the first historical examination of music criticism in Britain since the Second World War. In the process, it also challenges the simplistic prevailing view of this being a period of decline from a golden age in music criticism

Photography and memory work: Rethinking autobiography in Family Secrets by Annette Kuhn

Préparation d'un article en coursInternational audienceIn her hybrid work Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn radically reworks the conventions of life writing. Merging autobiography with cultural criticism, her collection of essays does not set out to trace the making of a unique self, the way most autobiographies would, but explores instead the complex workings of memory and the deep connections between the individual self and society. To do so, Kuhn revisits her past through a personal archive of family pictures and public documents, submitting them to what she calls “memory work”, “an active practice of remembering which takes an enquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re) construction through memory.” (Kuhn 157)This paper will focus on the role played by family photographs in this exploration. These are not used for referential purposes, as a way to recover the past, but as an interpretative device, a way to unsettle it and show it as subject to a multiplicity of interpretations. Rereading family pictures through a method based on free association, Kuhn unleashes their subversive potential, bringing out family secrets and forgotten traumas. Trimmed and covered with inscriptions, these banal, apparently harmless testimonies of family life turn out to be at the heart of intense power plays. Pictures also allow Kuhn to explore the inscription of the self in social structures. Located at the intersection of private and public worlds, formal and ceremonial pictures are part of what Kuhn calls “popular memory”. They become invested with a memorial function, pointing to larger cultural evolutions in post-war Britain but also capturing more marginal trajectories; the undocumented plight of the “scholarship girl” torn between two worlds is thus given particular attention. Caught in a web of conflicting discourses, family photographs emerge in Kuhn’s essay as constantly open to reinterpretation, showing memory and the past as perpetually in the making. Kuhn’s goal is not merely deconstructive however: Primarily concerned with the significance of the past in the present (“the struggle is now, the past is made in the present”, 19), she turns life writing into an empowering, deeply relational enterprise that can delineate another future for the writing subject and her readers

In Search of a Lost Past: Michael Ignatieff’s Photo Albums in The Russian Album

Article en préparationInternational audienceThe Revolution of 1917 caused the departure of a great many Russian families from their home country. This experience of exile is at the heart of a number of works of life-writing, some of them written by the descendants of Russian migrants. Such is the case of The Russian Album, published by Michael Ignatieff in 1987. His narrative is a minute reconstruction of the lives of his grand-parents, Paul and Natacha Ignatieff, based on their memoirs and family photo albums. Ignatieff’s Russian Album is striking for the central role it gives to the family pictures, a selection of which can be found in the middle of the book. Their significance, which goes beyond the decorative or merely illustrative function they are usually limited to, illustrates Marianne Hirsch’s claim that following the democratization of photography with the invention of the kodak at the end of the XIXth, “in the ensuing century, the camera has become the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and self-representation – the primary means by which family memory is perpetuated, by which the family’s story is told.” (Family Frames, xvi)Ignatieff’s work raises questions about the meaning of memory and identity for younger generations dealing with the traumas experienced by their parents and grandparents. The Russian Album is in fact characterized by the ambivalent attitude of the narrator to his roots: his deep desire to know his past is matched by his conjoined fear of being claimed by it. This ambivalence underlies the relationship between text and images. Pictures are presented as the matrix of the book; what is more, the narrator exhibits a deep trust in them as an archival material that will help him reach some kind of truth about the past. However, his use of family photographs reflects a fear of their latent power, a fear that ultimately leads him to try to contain them and to reassert the primacy of words