Octave Mirbeau et les clivages du moi

Mirbeau's inner world, with its hidden treasures, its disorder, its constructive incoherence, creates a literature in its own image, violent, disparate and generous. His entire work is part of his contemporary Viennese master's one. Subconscious deliberate mistakes, sublimations, perversions, original scenes, neuroses... Everything leads the reader to integrate the biographical element into the very act of creation. The regressive attitude of his earlier novels which translates into a desire for fusion with Nature turns in the 1890s into a will of self-construction eventually opening onto a confident vitality and an enthusiastic belief in modernity. But this decadent literature, no more than a naturalistic one, should not be reduced to a psychoanalytic analysis. Should they exist, these elements are subjected to a literary transmutation which urges the reader to conceive his own personal myth rather than sense a neurotic divide. Torn between an intellectual demand and a spiritual expectation, it seems nonetheless that Nature, the element of inspiration for the author, lets us feel a prospective deep division

Rachilde et ses «Mercuriales»

The emblem of decadence, Rachilde's literature is regarded as obscure, meant for the "happy few" who are fond of a modernity which is now outdated. In a field where languidness and the wild lyricism of imagination predominate, the criticisms written by the novel columnist are remarkable for their strength and the efficiency of their approach. For more than thirty years, in the columns of Mercure de France, she used her talent as a reader, applying herself to protecting the review's favourite novelists, praising some novel for their authenticity while denouncing the bad quality of others pieces of work. Her production, which covered a large number of novels, stood out. However, her work is not free of errors. Besides the names that she wants to promote, the article examines the liberties she allows herself to take with literary criticism, however codified this genre might be: recurrence of themes, outline of a poetical approach of the novel, quest for action, longing for a moral dimension, reinstatement of a function of the novel as entertainment. All these elements reveal how she manages to avoid the constraint of the critical exercise, putting her own mark on a practice which is traditionally distant from pure creation. Thus, criticism can function as a laboratory for the art of writing

Defenses in Dispute: The Bureaucratic and Domestic Politics of the First Anti-Ballistic Missile Debate

Since the dawn of the missile age in the mid-1940s, policymakers have grappled with the question of whether and how to defend against ballistic missiles. The saga of the rise of the United States’ first anti-ballistic missile system, known initially as Sentinel and later as Safeguard, and its subsequent demise after the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, has been well cataloged by historians and strategic thinkers. Although many scholars present the story of this ABM system as the logical and inexorable consequence of the acceptance of deterrence theory and mutual vulnerability by the U.S and the Soviet Union, I argue it was instead the product of a remarkably dynamic and contingent process. The combination of intense interagency and intercabinet debates on ABM, synthesized with the peculiar domestic politics of the arms race, help explain this complex story. Examining disputes within the executive branch in the context of foreign policy and domestic politics can help shed light on this process and how this resolution came about, making extensive use of publicly available and declassified documents

Le Jardin des supplices of Octave Mirbeau as a literary illustration of the eternal return myth (1899)

In Mirbeau's novel Le Jardin des supplices (1899), the circular representation, completed and relayed by design of the plant, should be read violently. The reader conceives some philosophical influences or convergences. The Narcissus myth is subjected here to a literary transmutation. The novel tells a personal obsession; it becomes a reconciliation between earlier fictions [L'Abbé Jules (1888), Dans le ciel (1892-1893)] and his dramatic work which is coming

Chapitre VI. L’Oblat, Huysmans à Ligugé

En 1892 et dans la décennie qui suit, la conversion de J.-K. Huysmans soulève scepticisme et incrédulité, voire sarcasmes chez les gendelettres. Goncourt manie l’ironie : « Ce serait une illusion chez Huysmans s’il croyait qu’il est en train de devenir un écrivain spiritualiste. » Dans le meilleur des cas, on reconnaît à l’auteur de L’Oblat la liberté d’un choix qui engage le chrétien, mais qui ne peut ni ne doit aliéner l’artiste. Nombre de ses pairs lui conservent le respect dû au romancier..

Thibaut d’Anthonay, Jean Lorrain

Les fins de siècle se ressemblent, répète-t-on. Il n’est que de prendre la mesure de l’animosité qu’est susceptible de générer aujourd’hui Jean Lorrain au sein du petit monde des collectionneurs, d’évaluer les jalousies dans l’accaparement dudit par les chercheurs, ou au contraire les manifestations de dédain affecté de la part d’autres, pour jauger la modernité de l’auteur de Monsieur de Phocas. Les sommes exorbitantes auxquelles s’arrachent ses œuvres vont dans le sens de ce constat. Modern..

Octave Mirbeau's rifts

Mirbeau's inner world, with its hidden treasures, its disorder, its constructive incoherence, creates a literature in its own image, violent, disparate and generous. His entire work is part of his contemporary Viennese master's one. Subconscious deliberate mistakes, sublimations, perversions, original scenes, neuroses... Everything leads the reader to integrate the biographical element into the very act of creation. The regressive attitude of his earlier novels which translates into a desire for fusion with Nature turns in the 1890s into a will of self-construction eventually opening onto a confident vitality and an enthusiastic belief in modernity. But this decadent literature, no more than a naturalistic one, should not be reduced to a psychoanalytic analysis. Should they exist, these elements are subjected to a literary transmutation which urges the reader to conceive his own personal myth rather than sense a neurotic divide. Torn between an intellectual demand and a spiritual expectation, it seems nonetheless that Nature, the element of inspiration for the author, lets us feel a prospective deep division

Gilles Bonnet, L’Écriture comique de J.-K. Huysmans

Pour le connaisseur superficiel de Huysmans, se fixer pour objet de recherche l’exploration du comique dans l’œuvre de celui que Maurras nomme le Hollandais peut surprendre ; et il est un temps tout récent où l’esprit de sérieux prévalait, et de loin, sur toute lecture spirituelle – non dans le sens inspiré. Pour le lecteur plus exigeant de celui qui consomme le schisme zolien dès 1884, les travaux de Daniel Grojnowski, de Jean-Marie Seillan ou de l’auteur de cet essai (dont on gardait en mém..