[Barsky continued] ... University, a long way, in virtually every regard, from the many Paris libraries and private collections in which one would expect to find works on this subject. Like many remarkable library or museum collections, those found in the W. T. Bandy Center because of unusual twists of fate, relating to particular individuals who worked in, or donated to, Vanderbilt’s French and Italian Department. Rather than focus upon the degree to which these events have created a Center that is, at it were, out of place, I’m much more interested in thinking about the works contained in this collection as being in America, in the South, and at Vanderbilt, and in so doing we are induced to consider what role these texts might have played for readers, and authors, in this part of the world.
Vanderbilt University is itself fascinating in this regard, being the founding center for the Fugitive and Agrarian literary groups and the New Critics, who influenced generations of teachers and students involved in the reading and critiquing of literary texts, and as Faculty Director of this Center, I’d like to emphasize and discuss the situatedness of this collection, rather than imagining that we’re on a little island connected through language and culture to Paris, and that everything that surrounds this island is of parenthetical concern. Further, this collection is in America, in a part of the world in which the French played an important role through the colony and then province of Québec. In an article published in the inaugural issue of the international on-line journal of the Americas called AmeriQuests, Professor Virginia Scott, Chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of French and Italian, tells the story of Jacques Timothé Boucher, Sieur de Mont Brun, an eighteenth-century Canadian fur trapper who made his home near where Vanderbilt University and AmeriQuests now live (http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ameriquests/article/view/2). AmeriQuests, strongly supported by the Government of Québec, will publish the proceedings of "Cultural Modernism in the Americas I: Québec”, marking the journal’s entrance into the family of journals published by Duke University Press, a great honor and tremendous boost the journal that already boasts 30,000 hits on top articles, a tribute to its being a pioneer in the open access on-line journal world.
�is revitalized Bandy Center Bulletin is also on-line, and open access, because this is clearly the direction that academic publishing is headed, and it’s a way of bringing these remarkable collections to the attention of interested scholars around the world, scholars who can then apply to us for Bandy Center grants, aimed at facilitating research trips to this very special place. Soon, we’ll add another on-line, open access journal, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to work that describes or emerges from the archives located in the W. T. Bandy Center; the official launching of that journal will be announced in the next Bulletin. And so, this Bulletin is a front door into the W. T. Bandy Center that is adorned with the welcoming screen, that allows the curious passerby to look inside, beyond the heavy wooden door, and into the many activities that take place inside. We are thrilled you are here, and I invite you to stay a while, peruse the news of our activities and, if you are so inclined, be in touch. A collection of this magnitude and importance resonates and glistens only when we interact with it, a pleasure we hope to induce in many visitors in the years to come.
Professor Robert Barsky, Vanderbilt UniversityW.T. Bandy Center Faculty Director
www.robertbarsky.org
Cultural Modernism inthe Americas I: Quebec
1) Daniel Ridge (Vanderbilt University), Paul Bourget and La Nouvelle France
2) Robert Barsky (Vanderbilt University), Dirt, Filth and Matter Out of Place: Baudelaire’s Legacy in the Trial of the Québécois artist Remy Couture
3) Gary Wihl (Washington University in St. Louis), �e Modern Definition of National Literature
4) Nelson Charest (�e University of Ottawa), L’“américanisme” de Baudelaire chez les poètes québécois au tournant du XXe siècle
5) Cynthia Harvey (L’Université du Québec), Le récit des Fleurs du Mal ou la métamorphose du vampire
6) Benoît Houzé (Paris VIII University), Moderne par tradition: Nelligan et les synesthésies
7) Michel Pierssens (Université de Montréal), L’Écho des jeunes et la première modernité québecoise
8) Nathalie Watteyne (Université de Sherbrooke), Saint-Denys Garneau, Anne Hébert et Jacques Brault : trois poètes lecteurs de Baudelaire
9) Antoine Boisclair (Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf), Héritages de Mallarmé. Modernité de Paul Morin et de René Chopin(English)
PRESENTATIONS
The W.T. Bandy Centerfor Baudelaire and Modern French Studies
bulletin
April2013Bandy
Center1vol.
Dr. Damian CataniBandy Fellow, Fall 2012
Dr. Damian Catani is a lecturer in French at Birkbeck College, London, where his primary teaching and research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and thought. He has published widely on Mallarmé and
Baudelaire, particularly on the social and ethical role of the poet and writer. He addressed these themes in his first book �e Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism and Politics in Mallarmé (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). His most recent book is Evil: a History in Modern French Literature and �ought (London: Continuum, 2013). At the W.T. Bandy Center, Dr. Catani furthered his research on Baudelaire’s underexplored text Les Paradis Artficiels, working specifically on Baudelaire’s adaptation and partial translation of �omas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. �e Center’s collection of critical works dating from 1860 to the present, as well as the digital resource Charles Baudelaire: Une Micro-histoire, provided Dr. Catani with the essential tools needed to shed light on the genesis, interpretation, and reception of this controversial work as well as the aesthetic attitudes towards drugs through this period.
Dr. Federica LocatelliBandy Fellow, Fall 2012
Dr. Frederica Locatelli is a researcher in the Department of French Literature at the Catholic University of Milan. Her research addresses symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, in particular Baudelaire and Apollinaire. She is
the author of multiple articles, including “Une certaine homologie des périphrases: Les Litanies de Satan de Charles Baudelaire”, “L'imagination de Coleridge à Baudelaire: positivement apparentée avec l'Infini”, “Baudelaire et la comparaison”, and “Apollinaire: des cris qui traversent la mer.” Her forthcoming work is titled Une figure de l’expansion : la périphrase chez Charles Baudelaire. While at the W.T. Bandy Center, Dr. Locatelli continued to develop perspectives on the language of symbolist poets.
Laure Bordas-IsnerWachs Fellow, Spring 2013
Originally from Nice, France, Laure Bordas-Isner is a Ph.D. student (ABD) in French Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She also teaches introductory and intermediate-level French courses at Belmont University. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on crimes and criminals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular and canonical French literature. Her research hopes to determine whether the conflation of reality and fiction typical of nineteenth-century romansfeuilletons can be traced back to the popular fiction of the eighteenth-century. At the W.T. Bandy Center, Brodas-Isner is working on this concept, otherwise titled "Raconter le crime: La figure du criminel dans la littérature française des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles." She is interested in the Morris Wachs Collection, which contains a wide range of popular eighteenth-century literary texts.
Dr. Seth WhiddenVillanova University, Villanova, PAPascal Pia Fellow
�e W. T. Bandy Center is that very best kind of Pandora's box: one quickly discovers that this relatively small space opens up so many areas of scholarly inquiry in the rich world of
French literature: infinite, endless, and seemingly in all directions. �e Pascal Pia Collection, known throughout the world for its incomparable holdings, helped my work tremendously this week, transporting me into the universe of the poets of the second half of the nineteenth century and helping me see so many important connections between their poems, volumes, and journals.
BANDY SCHOLARS
VISITING SCHOLAR
“ Thanks to the exceptional resources of the W.T. Bandy Center and the professionalism and assistance of the library staff I was able to undertake exciting new research on the relationship between ethics, evil and drugs in Baudelaire and De Quincey, a project that originally emerged from my recent book Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and �ought. I cannot recommend the Bandy Center highly enough.”
Damian Catani, March 2013
Evil: A History in Modern French
Literature and �oughtContinuum Intl Pub Group/
Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2013.
Recently published book by Damian Catani, W.T. Bandy Fellow. Professor
Catani is a Lecturer in French at Birkbeck College, London University.
While at the Bandy Center his research project was "Baudelaire, De Quincey
and Les Paradis Artificiels.”
Baudelaire Prose PoemsIllustrated by Stephen Sidelinger
Gouache on Arches paper with graphite. Four folios bound in distressed moiré portfolios with linen quarter bindings.12” X 16” plates, 1995.
Stephen Sidelinger, artist and teacher, was inspired by the work of Charles Baudelaire and the gardens of Paris for this illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s work. At the time when the illustrator was visiting Paris, the Tuileries Gardens had loud speakers in the trees broadcasting poetry recitations by different French poets. �e poetry of Baudelaire caught his attention. Sidelinger teaches his students using Baudelaire poems to inspire and “to get them interested in writing with their art.”
NE
W A
QU
ISIT
ION
S
Other illustrated Fleurs du mal books, please see this exhibition site: http://exhibits.library.vanderbilt.edu/bookasart
WELCOME TO THE CENTER
Daniel RidgeAssistant Director
One of the greatest pleasures I have found working at the Center is introducing undergraduate students to the life and work of Charles Baudelaire. Not only do I love discussing his poetry and
influence on modernism, but I have the rare privilege of illustrating my discussions with original editions of his work, including the 1857 unexpur-gated text of Les Fleurs du mal and his first translations of Edgar Allen Poe. In an increasingly digital world, it is important to bring students back to the material elements of literary production and literary life. Baudelaire’s theories on dandyism, and the life he lived, first as a young eccentric then as a poverty-stricken poet, provide a wealth of visual and literary material to engage questions of nineteenth-century culture and identity.
As a literary historian, I am regularly surprised by the materials found in the Pascal Pia Collection. It is always a pleasure to work with an autographed text, particularly when it is accompanied by Pia’s notes. Interestingly, Pia had used his personal library, whose purchase Claude Pichois negotiated in 1981, as a filing cabinet for his own hand written and typed remarks, letters he exchanged with the authors, as well as publicity material and newspaper clippings. As a Pascal Pia Fellow several years ago, I had the privilege of cataloguing this material for addition to Heard Library’s search engine Acorn. I am proud to have made this material more readily available to other scholars.
Yvonne BoyerBandy Center Librarian
As Librarian for the W.T. Bandy Center or Baudelaire and Modern French Studies, it is my privilege to welcome scholars, students, and Fellows to the Center. �e Center islocated in the main library of Vanderbilt University and is part of the campus life. Scholars come from all over the world to consult material about Charles Baudelaire’s life, works, and related studies. �is comprehensive collection is maintained with special attention paid to searching and acquiring materials in many formats and media, and providing access on site and online to scholars worldwide. Our commitment to a constantly expanding bibliography with entries ranging from print form to ephemera, including specifically curated digital exhibitions, acknowledges the continuing legacy of Charles Baudelaire and his central position in modern French studies. �e collection is housed in the Treasure Room of the library, an appropriate location, as a former director referred to the Center as the jewel in the Vanderbilt crown.
Robert BarskyW.T. Bandy Center Faculty Director
�is Bulletin marks the return of a newsletter that will henceforth highlight recent acquisitions, the work of recent Bandy Center Fellows, and descriptions of our newly-launched series of conferences that I foresee hosting on a yearly basis, beginning this spring. Our inaugural event, "Cultural Modernism in the Americas I: Québec”, focuses on the influence that French modernist works, most notably Baudelaire, had upon the shape, direction and evolution of Québec modernism. �e decision to begin with Québec reflects a number of factors at work at Vanderbilt University, including the presence of a strong program in Québec and Canadian Studies, a very productive relationship with representatives of the Government of Québec who help sponsor our work (including this conference), and, perhaps most interestingly, my sense that we need to focus not only upon the breadth and depth of the Baudelaire, Pascal Pia, Gilbert Sigaux and Wachs Collections at Vanderbilt, veritable jewels in their own right, but we need to also consider the role that they played in different parts of America, beginning with Québec. To begin, though, we need to think about what it means that they are housed at Vanderbilt ... [continued lower right]
Cultural Modernism in the Americas I: Quebec April 2013 – Presentation Abstracts
“Dirt, Filth and Matter Out of Place: Baudelaire’s Legacy in the Trial of the Québécois artist Remy Couture”
In 1857 two seminal texts came before French tribunals, and their authors, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, were both charged with obscenity. Despite the differences in genres, and in the approach taken by the defense, the rhetoric of both trials is notable as precursors to arguments that would be made against Vizetelly in 1888; Les Fleurs du mal was denounced as follows: “L’odieux y coudoie l’ignoble, le repoussant s’y allie a l’infect,”remarked Gustave Bourdin in his “Critique de Les Fleurs du Mal,” in Le Figaro, 5 July, 1857. He added that “ce livre est un hôpital ouvert à toutes les démences de l’esprit, à toutes les putridités du coeur”, providing a remarkable link between a poetic text and a hospital!), while others portrayed Baudelaire as a mere purveyor of garbage: “Il ramasse les sentines et les egouts” in a fashion typical of “les immondices de la presse boheime et realiste.” [1] On the English side, we find similar denunciations pronounced at inquiries into the work of Swinburne following publication of is 1866 work Poems and Ballads, and, moreover, in hearings held in 1888 regarding Vizetelly’s translations of Zola’s novels. In spite of the many differences between Swinburne, Zola via Vizetelly, Baudelaire and Flaubert, and despite considerable variation in the legal systems employed to prosecute them in England and in France, the critical vocabulary deployed against them all seems to make one thing clear: in the eyes of many of their contemporaries and certainly in the courtrooms of justice, these works were all portrayed as a kind of dirt that was imposed upon an unsuspecting reading public that risked, in its exposure to it, an irreversible infection. And, surprisingly, the vestiges of this view still have currency, as evidenced in the recent obscenity trial of the Québécois artist Remy Couture, a remarkable link to the continued importance of the trials of Baudelaire.
[1] Cited in André Guyaux, Baudelaire: un demi-‐siècle de lecture des ‘Fleurs du mal’, 1855-‐1905. Paris, PUPS, 2007.
Professor Robert Barsky Vanderbilt University Website: www.robertbarsky.org
La filiation mallarméenne Paul Morin et René Chopin
« Ô Mallarmé manqué », écrit Paul Morin dans un poème daté de 1915 où il s’interpelle avec un sens étonnant de l’autodérision. Il va sans dire que le poète répond ici à ses détracteurs – certains critiques canadiens-‐français du début du XXe siècle ont associé Le paon d’émail, son premier recueil publié en 1911, au maniérisme de Mallarmé –, mais une telle phrase révèle surtout l’influence exercée par les symbolistes auprès des poètes du Nigog, une revue d’avant-‐garde publiée en 1918 à laquelle le nom de Morin a été associé. Cette communication propose d’étudier l’ascendant exercé par Mallarmé chez Paul Morin, mais aussi chez René Chopin, un
poète qui, dans Le cœur en exil (1913), adopte une poétique de la suggestion directement inspirée de Mallarmé. Il s’agira, autrement dit, de voir comment la poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (et plus largement l’esthétique symboliste) a joué un rôle significatif dans le développement de la modernité poétique au Québec.
Antoine Boisclair
Proposition de communication « L’“américanisme” de Baudelaire chez les poètes
québécois au tournant du XXe siècle »
Dans des Notes préparatoires qu’il amasse en vue d’écrire un article sur Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue relève ce qu’il appelle son « américanisme », un aspect qu’a bien mis en lumière un article de Daniel Grojnowski (2003). Selon Laforgue, Baudelaire a conservé de l’esthétique d’Edgar Poe, qu’il a traduit comme on sait, un goût pour l’image qui mêle l’idéal et le concret, dans une écriture marquée par la témérité, l’énormité et la crudité. Il en voit un exemple particulier dans l’utilisation de l’adverbe « très », comme dans « Que diras-‐tu ce soir… ». Des comparaisons comme celle que présente « Le Beau Navire » lui semblent particulièrement représentatives de cet esprit « yankee », comme lorsque Baudelaire dit : « Ta gorge triomphante est une belle armoire ». En ce sens Baudelaire inaugure une nouvelle tradition qui commence à s’implanter dans la poésie française à la fin du XIXe siècle, où les œuvres communiquent de plus en plus avec les œuvres étrangères, américaines notamment. On sait que Laforgue lui-‐même est né à Montevideo, tout comme Lautréamont ; que quelques vers-‐libristes de la fin du siècle sont d’origine américaine, comme Francis Vielé-‐Griffin et Stuart Merrill ; et surtout, que la traduction des Leaves of Grass de Walt Whitman va considérablement marquer cette époque. Il sera dès lors intéressant de voir comment se manifeste cet « américanisme » dans une littérature qui est autant marquée par l’ascendance française que par l’ascendance américaine, soit la littérature québécoise. D’Émile Nelligan à Alfred Desrochers, Baudelaire demeure une source très présente, en qui on trouve un modèle de prosodie bien ciselée, d’âme sensible ou d’imagination fertile. Même si on peinerait à lier le dandysme d’un Nelligan à l’esprit du terroir d’un Desrochers, il semble que les deux conservent, de manières différentes, l’esprit yankee que met en œuvre Baudelaire. D’autres poètes de cette époque pourraient également servir d’exemples ; on pense notamment à Charles Gill, Marcel Dugas, Arthur de Bussières. On sera par ailleurs attentif au fait que l’américanisme de ces poètes est possiblement retourné, par rapport à la forme qu’il reçoit chez Baudelaire. En effet, toujours selon Laforgue, Baudelaire contrevient alors aux règles de bon goût français et étonne par sa témérité. Mais on peut penser que le poète québécois procède à l’inverse, soit qu’il parte d’une expression sauvage pour accéder, par degrés, à une expression raffinée, « à la française ». Il est clair que les influences des poètes québécois, dès cette époque, sont métissées ; ce qui, paradoxalement, les situe en phase avec les esthétiques les plus innovantes du tournant du XXe siècle.
Nelson Charest Université d’Ottawa
Le récit des Fleurs du Mal ou la métamorphose du vampire
Dans sa défense contre les accusations d’immoralité portées à son recueil Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire demandait que son livre soit « jugé dans son ensemble, et alors il en ressort[irait] une terrible moralité ». Il ne s’agit pas ici de défendre le recueil contre de vieilles accusations, maintenant dépassées. Dans cette communication, je souhaite montrer que le recueil peut être lu non seulement comme un ensemble, mais comme un récit. En prêtant une attention particulière aux premiers textes (le poème liminaire et « Bénédiction ») et au dernier texte (« Le voyage »), le fil qui soutient l’ensemble est aisé à retracer : de la naissance à la mort du poète, et entre les deux, une oscillation entre l’idéal et le spleen, les promenades dans Paris, le vin et la poésie. J’aimerais non seulement proposer de lire Les Fleurs du Mal comme un récit, mais comme un récit fantastique, selon l’acception moderne du terme, c’est-‐à-‐dire comme une « réflexion sur le réel ».
Cynthia Harvey Université du Québec à Chicoutimi Département des arts et lettres 555 boul. de l’Université Chicoutimi (Québec) G7H 2B1
«L'Écho des jeunes et la première modernité littéraire québécoise»
L’historiographie de la modernité littéraire au Québec a souligné l’importance de l’École littéraire de Montréal et la place toute particulière occupée par Nelligan. Ce faisant, elle a négligé des précurseurs d’un modernisme souvent plus audacieux mais dont les proclamations et les œuvres fragmentaires restent enfouies dans des périodiques rares et mal connus. Ces devanciers sont cependant intéressants car leur démarche est très proche de celle des avant-‐gardes européennes contemporaines, qu’ils connaissent de loin, mais manifestement bien. Des liens existent, encore très mal connus, mais les manières de s’affirmer sont identiques: pratique du groupuscule, déclarations frondeuses, culte de la petite revue, éclat éphémère, puis fusion dans des mouvements plus larges qui captent mieux l’attention du public lettré. L’Écho des Jeunes est le meilleur représentant de cette avant-‐garde oubliée, dont je retracerai quelques étapes en évoquant diverses revues représentatives de ce moment «moderne» bien particulier de l’histoire littéraire québécoise.
Michel Pierssens Université de Montréal
Paul Bourget and La Nouvelle-‐France
The genre of travel literature in the nineteenth century, particularly in the francophone context, allowed European writers to compare the Old World with the New World and cast judgments about democracy, religion, and race in comparison to Europe, themes which are particularly
relevant to our discussion about modernity. One such example of this literature is Outre-‐Mer by Paul Bourget which was written over an eight month period beginning in July 1893 and was published in Paris in 1895. Bourget is best known for his 1883 collection Essais de psychologie contemporaine and for his 1889 novel Le disciple. Although his work is viewed largely as minor literature today, in the 1880s and 1890s, he was essentially a literary celebrity. Thus, in 1893 when he visited Canada at the very beginning of his trip he was received with great fan fare and the events of his three-‐week vacation were chronicled in nearly every Francophone Quebec Journal. However, when the book was published in 1895, the Canadians were surprised to find that Bourget did not mention them once, as if he had never even gone to Canada. The outcry from the Canadian public, in my opinion, was not just about being snubbed by a literary celebrity, but showed that French-‐speaking Canadians genuinely wanted to hear Paul Bourget’s opinion about their culture and society. To meet this need, a Canadian journalist and editor named Sylva Clapin wrote Sensations de Nouvelle-‐France with the subtitle “Pour faire suite à Outre-‐Mer” and signed the book Paul Bourget.
My communication seeks to study Sylva Clapin’s appropriation of Bourget’s political and social ideology which he used to create his forgery and launch a polemic in the francophone journals of Québec in 1895. At the core of Bourget’s vision is the concept that while Democracy, Science (Positivism), and the problems of Race were essentially destroying the Old World, they were at the heart of what made the Americas great. These are the tools that Clapin applied to his study of French-‐speaking Canada which I propose to explore in my communication.
Daniel Ridge Vanderbilt University
Saint-‐Denys Garneau, Anne Hébert et Jacques Brault: trois grands poètes québécois lecteurs de Baudelaire
Le jeune Hector de Saint-‐Denys Garneau lit Baudelaire dès 1930 et invoquera à diverses reprises cette figure tutélaire de la poésie moderne dans son journal entre 1930 et 1939. Selon l’historien de la littérature Gilles Marcotte, les jeunes gens de La Relève, une revue fondée au Canada français en mars 1934, auraient découvert Les Fleurs du mal par l’entremise de leur professeur de Belles-‐Lettres au collège : « Je pense aux étudiants qui devaient fonder La Relève, Robert Élie, Jean Le Moyne, Saint-‐Denys Garneau, qui découvrirent Baudelaire, au Collège Sainte-‐Marie, grâce à l’ouverture d’esprit d’un professeur exceptionnel, le père d’Auteuil . »
Il est intéressant d’observer que le même père jésuite écrira, en 1942, un article élogieux sur le premier recueil d’Anne Hébert : Les Songes en équilibre. Par l’entremise de son cousin Saint-‐Denys Garneau, qu’elle admire, Anne Hébert fait elle-‐même la découverte de la poésie moderne dans les années 1930, aussi bien celle de Charles Baudelaire que de Paul Claudel ou de Pierre Jean Jouve. Tout comme son cousin, qui lui fait découvrir ces auteurs, c’est Baudelaire qu’elle tient en plus haute estime, lorsqu’il s’agit de jeter « sur le mal une lumière impitoyable et d’une lucidité telle que le monde en frémit encore . » Et, à l’instar de l’auteur des Fleurs du mal, elle voudra révéler la nature duelle de l’être humain, aux prises avec les forces adverses du temps qui passe, en mettant à profit sa compréhension de la révolte et du désir individuels.
Quand elle se rend pour la première fois à Paris, en 1954, Anne Hébert loue une chambre à l’Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, là même où Baudelaire vécut et écrivit quelques-‐uns des poèmes des Fleurs du mal. À l’occasion du Centenaire de la mort de Baudelaire, elle participe à des événements commémoratifs à Namur, en Belgique, à l’automne 1967. Elle est invitée aussi par Pierre Emmanuel à lire des poèmes dans le cadre d’autres célébrations qui devaient se tenir au Petit Odéon, les 9 et 10 mai 1968, mais l’événement est annulé en raison des troubles civiques et des émeutes à Paris. Quand elle compose son dernier recueil, Poèmes pour la main gauche, au printemps 1996, elle recopie à la main des poèmes de Baudelaire, s’en inspire au moment de parler de la mort et du mystère de l’existence, et de formuler des sensations.
En plus d’être poète, Jacques Brault a été professeur de littérature à l’Université de Montréal. Grand lecteur de Baudelaire dans les années 1950, il l’enseigne toujours dans les années 1990. Ce créateur doublé d’un critique est, pour Jacques Brault aussi, un confrère en lucidité. Dans un article qu’il publie en 1967 à l’occasion du centenaire de la mort de Baudelaire, Brault lui rend hommage, et consigne, en marge du texte: « Baudelaire rend notre poésie plus anticipatrice que prophétique, moins sentimentale que psychique, il lui permet de recentrer dans le poème l’âme du monde, cette réalité des réalités d’où chacun peut confier à chacun: J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans. »
Dans notre communication, nous voudrions souligner la fortune de Baudelaire au Québec en faisant ressortir l’influence durable que « l’impitoyable lucidité » de l’artiste a exercée sur trois de nos plus grands poètes. Nous analyserons quelques intertextes baudelairiens dans les écrits de ces passeurs culturels, dont on peut difficilement aborder la poésie sans invoquer cette figure tutélaire de la modernité poétique.
1 MARCOTTE, Gilles (2000), « Autobiographie d’un non-‐poète », Le Lecteur de poèmes, Montréal, Boréal, p. 8.
2 GARNEAU, Hector de Saint-‐Denys (1954), Journal, Montréal, Beauchemin, p. 47
3 BRAULT, Jacques, « Fragment d’un “Baudelaire”», dans Chemin faisant, Montréal, Les Éditions La Presse, 1975, p. 103-‐104.
Nathalie Watteyne Université de Sherbrooke
The Modern Definition of a National Literature
This paper traces a set of concepts that underlie the definition of literature as the product of a nation. In an obvious way, it is meaningful to classify works of literature by the language bounded by national territory, giving rise to the study of German literature, or French literature, or English literature. Literature therefore becomes the expression of a nation’s particular language. No literature can be studied apart from the poetic, rhetorical, properties specific to the language in which it is written, even in some cases down to the appearance of the language as letters or characters on a page. But language by itself is insufficient as a category of literary classification when we speak of these literatures as expressive of the history, culture, values of the populations that speak those languages. Other forces and ideas are at work behind the common practice of asking students and scholars to study French literary history, or Spanish