Annie Ramel | Université Lumière Lyon 2 (original) (raw)
Papers by Annie Ramel
Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, Dec 31, 2002
FATHOM, Dec 4, 2022
In the diegesis of Hardy's novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal... more In the diegesis of Hardy's novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. The letter 1 is imprinted on the real of human bodies, and it "killeth", as announced in the preface to Jude the Obscure. Tragedy often results from a linguistic error, "the fundamental error of taking figures of speech literally" (Hillis Miller 13), of conflating bodies and tropes. In Lacanian terms, we could speak of a deadly confusion between the Real and the Symbolic, or between nature and culture (Ramel 2015, 37-42). In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the bad bread made from the corn supplied by Henchard is said to be "unprincipled" (Hardy 1987, 32) because Henchard is an "unprincipled" man who sold his wife like a mare on a fair-a fact of which the Casterbridge people are ignorant: the moral judgment concerning him has materialized in the concrete essence of things, in the corn, and in the taste of the bread. The hypallage "unprincipled bread" is taken to the letter, its metaphorical function is lost, culture has left its inscription on nature. Similarly, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's "corporeal blight" (Hardy 1991, 129), which many Victorians viewed as a moral "fault", ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into the "sticky blights which, though snowwhite on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin" (127). The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess's body: "Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive?" (77). Nature here is impregnated by culture, bodies are "intextuated" (De Certeau) or, to put it the other way round, the sign is incarnated-for the incarnation of the sign and the intextuation of the body are two sides of the same coin, an idea which Elisabeth Bronfen condensed in her formulation, "Insigned Bodies-Embodied Signs" (Bronfen 66) 2. Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the "black flag" fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a
Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks, 2018
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
Slavoj Zizek has recently argued that the XXth century is characterized by the "passion for ... more Slavoj Zizek has recently argued that the XXth century is characterized by the "passion for the real," which is an exact inversion of the passion for semblances: beneath our modern passion for virtual reality there lurks a longing for "the experience of the real world of material decay." The Picture of Dorian Gray was written in a period of transition between the XIXth century and the XXth, and my point is that Wilde's aestheticism must be re-appraised in the light of Zizek's thought. A study of doors and windows in the novel shows that Dorian commits a major transgression which consists in mistaking the "window" of fantasy for a "door" that leads beyond the pleasure principle and provides "the thrill of the Real". Dorian's passion is not so much for beauty and art, but for the decomposing portrait, its grey and amorphous matter, the "palpitating life substance prior to symbolic mortification" from which he derives exquisite enjoyment.
The 69th volume of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens is an issue that compiles eight spontaneous ... more The 69th volume of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens is an issue that compiles eight spontaneous contributions from various fields of research. They compose its first section simply entitled Miscellany. This part features in no specific order the questioning of the heroic in Rider Haggard’s fiction, the way new sound technology fashioned Tennyson’s poetry, love relationships in Tasma’s antipodal fiction, Walter Pater’s dark aestheticism on the one hand and his consideration of old age on the other, the exotic eroticism pervading Daniel Deronda, the mystical ecstasy in Christina Rossetti’s poetry, and the construction of mid-Victorian suburban fiction. The second section is composed of seven contributions by Hardy specialists who attended the annual conference in Lyon in 2007. This part starts with Hardy’s now proverbial “moments of vision” where the woman, object of the male gaze, dissolves the screen and allows a new mode of writing to emerge; it is followed by Hardy’s poetics of s...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université Paris Descartes, 2016
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Diderot, 2018
Tess d'Urberville (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) and Eustacia Vye (The Return of the Native)... more Tess d'Urberville (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) and Eustacia Vye (The Return of the Native) are tragic scapegoats whose function in the diegesis may be revisited in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the field of our reality, there is always "more than meets the eye," because of the exclusion from it of what Lacan has called object small a. Not so in Hardy's tragic world, where the vacuity of the perspective is filled by an object which very nearly presentifies the "object-gaze"—one of the forms of object small a. That object is the heroine herself, who is singled out by a red stain and occupies in the visual field the place that should normally be a vacuum. A feminine figure of "unextracted" jouissance, she is a "spot" that comes in excess of reality, a surplus object whose very presence threatens her community with disintegration. Therefore she has to be sacrificed for object small a to be extracted and for the consistency ...
The “rich resting-place of silence” Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French la... more The “rich resting-place of silence” Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French law on intellectual property and is the exclusive property of the
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The "letter" was taken in its double acceptation: a written message, an epistolary exchange, used... more The "letter" was taken in its double acceptation: a written message, an epistolary exchange, used by people to communicate with each other, and a grapheme, the trace left on a page by a "man of letters"-those traces being made available to a multiplicity of readers through printing and publishing. In that second sense, the "letter" comes very close to referring to Hardy's writing, to his novels, short-stories, poems, notes, essays, letters, etc. For after all what is a literary text if not a collection of "letters", arranged and combined with each other to produce a meaning, and to give pleasure to a reader? In the first sense of the word "letter" (the letter as "epistle"), a further distinction appears necessary: between Hardy's personal letters, in which the speaker is the author himself, and the letters whose speaker is fictional, whether in a novel or in a poem. Letters in the real world, sent by real people, should be distinguished from letters within a text-like for instance the letters exchanged between Tess and her mother, or between Raye and Edith in "On the Western Circuit". We will focus mostly on the second category. If we take "letter" in the second acceptation (a grapheme), we realize that the "letters" of a text are not only the printed letters on the page, but also the letters within the text, all the inscriptions that are part of the diegetic world: for instance the fiery red letters painted on a stile by a religious fanatic in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the letters engraved on the marble stones at Kingsbere, those of "The Compleat Fortune-Teller" (a book "so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached the edge of the type"; Hardy 2003, 23), the letters on the coffin-plate that tell the two suitors that their beloved Elfride is dead in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the letters engraved by Jude, the words chalked by Gabriel Oak on Fanny's coffin, etc. All those are letters within the text. Letters within the text, whether they are graphemes or epistles, raise a crucial question:
Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, Dec 31, 2002
FATHOM, Dec 4, 2022
In the diegesis of Hardy's novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal... more In the diegesis of Hardy's novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. The letter 1 is imprinted on the real of human bodies, and it "killeth", as announced in the preface to Jude the Obscure. Tragedy often results from a linguistic error, "the fundamental error of taking figures of speech literally" (Hillis Miller 13), of conflating bodies and tropes. In Lacanian terms, we could speak of a deadly confusion between the Real and the Symbolic, or between nature and culture (Ramel 2015, 37-42). In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the bad bread made from the corn supplied by Henchard is said to be "unprincipled" (Hardy 1987, 32) because Henchard is an "unprincipled" man who sold his wife like a mare on a fair-a fact of which the Casterbridge people are ignorant: the moral judgment concerning him has materialized in the concrete essence of things, in the corn, and in the taste of the bread. The hypallage "unprincipled bread" is taken to the letter, its metaphorical function is lost, culture has left its inscription on nature. Similarly, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's "corporeal blight" (Hardy 1991, 129), which many Victorians viewed as a moral "fault", ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into the "sticky blights which, though snowwhite on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin" (127). The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess's body: "Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive?" (77). Nature here is impregnated by culture, bodies are "intextuated" (De Certeau) or, to put it the other way round, the sign is incarnated-for the incarnation of the sign and the intextuation of the body are two sides of the same coin, an idea which Elisabeth Bronfen condensed in her formulation, "Insigned Bodies-Embodied Signs" (Bronfen 66) 2. Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the "black flag" fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a
Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks, 2018
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
Slavoj Zizek has recently argued that the XXth century is characterized by the "passion for ... more Slavoj Zizek has recently argued that the XXth century is characterized by the "passion for the real," which is an exact inversion of the passion for semblances: beneath our modern passion for virtual reality there lurks a longing for "the experience of the real world of material decay." The Picture of Dorian Gray was written in a period of transition between the XIXth century and the XXth, and my point is that Wilde's aestheticism must be re-appraised in the light of Zizek's thought. A study of doors and windows in the novel shows that Dorian commits a major transgression which consists in mistaking the "window" of fantasy for a "door" that leads beyond the pleasure principle and provides "the thrill of the Real". Dorian's passion is not so much for beauty and art, but for the decomposing portrait, its grey and amorphous matter, the "palpitating life substance prior to symbolic mortification" from which he derives exquisite enjoyment.
The 69th volume of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens is an issue that compiles eight spontaneous ... more The 69th volume of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens is an issue that compiles eight spontaneous contributions from various fields of research. They compose its first section simply entitled Miscellany. This part features in no specific order the questioning of the heroic in Rider Haggard’s fiction, the way new sound technology fashioned Tennyson’s poetry, love relationships in Tasma’s antipodal fiction, Walter Pater’s dark aestheticism on the one hand and his consideration of old age on the other, the exotic eroticism pervading Daniel Deronda, the mystical ecstasy in Christina Rossetti’s poetry, and the construction of mid-Victorian suburban fiction. The second section is composed of seven contributions by Hardy specialists who attended the annual conference in Lyon in 2007. This part starts with Hardy’s now proverbial “moments of vision” where the woman, object of the male gaze, dissolves the screen and allows a new mode of writing to emerge; it is followed by Hardy’s poetics of s...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université Paris Descartes, 2016
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Diderot, 2018
Tess d'Urberville (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) and Eustacia Vye (The Return of the Native)... more Tess d'Urberville (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) and Eustacia Vye (The Return of the Native) are tragic scapegoats whose function in the diegesis may be revisited in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the field of our reality, there is always "more than meets the eye," because of the exclusion from it of what Lacan has called object small a. Not so in Hardy's tragic world, where the vacuity of the perspective is filled by an object which very nearly presentifies the "object-gaze"—one of the forms of object small a. That object is the heroine herself, who is singled out by a red stain and occupies in the visual field the place that should normally be a vacuum. A feminine figure of "unextracted" jouissance, she is a "spot" that comes in excess of reality, a surplus object whose very presence threatens her community with disintegration. Therefore she has to be sacrificed for object small a to be extracted and for the consistency ...
The “rich resting-place of silence” Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French la... more The “rich resting-place of silence” Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French law on intellectual property and is the exclusive property of the
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The "letter" was taken in its double acceptation: a written message, an epistolary exchange, used... more The "letter" was taken in its double acceptation: a written message, an epistolary exchange, used by people to communicate with each other, and a grapheme, the trace left on a page by a "man of letters"-those traces being made available to a multiplicity of readers through printing and publishing. In that second sense, the "letter" comes very close to referring to Hardy's writing, to his novels, short-stories, poems, notes, essays, letters, etc. For after all what is a literary text if not a collection of "letters", arranged and combined with each other to produce a meaning, and to give pleasure to a reader? In the first sense of the word "letter" (the letter as "epistle"), a further distinction appears necessary: between Hardy's personal letters, in which the speaker is the author himself, and the letters whose speaker is fictional, whether in a novel or in a poem. Letters in the real world, sent by real people, should be distinguished from letters within a text-like for instance the letters exchanged between Tess and her mother, or between Raye and Edith in "On the Western Circuit". We will focus mostly on the second category. If we take "letter" in the second acceptation (a grapheme), we realize that the "letters" of a text are not only the printed letters on the page, but also the letters within the text, all the inscriptions that are part of the diegetic world: for instance the fiery red letters painted on a stile by a religious fanatic in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the letters engraved on the marble stones at Kingsbere, those of "The Compleat Fortune-Teller" (a book "so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached the edge of the type"; Hardy 2003, 23), the letters on the coffin-plate that tell the two suitors that their beloved Elfride is dead in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the letters engraved by Jude, the words chalked by Gabriel Oak on Fanny's coffin, etc. All those are letters within the text. Letters within the text, whether they are graphemes or epistles, raise a crucial question: