COLLOQUE
NERVAL REVISITED
dans le cadre du Twenty-Ninth Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium qui se tiendra a The University of Arizona, Tucson, entre le 23 et le 25 octobre 2003.
Evelyne Ender a eu l'obligeance de nous communiquer les resumes des trois communications sur Nerval.
Aimee Kilbane, (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Community, Wandering and the Bohemian in Gerard de Nerval”.
Bohemian subculture in nineteenth-century Paris was characterized by its resistance to the bourgeois world’s commitment to conformity, industry, and capitalist exchange. Nerval’s writings reflect both the community and the isolation that resulted from the rejection of bourgeois values. Works such as Petits châteaux de Bohême and La Bohême galante nostalgically describe the community of romantic artists of Nerval’s youth, while Voyage en Orient, Promenades et souvenirs, Les Nuits d’octobre point to Nerval’s compulsion to wander, both within Paris and abroad. To travel in this way is to make oneself foreign, which served to accentuate Nerval’s dissociation from the dominant culture and enabled him to inhabit the outsider’s position. I will examine Nerval’s contribution to the image of the bohemian, the paradox of this subculture typified by both a camaraderie of outsiders and the need to escape, as well as the appeal of travel linked to unsettling changes occurring at home.
Jonathan Strauss (Miami University), “Writing into silence".
This paper examines a paradox in the use of language, which structures the relation between individuality and expression and is acute in Nerval, because of the isolating effect of his madness. Few authors would seem as changeable, in their style, existence or persona. Yet Nerval was deeply troubled by the impossibility of change and by a totalizing, hyperbolic subjectivity reminiscent of the worst criticisms directed at Hegel’s hegemonic and panlogistic world-historical subject. This world without another rightly horrified Nerval, for inside it new knowledge or genuine change was impossible. His response to Janin’s “epitaph” reveals his fear that he would never again be able to “me faire écouter sérieusement.” Is change possible if others will not listen? Nerval brings us to this paradox: there are no others unless they answer us, but in answering, they are no longer others. It is around this crux, I argue, that Nerval’s madness turns.
Evelyne Ender, (Harvard University), “Nerval et la science du souvenir”.
Walter Benjamin a demontre, a travers Baudelaire et Proust, que la modernite est marquee par la recherche de signifiants de l’experience et donc par la rememoration. Nerval prefigure ce changement en revolutionnant la conception de la memoire subjective. Mais l’apport nervalien n’est pas que culturel, il est egalement scientifique. La lecture de Sylvie montre ainsi comment l’ecriture de Nerval prefigure les découvertes recentes sur la memoire affective en psychologie et neurologie. Le texte presente en effet de facon exemplaire comment la construction de scenes mnesiques permet le deploiement d’une memoire devenue le fondement même d’une ressaisie de la subjectivite. L’on comprend mieux alors pourquoi la « recomposition du souvenir » propre a Sylvie acquiert une fonction therapeutique. En resume, en ecrivant Nerval ne fait pas que soigner sa folie, il offre les premieres esquisses d’une psychologie de l’imagination annoncant les decouvertes de chercheurs tels qu’Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio ou Jean-Pierre Changeux.
ARTICLE
Lieven D'hulst, « Fonctions de la citation poetique dans *La Boheme galante* et *Petits chateaux de Boheme* de Nerval », in Nathalie Vincent-Munnia, Simone Bernard-Griffiths & Robert Pickering, dir., *Aux origines du poeme en prose francais (1750-1850)*, Paris, Honore Champion editeur, 2003, pp. 416-429.
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