Presentation Abstracts

Presentation Abstracts / Résumés des présentations

Here, you can read abstracts of the speakers' presentations.

Ici vous pouvez lire les résumés des présentations qui se feront au colloque.

Keynote Speakers:

Annegret Fauser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Music

Women, Creativity, Death: Musical Journeys Out of World War I

In the aftermath of World War I, music was often cast as a malleable form of human expression that could transcend borders, (re-)define cultural communities, and offer a means to engage with traumatic loss through death, devastation, and disfigurement. The broad, transnational context of music's role at the end of World War I frames the tighter focus of this keynote address, which reflects on the musical journeys of women creators out of war into the untried terrain of the 1920s. At the heart of the communication are responses to war and death by three women with ties to Paris: Lili and Nadia Boulanger and Wanda Landowska.

Alison Fell, University of Leeds, School of Modern Languages & Cultures

Writing the Woman's War Story: French WW1 Nursing Memoirs and Female Resistance Narratives

In the interwar years, there was a moral economy of suffering associated with the First World War that privileged the combatant's war story above all others. Female characters in French ex-servicemen's literary evocations of the war tended to be distinctly two-dimensional in nature. Finding a model and an audience for a woman's perspective was not easy. However, the nurse's story counted in post-war accounts because they circulated close to what was understood as the real war story: front-line combatant experience. Equally, the women who participated in Resistance movements in occupied France and Belgium or who worked for the intelligence services were often heroized, both during and after the war, as female combatants. In this paper Alison Fell will explore examples of both nurse writing and Resistance memoirs as examples of attempts to write women into French national memories of the war.

Presenters:

Stephen Armstrong, University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music

Music, Murder, and the Demonic Feminine in Dorothy L. Sayers's The Nine Tailors

In this paper Stephen Armstrong reads the bells in Dorothy L. Sayers's The Nine Tailors (1934) as a chorus of the demonic feminine, arguing that the overt gender conflicts of her other novels are here sublimated into a Freudian nightmare -- the bells are consistently characterized as female, their chamber is a site of Gothic terror, and their voices kill. When shell-shocked Lord Peter Wimsey finally encounters the bells in their full horror, the ensuing scene is at once revelation, rape, and an echo of the Great War. Sayers frequently invokes music as a humanizing influence, but in The Nine Tailors she portrays English bell-ringing as impersonal, mathematical noise. The collapse of music into noise critiques the devolution of the detective-story into a mere puzzle -- because the murder victim is literally killed by noise, the intellectual structures built around the assumption of human agency fall apart in the novel's shattering conclusion.

Sarah-Jeanne Beauchamp-Houde, Université de Montréal, Littératures de langue française

(Présente avec Andrea Oberhuber)

Agents de troubles dans La Dame à la louve de Renée Vivien et Héroïnes de Claude Cahun

Les figures de la New Woman et de la Garçonne sont intimement liées aux grands bouleversements socio-politiques et culturels que connurent la plupart des pays occidentaux. Les incarnations d'un féminin reconfiguré sous les signes de nouveaux enjeux sociaux et culturels sont travaillées dans le recueil de nouvelles de Renée Vivien, La Dame à la louve (1904), et dans celui de Claude Cahun, Héroines (1924). Les auteures y proposent des réécritures de figures myth(olog)iques (Sapho, Pénélope, Ève, Salomé, Cendrillon, l'Androgyne, etc.) les faisant apparaître comme des femmes nouvelles pour les unes et comme des garçonnes pour les autres. Dans tous les cas de figure, les protagonistes s'avèrent des agents perturbateurs de l'ordre des sexes permettent aux auteures de participer aux débats de société autour de la confusion des genres et de la perte des repères identitaires.

Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, McGill University, Music Research

Maple Leaf Drag: On Vera Guilaroff, Improvisational Agency, and Early Jazz Historiography

This presentation explores the early career of the first woman to record a jazz record in Canada: pianist, composer, and radio broadcaster Vera Guilaroff (1902-1974). How can recovering the narrative of a British-born, Montreal-based, white Jewish woman who began playing ragtime and other popular syncopated music shortly after the Great War enrich our understanding of early jazz historiography? First, Vanessa Blais-Tremblay examines the identity politics at play when terms like "popular entertainer," "ragtime pianist," "jazz musician," or "a lady of many talents" are used to "straighten up" her cultural legacy (Tucker 2008). Second, she draws on two oral history segments preserved on tape, as well as Guilaroff's 1926 recording of "Maple Leaf Rag" to map the ways in which gender and identity factored into the kinds of sounds that she produced.

Stephanie Brynes, University of Texas at Austin, French and Italian

Birthing a New Narrative: the Subversion of Maternal Ideology in Magali-Boisnard's Poetic Collection, Le Chant des Femmes

In this presentation, Stephanie Brynes explores how Magali-Boisnard subverts the portrait of motherhood found in mainstream, contemporary Great War poetry. Drawing on Nancy Sloan Goldberg's notion of "maternal ideology" to contextualize the masculine narrative, she suggests Magali-Boisnard refuses the conflation of woman with patrie by portraying mothers as the resilient, hard-working, and autonomous women they were, and in doing so, reclaims motherhood as a position of individual and political strength. She argues her poetry therefore constitutes a powerful example of écriture féminine, which, in line with Cixous' thought, dislocates the masculine narrative by writing from within its discourse to redefine the value of mothers and motherhood in France during and after the First World War. In this way, Le Chant des Femmes rejects the image of woman as victim of war, and instead celebrates her subjectivity, creativity, and war-time contributions.

Melanie E. Collado, University of Lethbridge, Modern Languages

Un roman civil en 1914 et La veillée des armes: deux romancières "captent l'air de la guerre"

Marcelle Tinayre et Lucie Delarue Mardrus figurent parmi les romancières de cette génération oubliée dont parle Jennifer Milligan dans The Forgotten Generation (1996). Toutes deux ont écrit au moins un roman portant sur la Grande Guerre et mis en scène des héroïnes dans la période de l'après-guerre. Dans sa communication, Melanie propose d'étudier la façon dont ces auteures traitent les changements de société résultant de la guerre dans deux de leur romans: La veillée des armes (1915) et un roman civil en 1914 (1914) ainsi que la thématique qu'elles privilégient après la guerre: les romans historiques pour Marcelle Tinayre et les romans d'artistes pour Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.

Philip Collington, Niagara University, College of Arts and Sciences AND Tara Collington, University of Waterloo, French Studies

An Américaine in Paris: Clara Longworth de Chambrun, Critic, Translator, Biographer, Forgotten Shakespearean

Dismissed for producing naive readings of Shakespeare's plays and for relying on conjecture in her biography of the Bard, Clara Longworth de Chambrun (1873-1954) is now forgotten in Shakespeare criticism. But this should not detract from the importance of her prolific scholarly endeavours. In this presentation, Philip and Tara Collington outline her contributions to Shakespeare studies, especially in France during the interwar period and beyond. Chambrun translated King John for the French stage, where it played at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Occupied Paris. She won the Prix Bordin in 1925, and in 1928 was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. They also explore how her family's experience of war influenced her interpretations of Shakespeare (her husband was decorated for valour at the battles of the Marne, Verdun, and the Somme) as well as the lasting impact of her social advocacy (e.g., she was a founding member of the American Library in Paris [est. 1920]).

Beverly J. Evans, State University of New York at Geneseo, Department of Languages and Literatures

Marie Laurencin: From Apollinaire et ses amis to the Ballets Russes

Some women found their creative pursuits interrupted by the war, only to be resumed the post-war climate presented opportunities to participate in reconstruction efforts. Among those is French artist Marie Laurencin. Muse of the artistic and literary community of pre-war Paris and recognized artist in her own right, her fortune took a turn upon her marriage to a German pacifist in 1914, forcing the pair into exile. Laurencin returned to Paris in 1921, when she divorced her husband and relaunched her professional career by designing sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, while being in high demand as a portrait painter. Although Marie Laurencin remains known largely for her association with the Parisian avant-garde circle and her legendary love affair with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire prior to the war, this presentation will showcase how she seized the opportunity to make creative choices and explore new directions following its conclusion.

Sarah Fuchs Sampson, Syracuse University, Art & Music Histories

Emma Calvé's campagne de propagande

Shortly after France entered the grande guerre, the French soprano Emma Calvé set sail for New York. Between January 1915 and June 1916, the singer devoted herself to raising awareness of the French people's suffering and money to support the war effort. Drawing upon Calvé's letters, memoirs, and recordings and her reception in the American and French press, this paper offers the first in-depth examination of Calvé's wartime activities. Sarah Fuchs Sampson suggests that the repertoire Calvé chose for her benefit concerts and recordings---and the highly expressive mode of delivery she brought to both---molded the American people's perceptions of the conflict taking place across the ocean. Ultimately, she argues that, during a time in which the United States government maintained its neutrality, Calvé's concert tour helped to galvanize American citizens' support for France.

Élodie Gaden, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), UMR THALIM

Valentine de Saint-Point à New York. Diffuser la Métachorie, penser la virilité, refonder l'humanité ?

En 1914, Valentine de Saint-Point fait partie des personnalités qui comptent dans le champ artistique parisien depuis une dizaine d'années en tant que poète, romancière, polémiste. Son implication pour des formes nouvelles, propres à dire ses aspirations à refonder un monde nouveau, emprunt de virilité et de spiritualité, l'a également conduite à élaborer la Métachorie. Or, en pleine guerre, c'est vers l'Espagne que Saint-Point commence un périple qui la mène ensuite aux États-Unis, où elle organise, le 3 avril 1917, le Festival de la Métachorie (Metropolitan Opera House, New York) et où elle donne une série de conférences sur Rodin. Nous étudierons trois axes : d'abord, comment la guerre actualise-t-elle les enjeux de la virilité théorisée dans ses précédentes oeuvres? Ensuite, en quoi l'artiste a-t-elle cherché à faire de New York un nouveau Paris de l'art, décentralisé, durant la guerre européenne? Enfin, pourquoi ce séjour aux États-Unis est-il déterminant pour la suite de son implication contre d'autres formes de conflits, en Égypte et en Syrie, durant l'entre-deux-guerres.

Sarah Gutsche-Miller, University of Toronto, Faculty of Music

Claiming the Stage for Women Choreographers: What Madame Stichel's Career in Parisian Theatres tells us about Institutional Constraints in the Early Twentieth Century

Now long forgotten, the two most celebrated Parisian choreographers in the early twentieth century were women, Madame Mariquita (c. 1838-1922) and Mme Stichel (1856-c. 1933). Beloved by audiences and praised by critics for their imagination and originality, both were highly influential, creating dozens of works for the Gaité, Folies-Bergère, Opéra, and Opéra-Comique that shaped the course of French dance history. A study of Mariquita's and Stichel's careers before and after WWI reveals, however, that the two choreographers had comparatively few opportunities for individual artistic expression, even after WWI. Using Mariquita and Stichel as case studies, Gutsche-Miller will discuss the institutional and cultural barriers that French women choreographers faced well past the war years.

Catherine Hughes, Saint Joseph's University, Department of Music, Theatre and Film

Lallah Vandervelde, Social Art, and Belgian Relief Efforts in Wartime London

Lallah Vandervelde, the socialist British wife of the Belgian Minister of State, was a proponent of the power of the arts to educate, agitate, and organize. Before 1914, her advocacy for working class and women's rights inspired suspicion from both liberals and conservatives in Belgium. As a refugee based in London during the war, however, Vandervelde harnessed these socialist sensibilities concerning the arts to achieve international success raising funds for Belgian relief organisations. Upon her return to Brussels in 1918, Vandervelde drew upon her wartime experience and expanded network of contacts to ease her return to projects of cultural uplift and expanded political rights in Belgium. By considering Vandervelde's focus on culture as a tool of social improvement before, during and after the war, this paper argues that wartime cultural and relief work abroad inspired the shape of socialist cultural projects in interwar Belgium, despite continued criticism from both conservatives and working-class socialists.

Margot Irvine, University of Guelph, School of Languages and Literatures

Judith Cladel, aux origines du Musée Rodin

Cette communication retracera le rôle joué par Judith Cladel (1873-1958) dans la création du Musée Rodin à Paris, en plein milieu de guerre, après la disparition du sculpteur Auguste Rodin en 1917. Nous montrerons que Cladel, l'auteure de la première biographie de Rodin, était aussi l'initiatrice de la création de cette institution, bien que, à sa grande déception, elle n'a pas été nommée première conservatrice du Musée. Nous examinerons les premières années difficiles de cette institution parisienne, ainsi que les conflits légaux qui opposent Cladel et Léonce Bénédite, le premier conservateur.

Jeffrey H. Jackson, Rhodes College, History

Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and the Queer Art of War

Avant-garde artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (born Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe) have received significant attention from historians of photography and scholars of gender and queer theory for their powerful photographs in the 1920s and 1930s which problematize gender categories. This paper seeks to understand their four-year resistance campaign against the German occupying army on the Channel Island of Jersey as the logical trajectory of their lives arguing that they developed the tools of anti-Nazi resistance during their years in Paris through their engagement with post-World War I culture and society. It analyzes examples of the extant leaflets which they addressed to Nazi soldiers to show how they used these tools to resist the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey to which they had expatriated in 1937.

Alexandra Laederich, Centre International Nadia et Lili Boulanger, Déléguée générale, Déléguée générale du centre

Plenary roundtable presentation on Lili Boulanger

Alexandra Laederich will present on the recently released personal documents of the fonds Boulanger at the Bibliothèque nationale, particularly as they relate to Lili and Nadia Boulanger's relationship toward the end of Lili's life. When Nadia Boulanger passed away in October 1979, sensitive documents within her archives were placed in a reserve, not to be opened until 30 years following her death. Those documents have since been opened and processed, but many scholars have yet to view them. Laederich's presentation will provide invaluable, new information on the Boulanger sisters' relationship, revising our understanding of the last years of Lili's short life and Nadia's support for her sister, as well as her relationship to Lili's late music.

Michael McGuire, Salem State College, History

Recreating France through Public Cinema: Anne Dike, Anne Morgan, and The Heritage of France (1919)

In 1919, Scotswoman Anne Dike and américaine Anne Morgan produced and screened The Heritage of France. The film was an exceptional part of the American Committee for Devastated France (ACDF), a humanitarian agency both women led that aided the Great War's Gallic victims. Heritage depicted the prewar, wartime, and postwar existences of some 60,000 people whom the ACDF resettled among eighty Aisne towns. Dike and Morgan made the motion picture to raise Americans' awareness of the war's adverse effects on war zone noncombatants; to exhibit the ACDF's virtuous manifold commercial, social, agricultural, and professional rehabilitation; to generate receipts from movie-goers for financing the aforementioned ACDF activities; and to entertain postwar inhabitants providing film auto-cameos---especially children---and distract them from their lackluster postwar labour. Heritage helped Aisne peasants and Anglo-American patricians revive cherished class and community norms, and transnationally created new postwar women's roles.

Valerie Mendelsohn, The New School in New York, Art and Social Engagement

Shaped by War: Mabel Gardner and Les Ateliers de l'art sacré

Mabel Gardner went to Paris towards the end of World War I to volunteer as a nurse. For a sculptor trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and born into a prominent Providence, R.I. family, Paris symbolized all the achievements of the artistic tradition, and yet her mission was one of charity. Refusing the dichotomy between art and service, this compelling artist converted to Catholicism during the war and became involved with the artists of the Ateliers de l'art sacré. Founded by Maurice Denis and Georges Desvaillières in 1919 as a way of both training artists and providing sacred art to the devastated churches after WWI the aim of the ateliers was to recreate the workshop traditions of the medieval cathedral. Valerie Mendelson will argue that the Great War changed Mabel Gardner and shaped her artistic production.

Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch, Angelo State University, Department of English and Modern Languages

When Filmmaking was Women's Business

During the war years (1914-1918) many European female artists, writers, and actors sought film as a new venue to express themselves, enabling them to become innovative film directors who often mentored others along the way. At that time, the European film industry was actually quite open to female newcomers. She will focus on three female directors who were raised in privileged middle-class families: Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger, and Esfir Shub. All three women began their careers in fields other than film. However, during WWI, or immediately thereafter, they realized the potential of this new medium, embracing it enthusiastically. They either significantly shaped existing film genres or they created new ones.

Andrea Oberhuber, Université de Montréal, Littératures de langue française

Agents de troubles dans La Dame à la louve de Renée Vivien et Héroïnes de Claude Cahun

Catherine Parayre, Brock University, Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (MLLC)

Expressions en formation : Broncia Koller-Pinell, artiste et amie d'artistes

Artiste déjà établie au début du vingtième siècle, Broncia Koller-Pinell (1863-1934) anime un salon fréquenté par de célèbres artistes viennois (Autriche). Elle encourage aussi de jeunes artistes, parmi eux Egon Schiele. De son vivant, son oeuvre est jugée trop changeante. En effet, Koller-Pinell pratique volontiers des l'impressionnisme français, de différents courants de la Sécession viennoise, de l'Atelier viennois ou, après la première guerre mondiale, de la Nouvelle objectivité. À sa mort, dans une période d'antisémitisme croissanttombent rapidement dans l'oubli. Depuis 1960, de rares expositions ont reconnu le rôle important qu'elle occupe dans l'art autrichien. Cette communication illustrera comment Koller-Pinell s'est employée à donner forme à la vie artistique de Vienne et à son propre parcours d'artiste en temps de guerre.

Pamela Pilch, Westminster Choir College, Department of Voice

Nora Douglas Holt: Racial Uplift and African-American Musical Culture in the Postwar Years

Nora Douglas Holt (1885 - 1974), the first African-American to receive a Master of Music in composition (1918) in the United States, became the Chicago Defender's first female music critic in 1917. As a composer, critic and teacher, Holt played a little-recognized but foundational role in the promotion of African-American classical musical culture during World War I and in the postwar period. During this time, thousands of disillusioned African-American soldiers returned home from the War; their artistic and cultural response and that of their community continues to remain relatively unexamined. This paper will examine Holt's published musical criticism between 1917 and 1923 for traces of the artistic response of the Chicago African-American musical community to the experience of the Great War.

Caroline Potter, University of London, Institute of Modern Languages Research

Plenary roundtable presentation on Lili Boulanger

Caroline Potter's presentation will build on her work with Lili Boulanger's March Gale, providing new perspectives on Lili Boulanger's work as a composer. The presentation will explore the background of the March's dedicatee, Jeanne Leygues, focusing on her family's artistic and political connections. It will discuss the trans-Atlantic transmission of this lost Boulanger work, owing to Leagues' husband being an American who fought in the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Potter will argue for the work's position in Lili Boulanger's output and as a work composed with the First World War as its backdrop. This presentation will be accompanied by a performance of the Marche by a University of Guelph student.

Roxane Prevost, University of Ottawa, School of Music

Lena Ashwell's Concerts at the Front: Women Artists on the Frontlines of France (1915-1918)

This paper traces the remarkable journey of Lena Ashwell (1872-1957) from her childhood in Canada to her efforts to bring music, drama, and dance to soldiers fighting in France during the first world war. Meeting much resistance from the War Office, she persisted and began these performances in 1915 with the financial support of Princess Helena Victoria (Adie, Fighting on the home front, 2013). Many courageous female artists participated in these performances and travelled to war zones in France to support soldiers on the front. The number of artists reached over 600 by 1918 with some staying for long periods of time (Farthing, WW1 Lena Ashwell Parties, 2014). The toll on these women performers was great, but their contributions became vital to the well-being of active soldiers, as documented by Ashwell herself in Modern Troubadours (1922).

Adrien Rannaud, Université du Québec à Montréal

Quand le conflit s'invite au Royaume des femmes : Madeleine, mentore littéraire et marraine de guerre pour le journal La Patrie (1914-1918)

Cette communication entend prendre appui sur les travaux de Chantal Savoie (2014) pour aborder la Première Guerre mondiale comme un événement venant infléchir le processus d'accès collectif des femmes à la littérature observable au tournant du 20e siècle au Québec. Le cas du Royaume des femmes, page féminine du quotidien La Patrie et que dirige Madeleine (pseud. AnneMarie Gleason), apparaît significatif de cette reconfiguration des pratiques discursives féminines. Avec le début du conflit, la correspondance, traversée par les conseils de lecture et d'écriture prodigués par la mentore Madeleine, accueille également les interrogations entourant le rôle potentiel des femmes dans la défense du pays et la promotion de la paix. La communication montrera ainsi comment le Royaume des femmes constitue un creuset de l'engagement au féminin et qui propulse la création par Madeleine, en 1919, d'un périodique littéraire et intellectuel d'importance, La Revue moderne.

Jillian Rogers, University College Cork, Music

On the Impossibility of Maintaining Lili's Presence: Corporeal Memory and the Failure of Composition in Nadia Boulanger's Musical Work of Mourning

Today Nadia Boulanger's career as a composer remains largely overlooked, while her decision to stop composing shortly after her sister Lili's death in 1918 continues to puzzle scholars. In this talk, Jillian Rogers situates Nadia's decision to stop composing within her broader concerns with mourning Lili. Through examination of archival materials and Nadia's published writings, she demonstrates that Nadia mourned Lili through practices designed to allow her to engage with Lili's memory in and through her body. Sometimes this entailed musical practices that viscerally reminded her of Lili, while in other instances Nadia engaged in bodily practices that allowed her to resemble her sister. With these practices in mind, Rogers analyzes both sisters' compositions and posits that, in finding herself unable to capture aspects of Lili's compositions in her own works, Nadia chose to focus on non-compositional musical activities.

Megan Sarno, Carleton College, Music

Claire Croiza, Mother and Muse

This paper will be presented in three sections. First, Megan Sarno will present Le Miroir de Jésus by André Caplet, including the circumstances of its creation, literary features of the poetry, and musical features both harmonic and textural. Second, she presents newly-translated archival documents relating to Croiza's collaboration on the project, her vision for its performances, and the personal weight she attached to it. Finally, she will explain biographical details, using insights from feminist critical theory, to show how and why Caplet and Croiza both considered this piece crucially connected to Croiza's personality and her identity as a motherly figure in the years before the late conception of her own son, Jean-Claude Honegger. As the First World War dramatically shaped both the poetry and composition of this work, themes of war and trauma will appear in each section of the paper.

Mary Ann Steggles, University of Manitoba, School of Art

Hedwig Bollhagen: Simple Crockery Maker is recognized as leading 20th century German designer, posthumously

Hedwig Bollhagen (1907-2001) became a leading ceramic designer in Germany. Born in 1907, she was greatly influenced by the Bauhaus. Through Nazi influence and some serendipity, Bollhagen was able to purchase the ceramics workshop of Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein (Grete Marks) at a greatly reduced price, when she was twenty-four years old. My paper explores the numerous strategies Bollhagen used to remain true to the humble crockery she made for the masses, resisting multiple attempts by the Nazi Party to have her create commemorative porcelain, objects that would have made her wealthy. She survived no less than two economic downturns while also managing not to be labelled a degenerate artist like her close friend and collaborator, Charles Crodel.

Artis Wodehouse, Independent Scholar, Music Research and Production

Women and the Machine: Great Player Piano Roll Arrangers, 1910-1930

During the first quarter of the 20th century the then enormously profitable player piano ignited an insatiable need for new music tailored to its performance technology. A vast army of skilled workers, irrespective of sex or ethnicity, arose to supply the leisure-time musical diversion of player piano rolls. Wodehouse will highlight five women who achieved creative distinction in the player piano/piano roll industry from the 'teens through 1930: Mae Brown (1884-1934), Muriel Pollock (1895-1971), Vee Lawnhurst (1895-1971), Edythe Baker (1899-1971) and Pauline Alpert (1912-1988). Wodehouse will reconstruct the musical antecedents and stylistic features of their work (using recorded examples), She will also illustrate mechanical details of the process of creating and using a piano roll. Wodehouse argues that women played a significant part in developing the music for this genre, and returns their contributions to the historical record.

Anna Zerbib, Université du Québec à Montréal, Études littéraires

Anna de Noailles, écrire le jardin après les bombes

On a reproché à Anna de Noailles d'écrire à rebours, de vouloir réanimer les fleurs séchées du Romantisme, c'était sans prêter attention à la question fondamentale que pose son oeuvre après la Première Guerre Mondiale : comment écrire l'amour, la nature, et le jour qui se lève quand on sait, à présent, avec tous ses contemporains, que l'on est mortel? La poète relève ce défi et fait de la reviviscence du Romantisme le lieu même de la découverte de la finitude. Elle écrit dans un espace en décomposition au tournant du siècle et ne cherche pas à redonner la vie à une poésie un peu passée à l'époque où elle écrit, mais à y insuffler la conscience du caractère éphémère de l'environnement qui nous entoure. En refusant de renoncer au lyrisme de la nature, Anna de Noailles choisit alors de faire du cadre bucolique le lieu d'une expérience de la disparition et de sa menace.

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Presentation Abstracts