Academic literature on the topic 'Fantasy fiction, Belgian (French)'

The article is devoted to an important phenomenon — political fiction as a kind of an ideological construction analogue. Fiction has deepened the fantasy traits of an ideological structure. Irrespective of its imaginary character, it can produce a real impact on political and other social processes. Fictitious politics flourished during the French revolution and got consolidated in the era of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

The paper analyzes the changes in interpreting magic, fairytale fiction that occurred in translated and original stories of the late 17th - first third of the 18th centuries. A number of fiction works of this period show representations of magic closely linked to the Christian worldview, with some works appearing referring to magic and sorcery as a non-judgmental category. The first Russian translations of fairy tales by M.-C. d’Aulnoy’s made in the Petrine era contributed to the appearance of pure genre fiction free from judgment. These were “The Tale of Florine” (1700 - late 1710s, “L’oiseau bleu”) and “The History of Prince Adolf” (1720-1730s, L’Ile de la Félicité). A fairy was an entirely unfamiliar character to the Russian reader. In The Tale of Florine, the word “fée” was translated by “ega baba” (“yaga baba”) commonly used to refer to women with demonic forces. Magical abilities were designated by “vorozhenie” (divination) and “yagina mudrost’” (yaga’s wisdom). In the manuscripts of The History of Prince Adolf, fairies appear as “goddesses” and “gods”, and magical abilities - “l’esprit de féerie” - as “divine spirit”. When describing magical actions, Russian translators of French fairy tales use everyday vocabulary related to the sphere of folk magical beliefs or associated with the Russian folklore and book tradition. In the period under study, we observe the formation of the genre category of fairy-tale magic and a gradual replacement of the category of “miracle” by a genre-conditioned understanding of magic.

"Phraseology is considered nowadays a well-established and promising field of study. However, phraseological variation is a real phenomenon that, in certain contexts, is a deliberate decision. Therefore, we suggest with this article an approach to phraseological variation as a stylistic device for the translation of fantasy and science fiction literature. To do so, we analyze the cases of phraseological variation drawn from the novel La Plaie, written by the French author Nathalie Henneberg, as a resource that encourages the contextualization of the readers within a fictional universe thanks to the rhetorical, semantic and cultural features of the original phraseological units. Results showed a wide range of phraseological variation with lexical terms related to the story."

Most translation theorists agree that source text fidelity results in a translation that aptly transmits the foreign cultural values and meaning embedded within the source language to a target culture. While the preservation of foreignness might be beneficial for the propagation of international artistic diversity, when translating works of popular fiction, domestication is key to a novel’s successful incorporation into the target literary system. In popular fiction translation, the goal is accessibility rather than artistic influence or cultural exchange, yet the necessary domestication can be problematic. This article examines the reception of the English-to-French translation of an epic fantasy novel by Clive Barker. Online reviews written by the French-speaking readership describe the translated text as aberrant of Barker’s oeuvre and incomprehensible. While it may be easy to dismiss this translation as yet another example of poor translation practices, knowing that the translator, Jean-Daniel Brèque, is an award-winning translator and that he has translated many works by other popular artists such as Stephen King and Dan Simmons points the blame elsewhere. An analysis of Jean-Daniel Brèque’s translation of Weaveworld reveals the detrimental effect that strict adherence to the source text can have on the reception of popular literature in translation and affirms that domestication is necessary to transform the source text into a version digestible and understandable by the target audience.

Melting Pot est une série francophone produite par la RTBF, l’une des chaines télévisées publiques francophones. La RTBF est un média officiel et national, et comme tel, il ne fait pas partie des médias minoritaires. Melting pot reflète cette situation puisque les protagonistes sont des membres de la majorité ethnique et culturelle de la population (francophone, blanc et belge). Cependant, face aux Flamands néerlandophones, les Belges francophones constituent une minorité en Belgique, un pays caractérisé par un conflit linguistique et politique, et Melting pot est aussi représentative de cette situation ambigüe à travers les intrigues secondaires et en élaborant un réseau complexe de significations autour du symbole représenté par le café le Melting Pot (à la fois un lieu, un biotope de personnages et un jeu sur la notion de “melting pot”). Cet article est une étude de cas basée sur l’analyse du contenu des 3 saisons de la série. Abstract: The RTBF (public Belgian television) can hardly be considered as a minority media. However, in the context of fictional production, the RTBF is not a powerful actor. Melting Pot is the only large-scale series currently produced by the channel. We can thus qualify it as a triple media exception: Belgian, French speaking, series. The fiction takes place in the Marolles district in Brussels. This area represents the “Belgian melting pot”: a mix of people, languages, origins... But how are these communities and languages represented, notably the French speaking (a minority in Belgium and a majority in Brussels) and the Flemish (a majority in Belgium and a minority in Brussels)? The question makes sense in a country divided by a political crisis for more than one year and where the question of identity crystallizes the debates. This article will put in context the Belgian production of fictions. A content analysis of the representations conveyed by the series will constitute the main part of the communication. An interview with the producer will unveil their initial intentions.

The interest of this research resides in the analysis of the only fiction series dealing with the functioning of the European Union: the French- Belgian-German production Parlement (Émilie Noblet and Jérémie Sein, 2020). Through a qualitative methodology, it seeks to answer a threefold re- search objective: (1) to analyze the main characters and their characteristic elements; (2) to identify the space-time relationship and the political actions addressed in fiction in order to provide realism to its development through the scenarios and arguments presented; and (3) to detect the existence of parallelisms between the European Union in the social imagery and the one presented in the series according to the theory of social representations, the reality effect and the Eurobarometer surveys. The results reveal that Parle- ment works with stereotypes and social perceptions about the European Union through satire but manages to offer pedagogical elements in all its epi- sodes. In this way, it accomplishes becoming a popular catalyst to bring Euro- pean politics closer to citizens, by projecting a more human and lighthearted image.

Meant to signal in its parodic title both the causal, deductive conventions of academic art history and those of the detective story, this essay looks at the work of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and discusses the uses to which that œuvre has been put by several of the pioneers of the twentieth-century novel, such as Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Julio Cortázar, and J.G. Ballard. It goes on to speculate as to why so many French novelists from the 1950s who interrogated specifically narrative form, together with those inspired by their example, responded to Delvaux's work in their writing. Asking whether any gain can be made in art history's knowledge and understanding of art by viewing it back through the fiction or poetry generated by it, the essay suggests that fiction and poetry might inflect academic art history at the level of style, asking what the genre implications of such writing might be for a discipline in which writing and style have had such well-defined boundaries and limitations.

The present paper is based on the assumption that the language of the novel is characterized by a statistically relevant overrepresentation of certain linguistic units (e.g. lexemes, key words, collocations and colligations, Siepmann 2015). First steps towards checking the validity of this hypothesis had been undertaken in pioneering works in the 1990s/2000s (e.g. Stubbs & Barth 2003). These studies were however limited by the small size of their (exclusively English) corpora. The present study explores the role of some patterns (phraseological motifs) in distinguishing French literary subgenres. It also proposes a case study of some motifs related to the verbal (dire avec sourire ‘to say with a smile’) and non-verbal communication (adresser un sourire ‘to send a smile’). Unlike traditional corpus-stylistic analyses, which frequently focus on the style of a single author, our corpus-driven approach identifies lexico-syntactic constructions in literary genres which are automatically extracted from the corpora.The main purpose is to show the relevance of the notion of phraseological motif (Legallois 2012; Longrée & Mellet 2013; Novakova & Siepmann 2020) for the distinction of literary subgenres. Linking form and meaning, these ‘multidimensional units’ fulfil pragmatic as well as discursive functions.The data has been extracted from large French corpora of the PhraseoRom research project https://phraseorom.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr. They are accessible on http://phraseotext.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/phraseobase/index.html and contain 1000 novels (published from the 1950s to the present), partitioned into six sub-corpora: general literature (GEN), crime fiction (CRIM), romances (ROM), historical novels (HIST), science fiction (SF) and fantasy (FY).The results of our study reveal some unexpected differences between the literary subgenres: e.g. the motif dire d’une voix ‘to say in a voice’ in HIST compared to GEN. In FY, expressions of verbal communication are related to shouting and screaming. Expressions related to the non-verbal communication (prendre dans ses bras ‘to take in one’s arms’) are specific to ROM, where body language is overrepresented. In SF, there is a very limited number of these types of expressions. More generally, the motifs provide the link between the micro level (phraseological recurrences) and the macro level (the fictional script).

Abstract This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narrators – whereas with regard only to each single volume of the series, each narrator could be perceived as being completely reliable. As soon as we have several narrators telling stories that take place within the same fictive world, unreliable narration can result from inconsistencies between the statements of the different narrators about what is fictionally true within this universe. Additionally, the Tana French example is of special interest for narratology because in one of the volumes, an impersonal and seemingly omniscient narrator appears. Omniscient narration is usually being regarded as incompatible with unreliability, but, as Janine Jacke has already shown, in fact is not: Also impersonal narration can mire in contradictions and thus turn out to be unreliable. With regard to Tana French’s novel, I would add that it can also be mistrusted because the utterances of this narration can conflict with those of other narrators in other volumes of the same series. So in the light of serial narration, the old question of whether impersonal narration (or an omniscient narrator) can be unreliable at all should be reconsidered. In the case of narrative seriality, the evidence for ascribing unreliability to one of its alternating narrators need not be found in the particular sequel narrated by her/him but in other sequels narrating about events within the same story world. Once again, narrative unreliability turns out to be a category rather of interpretation than of pure text analysis and description. Again, Tana French like previously Agatha Christie is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention of letting her detective stories take place in a purely ›realistic‹ universe because today, genre conventions are merging more and more. Tana French achieves an even more tempting ›narrative tension‹ by keeping her readers in continuous uncertainty about whether a little bit of magic might be possible in the otherwise so quotidian world of her fictive detectives. Thus, the author metafictionally (and, later also overtly) flirts with the genre of »urban fantasy«, practicing a typical postmodern merging of well-established, hitherto distinct popular genres.

Abstract Some of the most unusual and compelling scores in TV history have been written for the fantasy and science-fiction genre. Twilight Zone launched with a Bernard Herrmann theme, one that was replaced by the avant-garde French composer Marius Constant (although it was decades before he knew how his unusual musical phrases were turned into a TV theme). Jerry Goldsmith scored several Twilight Zone episodes before moving to Universal for Thriller. Herrmann later contributed to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The Outer Limits and Lost in Space were major entries, but the multi-decade success of Star Trek in the 1960s and its various spinoffs of the 1980s and 1990s were landmarks, and their themes and scores now iconic. Later, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Lost charted new territory for the eerie and bizarre, and their composers matched the storytelling with evocative scores. Electronic music pioneer Gil Melle works primarily in television.

This chapter introduces the work of Laurent McAllister, the collaborative pseudonym of the French-Canadian science-fiction writers Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel. It briefly situates the careers of Meynard and Trudel within the contexts of science fiction in Québec and the larger context of science-fiction and fantasy writing, surveying their collaborative oeuvre as McAllister. It then analyses how the Suprématie cycle (comprised of the novel by McAllister and several solo short stories by Trudel) presents a fictional universe best understood through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome.” Finally, it examines the cycle’s engagement with contemporary science fiction’s most compelling topics, transhumanism and the posthuman.

This introduction focuses on the aims and objectives of Past Imperfect, a book examining how some French, Belgian and sub-Saharan African scholars contributed to the epistemological transformation of Africanism in the 1945-1960 era. Some key texts, Georges Balandier’s ‘La Situation coloniale’ (1951) and Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past (2004) are prioritized to signal the importance of time as a concept to appraise ongoing discussions on memory and progress. This introduction also provides a chapter-by-chapter description of the book and highlights their main foci: temporality (Chapter I), African art (Chapter II), African languages (Chapter III) and African customs (Chapter IV). Although the book does not focus on fiction, it is also suggested that the theoretical discussion informing Past Imperfect can illuminate the way in which creative writers from sub-Saharan Africa have examined the role of African historicity.

Jean-Claude Dunyach, born in 1957, has published more than a hundred short stories in a career of over thirty years. He belongs to a generation of contemporary French science-fiction writers that includes figures such as Roland C. Wagner, Emmanuel Jouanne, and Jean-Marc Ligny. At a time when French science fiction was struggling to explore new ways of storytelling influenced by surrealism or the Nouveau Roman, this generation has given science fiction new life by mixing a hard-science approach with the supernatural, fantasy and the fantastic, while paying glowing tributes to authors of the Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon sf: Duntach’s influences include Samuel Delany, Ray Bradbury, and more particularly, J. G. Ballard. The specificity of Dunyach consists of making metaphysical concepts tangible for the reader by giving them a symbolic substance: time itself becomes tangible as a sea of sand, stone, ashes, sea water; love stories can be petrified as semiprecious stones and worn as trophies—even the universe itself complies as a sheet of paper or a piece of cloth that can be creased. The characters in his short stories are hurt or twisted, often with cracks in their past, but they still act as links between the individual and the collective: for Dunyach, any kind of system—in particular a political one—can be defined by the way it deals with marginality. Dunyach favors an individual point of view for a better detection of the system’s weaknesses (cities, societies, religions, or relationships with time and death). In that respect, the most accomplished characters in his work are the “AnimalCities”: these living, extraterrestrial, city-shaped animals made of flesh and cartilage travel through space from node to node on the web of the universe. Their symbiotic liaison with humanity gradually leads humans to understand the global nature of reality.

This chapter concentrates on the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as an important example of the ways that the two senses of confusion distinguished in the prospectus can intersect in narrative films. In film, metalepsis refers to situations in which ontological layers that "should not" be able to intersect nevertheless do so, such as when Buster Keaton enters the cinema screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924). The theory of metalepsis, and what it helps reveal about the ontology of fiction, are explored largely by means of French theory and philosophy (Genette; Souriau). Finally, it is argued that metalepsis can serve as an important reminder that questions about a film's rhetoric – the way it addresses the viewer – can not always be neatly separated from its diegesis. Diegetic status (e.g. whether an event is "real" within the fictional world, or instead a dream, fantasy, or memory) is not a "fact" but a product of a film's rhetoric.

This chapter considers a defining moment of the working Parisienne’s day to which early twentieth-century French observers returned again and again: midi. The noon lunch break afforded Parisian artists, writers, and tourists alike a daily glimpse of the “fairies” of the city’s luxury garment workshops as they took to the boulevards and parks for an hour in the sun—an hour imagined to consist of flirtation, window-shopping, laughter, and, I will establish, conspicuous under-eating. Indeed, crucial to the picturesque allure of the lunchtime seductions that filled popular midinette literature was the notion of the female garment worker as a frivolous under-eater cheerfully forfeiting food for fashion and pleasure. No longer the tragically starving workingwoman of nineteenth-century fiction and art, nor her virtuous, anorectic middle-class sister, whose physical wasting increased their moral fortitude, the under-eating midinette of the early twentieth century was envisioned doing so as a means of engaging more fully in the capitalist marketplace, making her body a more appealing advertisement for and object of urban consumption. This cultural fantasy of the midinette’s lunch hour, which fetishized the supposed moral precariousness of her lifestyle as well as the sparseness of her diet, was echoed by social reformers, who, in this same period, sought to carve out spaces for workingwomen’s lunches that kept them from the cafés and parks where they were believed to flirt much and eat little.