Madame de Lafayette
When, in 2007, the French President scorned the idea that budding public servants should be required to read La Princesse de Cleves, the ensuing protests, whatever their purely political dimension, were a reminder of this work's iconic status. Naturally enough, perhaps, this spotlight left in the shade the other works attributed to Mme de Lafayette. There was also scant reference to the messy question of attribution. With no manuscript in existence the present attribution of La Princesse de Cleves was made ‘definitively’ only a century after its publication in 1678: for example, the 1764 reprint of the 1704 Paris edition cites La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, and Segrais as co-authors. Does this matter? True, we would still watch Hamlet if it were performed by the Royal Bacon Company. However, in the case of Mme de Lafayette, biographical details are still often used to shore up critical hypotheses. At the outset, therefore, one issue deserves attention: what does ‘Mme de Lafayette’ now imply?
Maîtrise esthétique de la passion féminine. Fonctionnement topique du pavillon dans La Princesse de Clèves.
When La Princesse de Cleves was published in 1678 it was celebrated as a literary achievement by some readers but criticized by others, in particular by some of the most reknowned and influential critiques of the time Jean-Baptiste Henri du Trousset Valincour and Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, as an attack on the ideals of plausibility and moral decency. It was notably the two scenes known as “The Confession” and “The Dream”, both taking place in the pavilion at the Cleves estate La Coulommiers, that appeared indecent and implausible in the eyes of the two critiques. Taking the multiple symbolique connotations of the pavilion as a starting point, this article will argue that the accusations of implausibility and indecency should be understood as ideological reactions to the novel's negociations of desire, aesthetics and power.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.