(continued)
(5) "In 'René,' a novel published in 1802, Chateaubriand introduced to the world the tortured French youth, whose 'wretched, barren, and disenchanted' existence embodied what the writer called the mal du siècle. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand recognised that he had set more of a trend than he had bargained for: 'If René did not exist, I would not write it again…all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There’s not a fop who has just left college who hasn’t dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there’s not a milksop who hasn’t exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn’t believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn’t given himself over to the 'wave of passions;' who hasn’t struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows.'"
(a) René (novella)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_(novella)
("by François-René de Chateaubriand, which first appeared in 1802. The work had an immense impact on early Romanticism")
(b) René
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René
(Renée being the feminine form); section 4 Variants in different languages: Renato in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish)
(c) mal du siècle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_du_si%C3%A8cle
(Mal du siècle, which can be roughly translated from French as "the malady of the century", is a term used to refer to the ennui, disillusionment, and melancholy experienced by primarily young adults of Europe's early 19th century, when speaking in terms of the rising Romantic movement)
Both mal and siècle are defined in (2).
(d) fop (n)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fop
(e) milksop (n; Middle English, literally, bread soaked in milk)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milksop
(6) "Hugo’s poem 'Melancholia' is required reading for French lycée students, as is Alfred de Musset’s [1810-1857] 'La Nuit de Mai,' whose narrator laments that 'Nothing makes us so great as great sorrow.' The strange beauty of melancholy finds some echo in mid-20th-century France, which produced a second wave of miserabilism. Françoise Sagan’s 'Bonjour Tristesse,' published in 1954, for instance, opens with the 17-year-old Cécile’s lament"
(a) Hugo (name)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_(name)
(The English version of the name is Hugh.)
(b) Melancholia
(i) The poem Melancholia is part of the work Les Contemplations (1856).
(ii) The "melancholia" is Greek noun for "sadness," literally black bile. Wikipedia
(c)
(i) For lycée, see secondary education in France
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_France
Read he introduction only.
(ii) For the etymology of lycée, see lycée
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lyc%C3%A9e
(the name of a gymnasium, or athletic training facility, near Athens where Aristotle established his school)
(d) See (2) for "nuit" and "mai."
(e) Bonjour Tristesse
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_Tristesse
(French, "Hello Sadness;" an overnight sensation; [Cécile is a woman])
(7) "Yet the ennui that marked this second period had less to do with nostalgia than nausea. In 'L’Etranger,' Albert Camus’s protagonist, Mersault, is perhaps the world’s best-known embodiment of anguish in the face of the unknowable meaning of existence, or the absurd. Post-war French theatre developed the absurd, through the plays of Camus, Jean Anouilh and the Franco-Romanian Eugène Ionescu. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote 'Waiting for Godot' in French. On a chilly winter’s evening in 1953 on Paris’s left bank, two years before the play went on to unsettle English-speaking audiences, it was first staged at the 75-seat Théâtre de Babylone [at Paris], and struck a chord with post-war Paris."
(a) For L’Etranger, see The Stranger (novel)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(novel)
(1942)
(b) Eugène Ionesco
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Ionesco
(1909-1994; born Eugen Ionescu in Romania)
The Romanian surname Ionescu means son of Ion (a personal/given name: Romanian version of John/Jonathan, both of which have the same root.
(c) Samuel Beckett
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
(1906-1989; Irish; Samuel Beckett; awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature; most famous for his play En attendant Godot (1953) (Waiting for Godot))
(8) "Neither Camus nor his contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-1980], was ultimately a pessimist. But it is the torment of existentialism, rather than its conclusions, that captured the imagination. Indeed, the left-bank literary clique led by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which gravitated to the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, adopted ennui as a way of life as well as a philosophy. "
(a) Saint-Germain-des-Prés
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Germain-des-Prés
(located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés [rededicated in 1163 by Pope Alexander III to Saint Germain of Paris [c 496 – 576])
(b) For des , see (2).
(c) The "prés " is the plural form of "pré"--meaning "meadow." Grouped in (2).
Why "meadows"?
Saint Germain des Pres Church – oldest church Paris. Travel France Online, May 26, 2013
www.travelfranceonline.com/saint ... ldest-church-paris/
("The affluent abbey became known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Saint-Germain in the Fields) as it owned the meadows known as Prés-aux-Clercs, the current [or] present Esplanade des Invalides")
This seems to be a private website.
(9) "Perhaps the best exemplar of miserabilism among contemporary French fiction writers is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial Goncourt-prize-winning novelist, in such nihilist works as 'Whatever' or 'Atomised.' His characters invariably lead empty, often sordid, always disillusioned lives. * * *There have, of course, been periods during which the gloom lifted. It was after the double shock of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the bloody Paris Commune [1871], after all, that the Impressionists took their tubes of paint and brushes outdoors, delighting in light and colour. Despite a measure of fin-de-siècle anxiety, the belle époque was a moment of breezy certainty. Gustave Eiffel unveiled his wrought-iron tower in 1889. By 1900 the City of Lights drew 51m visitors to its universal exhibition, under the theme of 'Paris, capital of the civilised world,' and Matisse, Derain and other fauves had started to capture exuberant colour and warmth on canvas. Yet miserabilism seems to have a greater hold on the French mind today."
(a) Michel Houellebecq
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Houellebecq
(born Michel Thomas in 1956 to father René Thomas on the island of Réunion in Indian Ocean; As his website gloomily states, his parents "lost interest in his existence pretty quickly" and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother headed off to live the hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her newly met boyfriend; His paternal grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which became his pen name)
(b) Goncourt brothers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncourt_brothers
(Edmond and Jules, of the nineteenth century, both writers; section 3 Legacy)
(i) Jules
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules
(Jules is the French form of the Latin "Julius" (eg Jules César, the French name for Julius Caesar))
(ii) The French form of Julian (meaning: related or belonging to Julius) is Julien.
(c) The French words "fin-de-siècle" and "fauve" (which appears later in the same quotation) are defined in (2).
(d) Belle Époque
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Époque
(French for "Beautiful Era;" a period in French and Belgian history that is conventionally dated as starting in 1871 and ending when World War I began in 1914; The Belle Époque was named, in retrospect, when it began to be considered a "golden age" in contrast to the horrors of World War I; In the newly rich United States, emerging from the Panic of 1873, the comparable epoch was dubbed the Gilded Age [spanning approximately the 1870s to the turn of the twentieth century])
(e) Fauvism. Metrpolitan Museum of Art, undated
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/fauv/hd_fauv.htm
Quote: "The Fauve painters were the first to break with Impressionism as well as with older, traditional methods of perception. * * * Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) and André Derain (French, 1880–1954) introduced unnaturalistic color and vivid brushstrokes into their paintings in the summer of 1905, working together in the small fishing port of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. When their pictures were exhibited later that year at the Salon d'Automne in Paris (Matisse, The Woman with a Hat), they inspired the witty critic Louis Vauxcelles to call them fauves ("wild beasts") in his review for the magazine Gil Blas. This term was later applied to the artists themselves.
(10) "Under a nationwide system that awards marks out of 20, a pupil doing a dictée has points (or even half-points) deducted for every error; so a child swiftly ends up with zero. The idea is that all children can always do better. The result is a lack of what the French, borrowing English syntax, call “la positive attitude.'"
See (2) for dictée.
(11) "During les années folles, upper-class American tourists took the steamer to Normandy and then the railway to Paris, drawn to France, writes Harvey Levenstein, a historian, as 'a land that was free from American puritanism, where the pursuit of pleasure reigned supreme.'"
(a) For les années folles
, see 1920s
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s
(It is sometimes referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, when speaking about the United States and Canada; French speakers called it the "années folles" ("Crazy Years"), emphasizing the era's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism)
(b) The singular form les années folles of is la année folle.
(c) French articles and determiners
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_articles_and_determiners
(section 1.1 Definite article: both le and la --> les)
(d) For Harvey Levenstein, see About the author. University of Chicago Press, undated
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/L/H/au5416112.html
(Harvey Levenstein is professor emeritus of history at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has published a number of books on American history, including * * * )
(12) "Nor has miserabilism discouraged the French preoccupation with beauty and taste. France does not wear its gloom like a dreary accessory. On the contrary, its culture delights in elegance, sensuality, quality and form: the exquisite hand-stitching on the haute-couture dress; the immaculately glazed tartes aux framboises lined up in the pâtisserie window. The aesthetics of daily life, the art de vivre, remains a source of both grand gestures and small stolen pleasures. It is no coincidence that the two biggest luxury-goods groups in the world are French."
(a) tartes aux framboises
is the plural form of tarte au framboise. Which is "raspberry pie" in English.
(i) tart (n; Middle English tarte, from Anglo-French)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tart
(ii) For aux and framboise, see (2) above.
(iii) "What is the meaning of au in french [sic]?
wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_meaning_of_au_in_french?#slide=1
(Answer: "Au and Aux are contractions Au = à le = to the (masc. singular)[;] Aux = à les = to the (plural) [nouns]. Note that the fem[inine] singular for[m] is not contracted à la = to the (fem[inine] singular) [noun]. Je vais au magasin = I am going to the store. It is also often added to make a connection between objects. E.G. Tarte aux pommes = Apple pies[;] Gâteau au chocolat = Chocolate cake")
For pomme and chocolat, see (2).
(iv) Still, why do I see both "tarte à la framboise" and "tarte au framboise" in the Web written by French speakers? (In fact, Answers.com even reply that "le framboise" means he raspberry, despite "la framboise" also.) I do not know the answer.
(b) patisserie (n; French pâtisserie, from Middle French pastiserie, from pasticier to make pastry, from Old French *pastitz cake, from Vulgar Latin *pasticium, from Late Latin pasta dough): "a pastry shop"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patisserie
* The English noun pastry came from English noun paste, whose etymology is "Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin pasta dough, paste."
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paste
In other words, the English word pastry is not derived from French.
(c) art (n; Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin art-, ars ["art"])
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art
(13) "The critical impulse has promoted cultural innovation. Both cinema’s New Wave and French literary theory were born of critical reconstruction of what came before. * * * Perhaps the French need dissatisfaction and thrive on doubt. 'There is a certain pleasure taken in being unhappy: it’s part of an intellectualism of French culture,' says Ms Senik. 'Malaise and ennui are to France what can-do is to America: a badge of honour,' wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times recently. Pessimism does not preclude pleasure. All that sitting around at pavement cafés, looking fashionably discontented, can be fun. Optimism is for fools; sophisticates know better. Bleak is chic—especially when opening another bottle of Saint-Emilion and reaching for the three-tier cheese trolley."
(a) French New Wave
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave
(b) Roger Cohenen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Cohen(1955- ; a British-born American columnist for New York Times)
(c) Saint-Émilion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Émilion
(section 1 History: name; section 5 Wine)
is in the Bordeaux wine region.
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发表于 2-23-2014 18:00:24
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