Review

Shorter entries about a literary text, brief review or selective reading, ideas while reading

War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann

This review presents Julia Weidmann's study, "Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature" (Winter, 2025), as a fundamental, comparative investigation of a central phenomenon in contemporary French literature: the intergenerational narration of the World Wars. The starting point is the observation that subsequent generations—from the "wound" generation to the "inheritance" generation—reconstruct familial wartime experiences in literary form, mediating between archival research and imagination. To this end, Weidmann develops an original model of a "war continuum" that replaces traditional numerical generational categories with a metaphorical, trauma-oriented scale. She operationalizes this concept in a four-stage analytical method, which she applies to a broad corpus of authors (including Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Ivan Jablonka, and Anne Berest). The review particularly praises the methodological clarity, the nuanced close readings, and the identification of recurring narrative structures across generations, but also highlights limited weaknesses, such as a certain schematization in the comparative analysis and the relatively marginal treatment of aesthetic details. Overall, the study appears as a substantial contribution to literary memory studies, providing a viable set of tools for analyzing transgenerational memory and simultaneously opening up new perspectives for the exploration of future narrative forms.

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Francesco Petrarch and his followers: Étienne Anheim

Étienne Anheim's "Pétrarque: portrait de famille" (Minuit, 2026) reconstructs Francesco Petrarch's literary project as the result of dense familial entanglements and understands his work as a discursive "family portrait" in which genealogical construction, social embeddedness, and poetic self-stylization are inextricably intertwined. Based on a combination of textual analysis and archival research, Anheim demonstrates how Petrarch mythologizes his origins along a patrilineal notary genealogy, while simultaneously systematically marginalizing or silencing key figures—especially his mother, daughter, and the mothers of his children. The constellations of father (as a professional model to be overcome), brother (as a spiritual alter ego), Laura (as a real void, imaginary lover, and symbolic cipher of poetry), as well as children and friends, unfold as structuring relationships within which Petrarch shapes his authorial identity. Writing thus always appears as an addressed, fragmentary practice within an extended "familia" composed of relatives, correspondents, and literary successors. Anheim does not resolve the tensions between archivally reconstructible social history and literary self-presentation, but rather understands them as a productive site where Petrarch invents his own genealogy and simultaneously establishes the model of modern authorship—a model based on selective memory, symbolic reshaping, and the transformation of familial bonds into literary transmission.

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Exchange and misunderstanding: Jacques Decour, Philisterburg

Jacques Decour's "Philisterburg" (1932, Éds. Allia, 2023) is paradigmatic as a text of a poetics of the "in-between": a hybrid work between diary, essay, travelogue, and political diagnosis, which, from the perspective of a young French student of German studies, explores Germany in the late Weimar Republic while simultaneously reflecting on the epistemic conditions of this observation. At its core is not a one-sided portrayal of the foreign, but rather the productive tension between proximity and distance, between participation and critical self-examination, which manifests itself both formally—in the interweaving of narrative and essayistic passages—and in terms of content. Decour's text unfolds a dense panorama of social, political, and cultural forces in which characters appear less as individuals than as bearers of structural positions within the Franco-German relationship. Particular attention is paid to the role of language and translation as sites of both misunderstanding and insight, the analysis of stereotypes and enemy images, and the comparison of different educational systems as expressions of divergent worldviews. Against the backdrop of the escalating political situation around 1930, the portrayal gains a prophetic sharpness without ever lapsing into deterministic certainty. The review highlights how Decour understands the "in-between" not as a harmonious synthesis, but as a conflict-ridden, knowledge-generating space in which cultural difference becomes visible and conceivable – and how precisely this literary stance lends the text its enduring relevance and intellectual urgency.

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Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

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Bridging the gap and self-correction: Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius's "The Literary Pioneers of the New France," a product of the immediate postwar period and born out of the experience of political defeat, opens up a deliberately counter-movement, a European-oriented interpretive space. By presenting key French authors (Gide, Rolland, Claudel, Suarès, Péguy) as bearers of an intellectual renewal in 1918/20, Curtius engages less in neutral literary mediation than in a cultural-political intervention against national resentments and stereotypical images of France. This review highlights that Curtius's argument rests on a twofold movement: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the German cliché of rationalist, "Latin" France through the demonstration of transnational, and especially "Germanic," influences; on the other hand, the construction of a "true France" that can serve as a pedagogical projection screen for a renewed, European-oriented Germany. The tension between documented enmity (for example, in the case of Suarès) and its programmatic overlay through the idea of ​​Europe is not leveled, but rather read as a productive contradiction. The review critically highlights the book's selective approach and its philosophical hierarchy of values, which excludes certain currents of thought while normatively elevating others. Overall, Curtius's study thus appears as a project that is both bound to its time and methodologically groundbreaking: a rhetorically driven self-correction of national perceptions that places literary studies in the service of intellectual understanding.

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The Sitcom Dictatorship: Political Thought, Literary Form, Machiavelli and Giorgia Meloni in Hélène Frappat

Hélène Frappat's novel "Nerona" (2025) portrays the rule of a right-wing populist dictator as a simultaneously grotesque and frighteningly precise model of contemporary politics: In an unnamed European nation, Nerona governs by decree and constant media staging, while a polyphonic, fragmented narrative structure – speeches, interviews, prophetic chants, film scenes – makes visible the simultaneity of power, violence, and repression; central motifs are the mythologizing of one's own origins, the systematic construction of "enemies within," the perversion of humanitarian discourses, for example in the migrant camp, and the escalation to apocalyptic self-destruction, which culminates in the figure of the Matricidium and the Nero topos. The review argues that Frappat's literary form itself generates knowledge: by modeling populism as a "sitcom"—an endless repetition of affective and rhetorical patterns devoid of learning—she combines genre poetics with political theory; at the same time, the review reads the novel as a Machiavellian parody in which classical concepts like "virtù" or "fortuna" are transformed into cynical management logics. The intertwining of discourse analysis and aesthetics is highlighted: the polyphony functions as a democratic counter-model to monologic populism, while the figure of Nerona can be read as a condensation of real political actors (especially Giorgia Meloni) without lapsing into mere satire. Overall, the interpretation shows that Frappat's novel is less a dystopian exaggeration than a diagnosis: populist rule appears as a regime of language and perception, against which literature, through its formal complexity, offers a critical counter-perception.

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Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich

Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed on the Franco-German heritage from the outside, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the “clarté française” against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.

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Between completion and silence: Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon's "La Vie derrière soi: Fins de la littérature" (2021) brings together the expanded lectures from his final Collège de France cycle into a wide-ranging, essayistic reflection on the "ends" of literature—understood simultaneously as conclusion, goal, boundary, and dissolution. Starting from the opposing poles of Roland Barthes (non-writing) and Marcel Proust (writing until the very end), Compagnon develops a poetics of late style that intertwines literary, art-historical, and philosophical discourses. Using a European canon—from Nicolas Poussin and Rembrandt to François-René de Chateaubriand and Samuel Beckett—the book examines figures of late-life work, of silence, of swan songs, and of last words, without reducing these phenomena to a single, unified theory. His central thesis, more demonstrated than explicitly formulated, is that literature is essentially a practice of finitude: it gains its meaning precisely in dealing with its own end. With the concept of the "aevum," Compagnon describes literature as a temporal form situated between individual transience and cultural duration, in which mortality and tradition intertwine. Thus, the end of literature appears not as its disappearance, but as its privileged enactment—as an art of taking leave that finds its form in the writing itself.

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The flower as text, body and danger: three novels by Colette Fellous, Célia Houdart and Constance Guisset

What connects three very different contemporary French novels—Colette Fellous's "Quelques fleurs" (Gallimard, 2024), Célia Houdart's "Les Fleurs sauvages" (POL, 2024), and Constance Guisset's "Fleur de peau" (Flammarion, 2026)? At first glance, only the botanical nature of their titles; but on closer reading, a shared and multifaceted literary project: the questioning, displacement, and in some cases, radical destruction of that symbolist tradition which, since Mallarmé, has encoded the flower as a sublime, incorporeal sign—as "l'absente de tous bouquets," absent from every real bouquet, ascending into pure idea. This comparative review shows how the three authors inherit and disrupt this legacy in their own unique ways, by reclaiming the plant-like and bringing it back into the corporeal, the ecological, and the pharmacological. Fellous, whose autofictional essay operates within the formal framework of the lyrical narrative, cultivates the flower as a mnemonic device and a poetics of self-portraiture: her flowers are silent witnesses to lived experience, condensations of childhood, mother, Tunis, and Paris, and the book she is writing is literally "en ces fleurs caché"—hidden within the flowers, awaiting the act of writing that will liberate them. Houdart, on the other hand, strips the flower of any subjective claim: in the laconic polyphonic narration of her Provençal characters, wildflowers are ecological symbols of a nature indifferent to humankind and—in the case of the hallucinogenic datura, which poisons two characters—even prepared to harm them, unintentionally and without message; botanical knowledge here becomes an ethical and epistemic necessity. Finally, Guisset turns the romantic floral aesthetic on its head with a gesture of critical commentary on the system: Her florist Ava has spent thirteen years arranging the beauty of flowers, accumulating an invisible poison through pesticides in her skin – the flower, chosen as a counter-world to the financial world, turns out to be its accomplice, and the woman's body a barometer of a global commodity economy that bases beauty on toxic substances. The essay reads these three very different text projects along a common dimension of analysis: the function of the flower as a temporal figure, as a bodily figure, and as a linguistic figure. It argues that contemporary French literature uses the flower motif to span a scale ranging from mnemonic cultivation to ecological sobriety and pharmacological paradox – culminating in Ismaël Jude's concurrently published novel "Une vie de jasmin," which is used as a fourth comparative text, in a linguistically skeptical ontology of pure emanation that consistently takes Mallarmé's idealization to its logical conclusion using the means of the body and biology.

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The 35 categories of the French literary landscape: Frédéric Beigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder's "Dictionnaire amoureux des écrivains français d'aujourd'hui" (Plon, 2023) is a monumental and deliberately contradictory work: a condensed inventory of living French-language contemporary literature, comprising 281 entries, which stretches the lexicographical form of the "Dictionnaires amoureux" series to its limits while simultaneously serving as a self-portrait of its author. Beigbeder defines his method as "resolutely subjective": his corpus includes only novelists living in August 2023 who write directly in French—essayists, poets, playwrights, and crime writers are excluded, while Francophone authors from Martinique, the Maghreb, Senegal, or Quebec are included, since the volume claims, in a literary-political sense, to map a literature that extends beyond France. The most conceptually bold and polemical element of the book is the taxonomy of twenty-eight “Logos des écoles et mouvements littéraires contemporains” – small symbols with which Beigbeder assigns each author to one or more schools, thus doing what literary studies have so far failed to do for the 21st century: to divide contemporary literature into binding currents, from “autoréalité” (the self as the primary raw material, with Ernaux and Angot as canonical figures) through “faction” or exofiction (Carrère, Jaenada, Aubenas) and the “glauquistes apocalyptiques” (Houellebecq, Despentes, Mathieu) to the “néo-hussards” (Tesson, Kauffmann, Parisis), the “décoloniaux voyageurs” (Chamoiseau, Condé, Daoud, Mbougar Sarr) and the “revelators of a maudlin past” (Modiano, Guez, Mukasonga, Littell). This review analyzes Beigbeder’s definition of the corpus, his implicit value criteria (style, originality of perspective, courage to provoke, existential risk), the characteristics of the individual groups based on exemplary entries, and finally the position Beigbeder occupies in his own panorama—as a novelist who has excluded himself but remains present as an authority on every page—in order to ultimately weigh both the volume’s genuine achievement (filling a real gap, the quality of the best portraits, the heuristic productivity of the taxonomy) and its structural limitations (the Parisian milieu-bound nature of the perspective, the canonization of the already established, the veiled political partisanship).

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Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.

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Proliferating bodies, silent flowers: the aesthetics of emanation in Ismaël Jude

The review of Ismaël Jude's "Une vie de jasmin" (éditions verticales, 2026) interprets the novel as a fundamental questioning of human identity, language, and civilization. At its heart is the character Jasmine, whose body, through a process of "dermaculture," produces plants, thus dissolving the boundary between humans and vegetation. Against the backdrop of a repressive, technocratic order—embodied by the allergic, authoritarian father and a world shaped by concrete and pesticides—the text develops a counter-aesthetic of proliferation, of "Émanation," and of a "sexuality without language," in which flowers appear not as symbols but as independent, untranslatable forms of life. The review demonstrates how this poetics intertwines with a traumatic family and colonial history: The name Jasmine proves to be an "acte manqué," a bloody trace of the Algerian War that does not create identity but rather undermines it. By combining ecological critique, queer physicality and language-skeptical poetics, the review ultimately interprets the novel as a plea for an unfixable life that spreads – like a pioneer plant – in the cracks of civilization and asserts itself beyond symbolic orders.

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The reparative turn: why literature today should do more than tell stories

This review presents Alexandre Gefen's essay "Réparer le monde: la littérature française face au XXIe siècle" (2017, English translation 2024) as an ambitious yet symptomatic diagnosis of contemporary literature: The aesthetic autonomy of the 20th century is replaced by a "reparative" paradigm in which literature is understood as a therapeutic, social, and ethical practice. Using a deliberately open corpus—ranging from Annie Ernaux to clinical case reports—Gefen maps a literature that forges identity, processes trauma, cultivates empathy, and safeguards collective memory; drawing on thinkers such as Paul Ricœur and care ethics, he describes storytelling as a technology of the self and an instrument of symbolic reparation. The review succinctly highlights this central thesis, acknowledging the analytical breadth and theoretical eclecticism, but simultaneously problematizing the normative narrowness: by reading literature primarily as a "cure," Gefen risks obscuring its inherent aesthetic logic in favor of an ethical utilitarianism. Thus, the book itself appears as an exemplary expression of the very tendency it describes—a committed, impact-oriented literary theory that oscillates between diagnosis and programmatic statement.

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Alain Finkielkraut between cultural criticism and political reflection

Alain Finkielkraut's "Le cœur lourd" (Gallimard, 2026) is a personal and diagnostic portrait of the intellectual, born in 1949, who experiences himself as an "orphan" in a world in upheaval. The review highlights that the book, based on conversations with Vincent Trémolet de Villers, not only reflects Finkielkraut's postwar biography and his belonging to the "post-Shoah" generation, but also critically analyzes the threats to language, culture, and identity in the present. Central themes include responsibility towards one's own historical and Jewish identity, concern for France and Israel, the loss of high culture and education, and nostalgia for a past, harmonious world. Finkielkraut presents himself as a melancholic chronicler who simultaneously makes concrete political, ethical and ecological proposals – from saving language to integral ecology to a model of conservative-liberal-socialist values ​​– thus showing how personal experience, philosophical reflection and concern for the future are inextricably linked.

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Writing against the border: Utopia Babel by Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani's essay "Assaut contre la frontière" (Gallimard, 2026) is a dense self-positioning situated between languages, cultures, and political discourses. Starting with a nightmarish courtroom scenario in which the wrong language becomes an existential guilt, the text unfolds an autobiographically grounded reflection on multilingualism as a space of identity and its loss as a genealogical wound—from her multilingual childhood and her father's colonial-influenced education to her own alienation from Arabic, which lives on as a "phantom language" in her writing. Slimani connects this personal linguistic history with a sharp analysis of global power relations: the hierarchization of languages ​​in the postcolonial space, the exoticization of "Maghrebi" literature, the political instrumentalization of Arabic after 9/11, and the illusion of a "pure" language, which she exposes as an ideological construct. She counters this with a poetics of the novel that understands literature as a radical practice of empathy and a diversity of perspectives—as a movement across borders that finds its continuation precisely in the act of translation. Slimani's argument is not linear, but rather essayistically condensed: she interweaves autobiographical scenes with intertextual references (from Canetti to Barthes to Camus) and cultural-political diagnoses to show that writing itself is an act of transgression. By reinterpreting Babel from a biblical place of punishment to a utopian cipher for a pluralistic world, literature appears here as a counterforce to linguistic and political isolation—as an "attack on the border" that does not consist of a return to a lost unity, but rather in the productive recognition of difference.

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Autofictional testimony, therapeutic writing, and self-empowerment: Gisèle Pelicot

This article reads Gisèle Pelicot's "Et la joie de vivre" (2026, cited as EJV) not merely as an account of a spectacular criminal trial, but as a literary reflection on self-constitution through language: The text tells the story of a woman who, after the shocking revelation of systematic violence—mediated through the fragmentary, dissociative structure of memory, through flashbacks to a childhood marked by loss, and through the gradual escalation of her husband's crimes—must recreate her own self by narrating it. Central to this is the shift in shame and interpretive authority: Starting from an internalized shame, articulated in the inability to acknowledge what happened as one's own experience ("Non, ce n'est pas moi"), the book develops a poetics of reappropriation in which naming, the choice of name, and the narrative voice become acts of self-empowerment. The narrative organization does not follow the chronology of events, but rather the logic of trauma—in layers, ruptures, and repetitions—while recurring motifs such as the ritual of the set breakfast table or the symbolism of light in the landscapes open up counter-spaces to the violence. In the final part, this movement culminates in the public court trial, which is staged as a platform for a social discourse on patriarchal violence and finds its political climax in Pelicot's decision to be transparent: "La honte doit changer de camp" functions as an ethical and structural peripeteia. The reading analyzes this development as a consistently autofictional project that mediates between therapeutic writing and literary creation: it shows how Pelicot's text implicitly designs a poetics in which writing is neither documentation nor fiction, but an existential practice that brings the subject into being in the first place. At the same time, the article interprets the life-affirming tone—which has often been received as a "hymn to resilience"—not as an affirmative glossing over of the issues, but as a hard-won counter-reading to violence, which manifests itself in unspectacular gestures of autonomy (living alone, choosing one's own name, being able to love). The argument thus aims to liberate the book from the sphere of mere testimony and to understand it as a literarily sophisticated, formally reflective, and politically effective work, whose true radicalism lies in the assertion that rediscovering one's own words is identical to rediscovering one's own life.

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A Montaigne for now

Starting from the premise of the "textual mobility" of classical works, this review first outlines the extraordinary adaptability of Michel de Montaigne's Essays in modernity and the present day, drawing on interpretations by Michel Foucault, Antoine Compagnon, Tiphaine Samoyault, and current political appropriations. Against this backdrop, the edited volume "The International Reception of Michel de Montaigne's Essays: Forms, Interpretations, Conjunctures" (De Gruyter, 2026), edited by Olav Krämer, Andrea Grewe, and Susanne Schlünder, is presented, as it systematically documents this responsiveness for the first time from an international perspective. The review focuses particularly on those contributions that examine the reception of Montaigne in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as in contemporary philosophical and political discourses—for example, the studies on Flaubert, Nietzsche, Derrida, and the political instrumentalization of the skeptic. Thus, the volume appears less as a comprehensive overview than as a rich source of material for a history of modern appropriations of Montaigne, which confirms the thesis developed at the outset: The authority of the Essays does not rest on a fixed original text, but on its continuous variation, translation and ideological reinterpretation.

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Writing Habitats: Times of Habitability by Joy Sorman

The interpretation reads “Gros œuvre” (OEU) and “L’inhabitable” (INH) by Inculte author Joy Sorman as complementary experimental setups in which housing is understood once from the perspective of its creation and once from that of its withdrawal: While OEU unfolds the habitat in thirteen episodic miniatures as the result of physical labor, improvised appropriation and social practice – from self-taught house building to mobile, modular or precarious forms of housing to collective, ephemeral utopias – INH starts from the opposite premise by documenting dilapidated Parisian buildings and their inhabitants and showing in a double temporal structure (visit and return) how even the improvement of material conditions destabilizes social structures and makes housing visible as a learned, fragile practice. The essay's argument demonstrates that only through the interplay of both texts does an adequate theory of dwelling emerge: as a process between shell construction and ruin, between possibility and loss, which can be grasped neither as a static state nor as a purely functional category. Methodologically, the analysis follows three lines: First, it shows how the respective spatial and temporal orders—mosaic-like parataxis and perspectival mobility in OEU, palimpsest-like layering and retrospective doubling in INH—model dwelling as a dynamic, never-ending state; second, it demonstrates that the constellations of characters and forms of communication (from dialogic exchange with craftsmen to administratively framed interviews) reflect the social inequality of housing and speaking rights; third, the interpretation reconstructs the central metaphorical fields—body, construction, threshold—that connect both texts and simultaneously shift them against each other. Thus, the thesis of a “poetics of the unfinished” is developed, which is also confirmed autopoetologically: the beginning and end of both works stage living not as arrival, but as an activity in the mode of not-yet or no-longer, so that Sorman’s writing itself appears as a form of inhabiting – an exploration of spaces whose meaning is only constituted in passage, in repetition and in linguistic access.

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Textual Mobility: Tiphaine Samoyault and her plea for an agonistic philology

The double review of Tiphaine Samoyault's books "Toutes sortes de Misérables" (2026, cited as TSM) and "Traduction et violence" (2020, cited as TEV) presents two different yet complementary approaches to the transformation of literary texts and uses their juxtaposition to discuss a fundamental shift in the understanding of literary works in academic studies: While TSM, based on the global reception and adaptation history of Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables," develops a theory of the classic as the result of incessant variation—the classic thus exists not despite, but because of its rewritings, abridgments, translations, and adaptations—TEV analyzes translation as a conflict-ridden act of cultural transformation that not only enables understanding but also reveals appropriation, the reduction of otherness, and political power relations; together, both studies lead to a consistently processual understanding of the literary text. The double review makes it clear that in both books, Samoyault undermines the notion of a stable, sovereign original and instead formulates a poetics of "textual mobility." In her analysis of the countless versions of characters like Cosette, she demonstrates that it is precisely the proliferation of variants that guarantees a work's cultural memorability, while her theory of translation replaces the seemingly harmonious discourse of cultural mediation with the concept of an "agonistic" translation that consciously preserves difference and friction. Taken together, variation thus appears as a twofold movement—on the one hand, as a survival strategy of the classic in cultural memory, and on the other, as a conflictual practice of linguistic and political negotiation. The double review therefore reads both books as theoretically intertwined interventions against a static concept of the work: literature does not arise from the immutability of an origin, but from the ongoing transformation through reading, adaptation, and translation. In doing so, Samoyault shifts the focus of literary studies from the authority of the original to the dynamics of its circulation in space and time, and calls for a philology that no longer attempts to fix "the one" text, but examines the processes by which texts change, multiply, and become effective in new historical and political constellations.

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Pascal Bruckner: the philosopher as son

In "Un bon fils" (2014, cited as BF) and his most recent book, "De mère inconnue" (2026, cited as MI), the nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner undertakes a twofold familial self-examination that can also be read as an intellectual biography. While BF portrays the violent and ideologically rigid father figure—an antisemitic and authoritarian man whose worldview both shaped the young Bruckner and forced him to distance himself—MI reconstructs the long-neglected story of his mother. The two books thus form a complementary diptych: on the one hand, the father as a symbol of a repressive, resentment-laden mindset; on the other, the enigmatic, sometimes absent mother, whose biography raises questions about origin, identity, and emotional heritage. Together, these autobiographical texts sketch a genealogy of Bruckner's intellectual self-positioning. The review demonstrates how central themes in Bruckner's essayistic publications can be explained by this familial constellation. His critique of Western ideology of guilt (in works such as "La tyrannie de la pénitence," "Le sanglot de l'homme blanc," and "Je souffre donc je suis") appears newly legible against the backdrop of his personal experience of guilt, authority, and moral self-examination. Similarly, his analysis of modern discourses on victimhood can be linked to his exploration of familial power dynamics and roles of victim. The review therefore argues that BF and MI are not merely autobiographical documents, but key texts for understanding Bruckner's work of ideological critique: in them, family history, moral reflection, and political essay writing intertwine to form an intellectual self-interpretation.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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