Editors’ Introduction

Mediated Senses: Translating Sensations for Media

La représentation de la succession n’a lieu que si la sensation antérieure ne se maintient pas sans changement dans la conscience, mais se modifie spécifiquement, de la manière que nous avons décrite, et se modifie continûment d’instant en instant. Elle reçoit, en passant dans l’imagination, le caractère temporel, qui se modifie sans cesse, et ainsi, d’instant en instant, le contenu apparaît de plus en plus repoussé.

(Husserl 22)

This second issue on the theme Le Sens et les sens/Sense and the Senses gathers selected papers presented at the 20^th-/21^st- Century French and Francophone Studies’ colloquium in April 2017 at Indiana University, Bloomington. The conference proposed to interrogate literature and other arts as the privileged sites of the connection between sensation and interpretation, i.e. the multiple articulations and the many tensions and frictions between the meaningful apprehension of the world and its fictitious, but real, mediation. In other words, the aesthetic relation between senses and sense.

If perception lies at the core of our experience, which nourishes and structures our cognitive activity, it is also necessary to consider the conduits that mediate our senses. Indeed, invoking Marcel Mauss (1936) and Marshall McLuhan (1964), it is interesting to consider the question of media as extensions of our body, of our intelligence. Thus, our relationship to the world and its significant apprehension is also conditioned by the transformation of old thought patterns through the distancing and the re-organization created by technical systems (writing, printing, perspective, audio-visual recording, digital broadcasting, etc.). Moreover, this experiment takes a particular significance when we critically examine the production process: who is responsible for cultural recirculation (recyclages culturels, Moser and Klucinskas, 2004)? If it is necessary to read to be able to write, to listen in order to compose, to watch in order to paint, carve, or film, any form of artistic production is initially a matter of mediatized perception.

This last point brings us to the question of aesthetics. This concept (epistêmê aisthetikê), introduced by Alexandre G. Baumgarten (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, 1735) as a science of sensory perception, quickly takes the form of an aesthetic judgment, a perspective reinforced by Emmanuel Kant’s theorization. Since the end of the twentieth century, there has been a reconsideration of the basis of a theory of perception. This approach leads us to question the place of a work of art at a given time, but also its effect or impact, its Wirkung as Jauss has it (1969), the ways in which it is brought up to date according to an apparatus of reception. We are thus required to explore the relation between feeling and interpretation, to reconsider the relationship between perception and production, which one can name a “perspective aïsthésique” (aesthetic perspective; epistêmê aisthetikê). This is equivalent to granting “an important place to the body as a medium of experience” (Moser and Klucinskas, 10–11).

The present issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies engages with various artistic strategies aimed at recording sensory perceptions in different kinds of media (technical medium, page, sound record, film reel, building, etc.). Through a comparative analysis of different artistic works (audiovisual, photographic, architectural, literary, etc.) the authors reflect on the relevance, the necessity or, quite simply, the ways of translating a sensory experience into a cultural artifact: a recorded sound, a haptic image, an introspective expression, a record of time, into a fictional work. They capture how an emotion or a powerful experience can be translated into words, sounds, images, etc. Thus, the texts included in this issue address the following topics: the questions of representation, the transcription of reality onto the screen, the link between photos and audiovisual media; the ways in which our auditory and visual perception is structured according to our individual frames of reference and stereotypes; the connection between perception/retention (photo; video) and affected memories.

This issue begins with an exploration of the complex link between the visual (space), the audio-visual (time) and the tactile (space). In “‘Varda en vadrouille/Agnès on the road again,’ an Extended Review of Visages Villages by Agnès Varda & JR (2017),” Delphine Bénézet explores the film Visages Villages (Faces Places) in which the filmmaker Agnès Varda and the photographer JR travel around rural France in a projector-equipped truck. Over the course of their travels, the countryside they drive through becomes plastered with photographs of the people they meet, projected onto the façades of buildings, as if by magic. Bénézet’s contribution examines a film that is about the passion for and the questioning of images and, more specifically, about their premises and the devices on which to show them. The following essay, Yosr Ben Romdhane’s “From Sight to Touch, a Stereoscopic Cinematographic Experience,” examines the relationship between stereoscopic vision and body awareness. Depending on the work, the spectator may experience the sensation of floating in space, the acceleration of time, or the loss of all sensation. Consequently, through this experience of reception, the brain begins to play with the confusion between visual and tactile sensations.

We then have two articles on music recording. First, Marie-Laure Boudreau’s “La Remédiatisation de l’oralité et le sens: Écouter un 78 tours de musique cadienne sur l’Internet,” which analyzes the experience of listening to music through audio-visual media. The viewers’ comments and the visual layout of platforms like YouTube and their effects on remediation are the main subjects of a theoretical reflection on the cultural dynamics surrounding Cajun music and its reception. Boudreau focuses primarily on these visual layouts and effects, while also exploring the role of the audience, the formation of opinions, and the importance of cultural context. Andrea Jonsson’s “From Interval, to Trill, to Undulation: Expressions of Vulnerability in the Melismatic Gestures of Jacques Brel and Stromae,” proposes a cultural analysis of expressions of vulnerability in the connections between musical interval, linguistic texture, and language. The author situates her work around the cultural production of two Belgian artists, Jacques Brel (1929–1978) and Stromae (1985).

As a counterpoint to the interaction between music and support (both technical and encoding), we then explore the perception of spaces. In his essay, “‘Peering Through the Window’: Experiencing the Banlieue in Sarcellopolis (1964/2015),” Philippe Brand examines different forms of representation made possible by two distinct types of technological media. This takes the shape of an exploration of two works on Sarcelles, one of the most notoriously deprived banlieues of France. Marc Bernard’s Sarcellopolis (1964), is a travel journal by an amateur sociologist that recounts a period of three months during which Bernard and his partner lived in the newly-built housing projects. The interactive transmedia work of 2015, Sarcellopolis, adapts the narrative approach of Bernard’s book to reconsider the legacy of Sarcelles today. This is followed by Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire’s “The Narrative Lives of Places: Literature as an Architecture,” which focuses on the action of writing, the relationship between literature, space, and materiality. Analyzing the novel Les Événements by Jean Roulin, the author proposes a new way of studying literary texts in relation to the sensory experience of the characters and the action of reading.

Finally, we are led back to literature, but at the crossroads of feelings and words. Corentin Lahouste’s “Les Sens du quotidien, l’essence du quotidien. Désordre de Philippe De Jonckheere” examines Désordre, the multimedia website project created by Philippe De Jonckheere in 2000, a work whose labyrinthine structure is characterized by hybridization. The article focuses on a singular object, the website, and places it alongside similar works (Perec, Blanchot, etc.). Lahouste draws attention to an interesting project, addressing its formal and thematic issues in a pertinent literary framework. Then, Michèle A. Schaal’s essay, “L’Univers affectif féminin dans Vernon Subutex de Virginie Despentes” discusses the ways in which the feminine universes of the novel are traditionally connected to themes of love:

Dans sa trilogie, l’écrivaine ne dénonce pas de manière directe la persistance des idéaux de genre ou de la sexualisation des émotions et de l’intimité. Au contraire, au travers de la reproduction fidèle de l’intime, des pensées et des émotions des personnages, elle conscientise ses lecteurs et lectrices quant à ce phénomène. La critique intervient donc au niveau métadiscursif.

In this way, the author shows how the transition from direct enunciation to indirect discourse alters the reader’s experience and the ways in which s/he claims ownership of these “affective universes.”

We close the volume with a special dossier on writer and filmmaker, Véronique Taquin, introduced and presented by Laurent Loty. Three novels by Taquin are examined: Vous pouvez mentir, Un roman du réseau, and Étreinte des fantômes, of which we publish three excerpts accompanied by three illustrations by Béatrice Turquand d’Auzay. This final dossier includes three essays by Véronique Taquin, Laurent Loty, and Jacques Athanase Gilbert respectively, all focusing on the presence and interaction of emotion and meaning, sense and senses emerging from and intermingling with the internet. The digital and mediatic world intervenes at all levels in Taquin’s novels, making her, according to Loty, the first complete “network” writer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin

Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Vincent Bouchard

Vincent Bouchard is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at Indiana University—Bloomington. He published a book Pour un cinéma léger et synchrone à Montréal!, with Septentrion University Press (2012). He also co-directed an issue of the scientific journal Cinémas (Le Bonimenteur et ses avatars, Cinémas, vol. 20, no. 1, 2010), and the book Dialogues du cinéma (Nota Bene, 2016). He currently works on the reception of colonial and educational screenings in West Africa.