E.C.S. Jongeneel

Les combats d’orphée : la poésie de guerre de Guillaume Apollinaire

Jusque tard dans le vingtieme siecle la poesie de guerre d’Apollinaire a ete meconnue par un grand nombre de critiques litteraires francais. Apres avoir passe en revue les motifs principaux a l’origine de cette attitude hostile, le present article propose une caracterisation succincte de la poesie du poilu Apollinaire, moyennant une analyse critique d’un poeme severement critique mais mal lu par les adversaires du poete : « Merveille de la guerre »

Art and Divine Order in the Divina Commedia

The present essay focuses on a conflict between ethics and aesthetics in the Divina Commedia, and on the way in which Dante has tried to resolve it. Although bound up with a Christian view on History, he embeds, as a self-conscious modern artist, his secular stil novo poetics of earthly love in Gods salvation plan for humankind. This conflict requires a relatively long ‘journey’ of interpretation and reconsideration, illustrated by concrete ‘case-studies’, the most famous being that of Francesca of Rimini in Inferno V. In accordance with medieval hermeneutics, Dante makes use of a palinodic dialectic in order to reconcile profane art with divine order.

Writing and Commitment: Gide's Travels in the Congo

From July 1925 to May 1926, André Gide made a journey to French Equatorial Africa. The trip resulted in a shocking experience, the highlights of which he wrote down in a diary that was published in Paris soon after his return. Travels in the Congo marks a turning-point in Gides literary career: for the first time the author seeks to combine commitment and aesthetics. Still a colonial writer but ambivalent about the colonialist politics of the French, he wrestles with his own Eurocentric aestheticism. However, the literary form that he used for his political positioning, the diary, only partly lends itself to this purpose. In my essay I examine the way in which Gide has tried to adapt diaristic poetics to History.