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EMF: Studies in Early Modern
France extends and broadens the project undertaken in Continuum,
whose fifth and final volume appeared in 1993.
EMF includes but goes
beyond the scope of its predecessor, encompassing not only French
but related European contributions to all intellectual and artistic
disciplines from as early as the fifteenth century to as late
as the post-Revolutionary decade.
Like Continuum, EMF
is themed and refereed. It is also open to editorial collaboration:
contributors and other readers are invited to propose topics and
share in the challenges (not to mention the rewards) of identifying
potential contributors, evaluating proposals, and assisting colleagues
while they perfect their essays.
As before, generous deadlines and
the opportunity to develop arguments in full will enable authors
to assume responsible risks in the exploration of historical,
theoretical, or interpretive issues.
Clearly, one of EMF's
chief aims is to provoke, and provide a forum for, dialogue -
even dialectic - across period boundaries, critical frameworks,
and fields of inquiry. Accordingly, EMF's editorial
policy, like Continuum's, is pluralistic and critical, in the
strong sense of both terms.
For supporting this new venture,
I thank the editorial board and advisory committee, the chair
of the University of Virginia French Department, and especially
the contributors of articles and reviews, who patiently and magnanimously
weathered the transition from Continuum to EMF.
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The inaugural volume addresses the problem of word and image,
variously interpreted by a group of French and American specialists.
In "La Forme et le contenu:
La portée du concept de baroque littéraire,"
Georges Molinié enriches the theoretical scope of baroque
studies not only by infusing general esthetics and semiology into
the debate but by insisting on the versatile, pan-European nature
of this phenomenon, which, he argues, subsumes classicism.
The next two essays focus on a
crucial but too often marginalized mode of early modern discourse.
In "Emblems and Devices in
Seventeenth-Century France," Daniel Russell prescribes a
new program for the study of these verbal/visual forms with special
attention to publishing history, spiritual functions, and political
appropriation.
Dalia Judovitz then discusses a
seeming paradox: emblems without the pictorial component. Her
"Emblematic Legacies: Hieroglyphs of Desire in L'Astrée"
argues that Honoré d'Urfé's allegorical interweaving
of poetic image and commentary produced the novel's exceptional
freedom and fluidity of gender representation as well as its mediated
apprehension of the world as changing semblance.
Three contributions focus on ekphrasis.
In "Mixed Media: Word and
Image in Les Peintures Morales," Donna Kuizenga contends
that if Le Moyne used two arts at once to make truth and virtue
appealing, the verbal clearly dominated the visual, serving as
a guide to, or, more precisely, a limit on, interpretation.
Turning to Le Moyne's "Actéon"
and La Fontaine's "Le Tableau," Michael Vincent's Ekphrasis
and the Poetics of the Veil" shows how the veil figure functions
first as a strategy of concealment and, paradoxically, revelation,
then, at last, as a figure of representation.
The next two contributions address
aspects of official, or officially sponsored, art with literary
elements or resonance.
James F. Gaines's "Disaster
and the Lower Body: Punishment of Presumption in Seventeenth-Century
Art and Literature" studies Puget's "Milone de Crotone,"
Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy's Latona fountain, and the tragic
statuary at Versailles. Like Molière;s M.de Pourceaugnac,
these cautionary works display a symbolic attack by absolutist
power on the usurping subject's lower body as well as an effort
to reincorporate the perpetrator into the earth, from which he
springs.
In "Ludovicus Heroicus: The
Visual and Verbal Iconography of the Medal," Jeanne Morgan
Zarucchi studies the subtle interplay between graven image (usually
mytho-allusive) and wordsmiths' mottoes (usually in Latin). Their
net effect is to describe a superhuman king and make his faicts
et gestes transcend the banalities of mere history.
"How can one speak of a painting?"
asks François Lecercle in the concluding essay, "L'Ecriture
Chardin." His answer (valid for Diderot, at least): with
disingenuous versatility, a constantly changing manner that ranges
from mere redundancy to a mimeticism which puts into practice
the painterly secret it has penetrated.
Opening new perspectives and rejuvenating
traditional ones, these discussions, and the book reviews to follow,
testify to the continuing vitality of early modern French studies.
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