...Neil Kenny Copyright © 2012 The Trustees of Columbia University 2012 Neil Kenny DISINTERRING AND REINTERRING THE DEAD: TENSE IN FRENCH GRAMMARS, DU VAIR, AND PASQUIER (c. 1550-1610) Relations between the living and the dead are negotiated through various categories of discourse, including...

..., Julie au la nouvelle Heloise, Les Liaisons dangereuses and, precisely, Balzac, to note that the passe simple is far from the only principle that puts everything somehow into place. Indeed, one might ask why tense is so privileged in Barthes. One answer to this, of course, is the stucturalist influence...

... travel outside any destiny and come to touch . . . some f­uture body (Barthes, qtd. in Gallop 48). The time travel that in Barthes s earlier 1971 text involves some ­future body is, in his last work, Camera Lucida (1981), represented by the touching that transpires between the past tense...

... division operates according to a typical articulation of two grammatical tenses: the imperfect and the conditional. While the imperfect serves to designate “referential time,” the conditional signals the dream mode, pointing to a hypothetical future projected through the dream. Unlike Charles, however...

... to be structured; learners will not be able to speak in complete sentences before they acquire any vocabulary, and they will not be able to speak in past tense if they do not understand the present tense. Non-language-learning-focused classes, on the other hand, whether they are in the target language or not, do...

... ( fide Ie, fier, farouche, v. 638). She struggles in the present tense of her own utterance with the internal contradictions that foreground the dramatic consciousness-even willfulness-of her paradoxical meaning: "Je l'aime, non point tel que l'ont vu les enfers [his actual location, according to all...

... to Fair Welcome at the end of Guillaume arises from its being delivered in the present rather than past tense. As David Hult notes, this switch in verbal tense begs the question: Which voice is behind the lament, that of the Narrator who is currently relating it, or that of the Lover who occupies the past...

... of eschatological prophecy: the Apocalypse of Kevin Lambert the Author, the book of Revelation. If I describe the future tense of Faldistoire’s articulation of Chicoutimi’s destruction as prophetic rather than as an expression of simple anger or wishful thinking, it is because Lambert consistently aligns his...

... in the past tense, because for all of us, I believe, the tools he introduced early on in those classes remain a powerful criterion for our readings today. The manual I first used to keep up with his course Theory of Literature I has a curious impact on me still. Fictional Truth blurts out what the other...

... is built into the future-tense "trouverez," with the cause-and-effect relationship sealed by the word "car." On the whole, Marote makes explicit that which is implicit but unexamined in the traditional pastourelle and in courtly love discourse alike. This passage also highlights the theme of time...

...? What kinds of language use do you observe? What forms of address are used? What verb tenses are used? How is capitalization and punctuation used? Are sentences long or short? What adjectives are used, if any? What else do you notice at the language level? What does this tell you? What do...

... not taken, when we would surely be better served heeding Montaigne’s point about the uselessness of regret. 1 When combined with verbs in the progressive present tense, “should” statements raise the possibility that we are currently doing the wrong thing. Academics may be especially prone...

... presents a succession of what Sartre calls disconnected present instances: “The sentences in The Stranger are islands. We tumble from sentence to sentence, from nothingness to nothingness” (94). 4 He notes Camus’s use of the passé composé tense instead of the passé simple (93–94). The disjointed...

...," in the infinitive, suggests the infinite nature of this struggle of thought. And, "Connaissent," the only present tense verb, calls our attention to the selfcontained knowledge of sunset. Valery represents the circularity of both the sunset and contemplation in the pauseless pace of lines two and three, and by his...

... literary tense. Most important, as Berkane turns into a more direct avatar for Djebar-as-author, he stops framing his own narratives orally. Prior to this merging, Berkane introduces both his transcription of Nadjia's stories and his letters to Marise through a first-person narration not explicitly...

... liked all these years is to be sur- rounded by people who know no english. It has left me more in- tensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even...

...." Arriving at the end of a novel consisting entirely of a continuous series of present-tense scenes that slip into each other like the "images du monde," these final words cross back from anatomical reference (how a retina works) to textual self-reference (how Orion aveugle works). As the point of contact...

... codified way. I try to train students to notice, for example, that a poem might be built around a hidden etymology, or that a subtle constellation of metaphors has been doing its work on our subconscious for a few pages, or that a sudden shift in verb tense is weird and thus perhaps significant. Keeping...

... would not accept “corrections” from a press any more than you would. Besides, the press told me that you had given them the list; and it was full of mistakes in English. That is, you wanted “dispersed” on p. 17 changed to the present tense. It is in the present tense: this is a past-participle used...

...-informed: “Certes, ce ne serait pas ennuyeux de les voir ‘en passant,’ car grâce à eux, si on lit un livre ou un article, on connaît ‘les dessous des cartes,’ on peut ‘lever les masques.’ Malgré tout, le plus sage est de se tenir aux auteurs morts” (CG 66). The gnomic present tense in these lines denotes...