MÉLUSINE

READING JULES LAFORGUE’S COMPLAINTS

PUBLICATIONS DIVERSES

"Reading Jules Laforgue's Complaints, Essay on Cultural Analysis", in Words and Lexiculture, Homage to Robert Galisson, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2003, pp. 335-354.

I first met Robert Gallisson (1932-2020) on the train that took us to or from the Scientific Council of INaLF, in Nancy, where Bernard Quemada had invited us to sit. He was a practitioner of French linguistics, which he taught at the Institute of French Teaching for Foreigners, a constituent unit of the University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle where he invented "didactics of French as a foreign language" and "didactics of languages and cultures". We talked about our respective research which met on the cultural level as well as on the didactics of French as a foreign language (let's not forget that I practiced this teaching for four years at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Place des Vosges in Paris). It is therefore quite naturally that at the time of his retirement, the time of the Homage having come, I proposed the article on the cultural analysis of Jules Laforgue's Complaints (1894) (read here).

See: Hubert de Phalèse The Forging of Complaints on this same site.

WORDS AND LEXICULTURE. HOMAGE TO ROBERT GALISSON, Under the direction of Maria Teresa Lino and Jean Pruvost. With the collaboration of Laetitia Bonicel. At the initiative of Maria Teresa Lino and with the collaboration of Jean Pruvost and Laetitia Bonicel are here presented, thanks to very high quality contributions, the major themes of what Robert Galisson designated under the term "lexiculture" or "pragmatic lexiculture". The concepts that correspond to it have so quickly become essential in the framework of lexicology and reflection on language learning that they deserved, on the one hand, a special issue of the Cahiers de lexicologie (n° 78, ILF, Champion 2001) and, on the other hand, this present volume, both synthesis and homage paid to the one who knew how to give linguistics and didactics tools as innovative and as widely recognized internationally. The works gathered in Words and Lexiculture illustrate, each in their own way and always with relevance, the profound methodological renewal that we owe to Robert Galisson. His international reputation in fact exceeds that of the Director of Applied Linguistics Studies (ÉLA) and the great professor and researcher that he is: it is indeed also based on an elevated form of humanism of which this work necessarily bears the trace.

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This cultural analysis of Laforgue's poems has been reproduced here:
H. Béhar, Essay on Cultural Analysis of Texts. Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2022, Coll.: Theory of Literature, n° 24; chap. Reading Jules Laforgue's Complaints, pp. 33-51.