See the Bulletin society website: Bulletin de la Société J.-K. Huysmans

Table of contents of No. 104:

Bulletin of the J.-K. Huysmans Society No. 104, 2011

Dimitri ROBOLY. Huysmans between good and evil…3
Philippe BARASCUD. Gothic man against classical man. Huysmans, Worringer and the Greek heritage…15
Ionna CONSTANDULAKI. Spiritual and aesthetic interferences in Huysmans' writings on art…29
Dominique MILLET-GÉRARD. Huysmans and Christian art: the imprint of Montalembert…37
Ion ZOTTOS. Esoteric Huysmans or Éso-Sati….rique?…51
Henri BÉHAR. Specificities of Against Nature…69
Ioanna PAPASPYRIDOU. Huysmans and the surrealists…85
Daniel GROJNOWSKI. A burlesque tale: Monsieur Bougran's Retreat…93
Iphigénie BOTOUROPOULOU. Greek Aestheticism and fin-de-siècle writers…101
Gaël PRIGENT. Huysmans and French writers of the 20th century….107

This brochure publishes the proceedings of the Athens colloquium on December 7 and 8, 2007, on the occasion of the centenary of the death of the author of Against Nature.

Read the digitized text of Against Nature

Download the PDF of Henri Béhar's intervention

[At the Athens colloquium, this communication had the form of a presentation of thirty-three slides commented orally. The simple reproduction of a sequence of images under PowerPoint having no meaning in a journal, I resolved to publish a continuous text, at the risk of freezing what was originally only a reading proposal bearing on computer-assisted analyses.]

These remarks result from the research and reflections of the Hubert de Phalèse team (Paris III-CNRS) which, for the occasion, produced a work intended mainly for candidates for the 1972 agrégation competition. This group, thus named in reference to the author of a Bible concordance published in the 17th century preceded by the instructions he considered indispensable to provide coherent work.

This Cap'Agreg collection proposes to provide the student preparing for teaching competitions with the materials most directly useful to his work, in the field of literary studies, provided by currently available computer tools (databases, digital optical discs, text analysis software). In each work, he will find pre-processed computer data that, otherwise, would require extra preparation. Concerning J.-K. Huysmans' Against Nature, historical information on the period, writers, genres and literary themes are gathered; fact sheets on vocabulary structure, period words (decadence, neurosis, hysteria, fin de siècle), on the main themes of the work. In addition, in Comptes à rebours, one will find a glossary doubled by a concordance of rare or difficult words, a florilegium of opinions expressed on Huysmans and the character of des Esseintes, a bibliography and the index of proper names that was missing from the reference edition. Thus one can guard against the three sins that generally taint literary studies: anachronism, emanatism, confusion of the social self with the writing self. An ambition that, beyond competitions, should concern all lovers of Belles-Lettres concerned with opening up to new technologies.

The Librairie Nizet having closed its doors definitively, the work is no longer available at this sign, but it can still be found in good bookstores. You can read it in digital version here:

Comptes À rebours | Henri Béhar (melusine-surrealisme.fr)