Philip Roth. American Pastoral

Résumé : Sophie's Choice has met a tremendous success since publication in 1979 and has been translated in many languages, including Japanese and Russian; it bas been made into a movie by Alan Pakula, with Meryl Streep in the unforgettable leading rote, and even gave birth to an opera. As usual William Styron gets down to brass tacks with one of the most awe-inspiring themes of the twentieth century: the final solution and the horror of the death-camps. In this bilingual study the emphasis is laid on the complexity of the narrative technique, the link between sexuality and violence, and the entanglement of historical, religious, philosophical and psychoanalytical references that make up the fabric of personal drama and human tragedy that Sophie's Choice represents.

Résumé : Written as the recollection of a 110-year-old woman, "Miss Jane", The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the narrative of African-American history from the Declaration of Emancipation to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Gaines's masterpiece is meant to represent the interpretation of the events of a century through the central character's uneducated but street-wise vision. Carefully built on a historical structure, the book relies on a well-mastered stylistic technique that mixes several literary genres, providing the reader with a deep insight into the African American experience. Inevitably, such central issues as "black pride", human dignity, ethics or the nature of freedom are raised and the reader finds himself actively involved in the reconstruction of a black subject whom "history" had relegated in the footnotes of a "Manifest Destiny" written by revisionist ideologues.

A sequel to Rock Springs and Women with Men, the collection of short stories entitled A Multitude of Sins was published in 2001 and immediately achieved worldwide recognition. If this series of ten short stories seems to feature adultery, it would be a major mistake to believe that the stories can be reduced to what is actually a side issue or a pretext to something else, sometimes of much greater importance. As often with great writers, Richard Ford tackles several other topics along with the sin of unfaithfulness which is a base camp from which to go further up into the knowledge of human deficiency, lack and want. Pondering these sins, Richard Ford lays them all bare while often unveiling the issue of the story right from the beginning, instead of cautiously preserving it as a last chance literary trick to pull it off at the fast moment. Showing insight through observation, his writing is deceptive in as much as it seems natural and easygoing when it requires close analysis and several successive readings to yield up its literary and humane secrets. The comparison some critics have made to Chekhov is not overblown and Agregation students, certainly among the most perceptive readers in the world, should naturally enjoy both reading and studying A Multitude of Sins, pleasure and scholarship being complementary, not antagonistic. The exclusive interview of Richard Ford at the end of the book will certainly be appreciated by Agregation students, who will thus be able to finish off their knowledge of Ford's works. Biographie de l'auteur Patrick Badonnel, former chair of the Agrégation, is full professor of American literature and civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris III). Claude Maisonnat, a former member of the jury of the Agrégation, is Professor Emeritus at the Lumière-Lyon II University where he taught seminars on English and American literature and psychoanalytical criticism.

The Big Sleep was published in 1939 and was immediately labelled as hard-boiled . The New Yorker described it as a terrifying story of degeneracy in Southern California by an author who almost makes Dashiell Hammett seem as innocuous as Winnie-the-Pooh . Chandler, much more than any other detective story-writer in America, has established a tradition of which leading contemporary writers like James Ellroy could be regarded as the inheritors. As W. H. Auden wrote : Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art .