La pleurante des rues de Prague

Sylvie Germain, La pleurante des rues de Prgue, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

«Cette inconnue, qui donc est-elle ?
Une vision, elle-même porteuse, semeuse de visions.
Une vision avare de ses apparitions. Elle ne s’est montrée que peu de fois, et toujours très brièvement. Mais chaque fois sa présence fut extrême.
Une vision liée à un lieu, émanée des pierres d’une ville. Sa ville. - Prague. Jamais elle n’a paru ailleurs, bien que certainement elle en ait le pouvoir.
Cette femme n’a ni nom, ni âge ni visage. Peut-être en a-t-elle, mais elle les tient cachés.
Son corps est majestueux, et inquiétant. Elle est immense, une géante. Et elle boite fortement.»
(Quatrième de couverture)

MORIS-STEFKOVIC, Milène, « Vision et allégorie dans La pleurante dans les rues de Prague, dans Vision et poésie dans l’œuvre romanesque de Sylvie Germain, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2014, p. 107-123. +++ Monographie

BADRE, Sabine, « L’épiphanie ou l’envers du masque : la quête du visage dans La Pleurante des rues de Prague et Eclats de sel », dans Toby GARFITT (dir.) Sylvie Germain. Rose des vents et de l’ailleurs, Paris, L’Harmattan, p. 109-118. +++ Chapitre de collectif

DOTAN, Isabelle, « Narrer la douleur : La Pleurante des rues de Prague », dans Jacqueline MICHEL et Isabelle DOTAN (dir.), Sylvie Germain et son œuvre, Bucarest, EST : Samuel Tastet Éditeur, 2006, p. 141-146. +++ Chapitre de collectif

GRAMIGNA, Valeria, Dans l’encre de la danse. Roman et danse entre XXème et XXIème siècles, préface de Matteo MAJORANO, Bari, Edizioni B.A. Graphis (Marges critiques/Marigini critici, 6), 2006, XXX-226 p. +++ Monographie

DION, Robert, « Paysages de l’écrivain. Les villes biographiées (Fourvel, Pajak, Germain) », dans temps zéro, nº 6 (2013) [en ligne]. +++ Article de revue

### Résumé
Cet article traite de la ville dans la biographie à la lumière de trois cas de figure reliés à des écrivains. Dans le premier cas, l’analyse d’Henri Calet, Montevideo et moi (2006) de Christophe Fourvel envisage le pèlerinage de l’écrivain sur les lieux arpentés par le biographié. Dans le second cas, il s’agit, à partir de L’immense solitude (1999) de Frédéric Pajak, d’analyser le lieu en tant que scène surdéterminant l’existence des écrivains qui furent amenés à y jouer un rôle. Le troisième cas, sans doute celui qui se rapproche le plus de la biographie d’une ville, est celui de La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992) de Sylvie Germain, où la cité paraît secréter un certain type d’histoires, une certaine mémoire qui émane du lieu sans toutefois s’y réduire.

Abstract
This article focuses on the city in biography in light of three biographical works dealing with writers. In the first example, an analysis of Christophe Fourvel’s Henri Calet, Montevideo et moi (2006) considers the biographers pilgrimages to places frequented by the subject of his biography. The second example is Frédéric Pajak’s L’immense solitude (1999), in which places are analyzed as stages upon which writers made to play a part, therefore overdetermining their existence. The final example, which comes the closest to being a biography of a city, is Sylvie Germain’s La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992), where the inner city seems to exude a certain type of story, to emanate a certain memory that cannot, however, be reduced to it.

Dion, 2013, HTML ###

GÜZEL, Emine, « Une lecture psychanalytique de La pleurante des rues de Prague : la voie qui mène Sylvie Germain de la souffrance à la catharsis », Humanitas: Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi/International Journal of Social Sciences, n° 4 (automne 2014), p. 153-164. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
Abstract: Sylvie Germain, one of the writers of the generation of the post-World War II years, is a contemporary writer who highlights in her novels the events that profoundly influenced nations through the notion of the evil. Her novels follow one another on the same subject and reflect around a collective memory. The author who holds a doctorate in philosophy, probes historical event deeply from their religious, philosophic and literary angles. Her literary universe is made of the concept of evil that has determined the humanity to cry and suffer for centuries. War, crime, murder, rape, incest - each represents the evil. The sufferings and the destructions lived after the evil had only some fatal consequence at that time, but also their effects were genetically transferred to future generations. Freud, who is considered as the pioneer of psychoanalysis, was the first scientist who elaborated the theory of the unconscious. He was then able to explain the causes many mental disorders as manifestations of repressed feelings. Psychosis, considered as a mental disorder, is the unearthing of hallucinatory images stemming from repressed feelings and thoughts. The disorder reveals a disconnect between the internal world and the real life of the individual. The short story of Sylvie Germain, entitled The weeping women on the streets of Prague, presents all the sufferings of the humanity by a narrator who describes the conflict between the unconscious and the conscious through hallucination. We should not forget that the literary texts are documents witnessing the real-life experiences. The present study attempts to show that one of the ways for catharsis is to “write”.

[L’article est en français.]

Güzel, 2014, PDF ###

DEPINOY, Denis, « Les espaces de la mort : faire face à la disparition dans la littérature médiévale et la littérature contemporaine », thèse de doctorat, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2014, 264 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
Can literature be perceived as an attempt to resist the movement inherent in life leading to disappearance? Because displacing death from a temporal perspective to a spatial one could enable man to actively take a stance, this dissertation explores how texts support the construction of spaces as means to accept death. More specifically, it focuses on medieval and contemporary texts to examine if the historical and sociological shift identified by Ariès from tame death in the Middle Ages to forbidden death today can also be found in the literary production of these periods. The dissertation begins with the study of narratives and plays by Marie de France, Cocteau, Maeterlinck, Giraudoux, Ghelderode, Ionesco and Sylvie Germain, all seemingly based on the double premise that circulations between a space of life and a space of death are possible, and that these spaces are geographically and economically connected. They prove to be flawed and impossible constructions, creating what Clément Rosset calls “doubles”, deceiving images of a reality that cannot be represented: they only exist in the space of their narratives. In its second half, the dissertation relies on essays on images by Sartre and Berger to examine the notion of imaginary space in Proust, Germain, Guibert, Michon and Apollinaire. This space, modeled after Blanchot’s literary space, is created through the relationship of an author and a reader via the shared experience of a text. At the intersection of the relationship between reality and images, the psuchē, or essence of the dead person, subsists in a public space structured around the survivors’ subjectivities. In this space, which goes beyond memory, the dynamics of our devenir, as Deleuze defines it, is preserved. Through the exploration of the relations between spaces and texts, a new non-linear temporal model appears in the dialogue between a writer and a responsible reader, a movement within which the impregnable wall of death is at last successfully challenged.

Les oeuvres de Germain étudiées sont La pleurante des rues de Prague et Tobie des marais.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###

PONNOU-DELAFFON, Erin Tremblay, « Histoire de souffrances: Ethics of Remembering and Listening in Sylvie Germain’s La Pleurante des rues de Prague » French Review: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of French, vol. 87, n° 1 (octobre 2014), p. 153-164. +++ Article de revue

YILANCIOĞLU, S. Seza, « Sylvie Germain et une écriture réflexive », Littera, n° 24 (juin 2009), p. 63-68. +++ Article de revue