2009 / 15 Prospero. Rivista di Letterature Straniere, Comparatistica e Studi Culturali

The wooden panel kept in the church Saint-Jacques-Majeur in Bar-sur-Loup, features both images and a text written in a beautiful textura. The article discusses the editions of the text by Chabaneau, Schneegans and Maillard. What is missing, is a reading focused on the parallels between images and text. The study analyses the verses, while simultaneously looking at the images. The author proposes to look at the text as articulated in four stanzas of eight verses each, except for the second stanza, with its nine lines. This reading enables the elucidation of some problems regarding both the images and the text. Moreover, the suggested division integrates the text in a group of analogous productions: danses macabres are characterised by a structure of stanzas of eight verses. Finally, the author individuates some elements, especially linguistic ones, which could help in the attribution of the panel. According to the author, the 'Dance of Death of Bar' belongs to the production of the Waldensian culture (which experienced an epoch of great blossoming between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th Century), and it was created in a place different from the one where the panel is now preserved.

The essay tackles the concept of ‘cultural hysteresis’ through examples drawn from "Âne" by Driss Chraïbi. This phenomenon emerges when authors belong to two different cultures (and languages): in certain situations, a word or an expression can be loaded with two different meanings that exist in the two languages and in the two corresponding cultures. The term ‘hysteresis’ is used, because if the author writes the word in the meaning number 1 (of language number 1), the meaning number 2 (of language number 2) remains latent and manifests itself later, “lagging behind” (from the Greek ‘hysteros’, “lagging behind”). The specific case taken here into consideration revolves around the situation in which a given culture, after having been permeated by another (the case of colonisation), does not regain its initial form after the withdrawal of the second one. The article examines how the fantasy aspect in Âne could be described as an effect of the ‘cultural hysteresis’.