MERINDOL ET CABRIERES - VAUDOIS, GARRIGUE, PERMIS DE TUER

En vidant l'appartement de sa mère, l'auteur tombe sur un vieux carton poussiéreux. Il s'interroge sur son contenu. Il y découvre alors le passé militaire de son père, prisonnier, et de son oncle, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale au travers de lettres et de pièces militaires inédites. D'apparence anodine, ces documents révèlent bien plus que ce que les mots expriment...

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 .

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.

Lord Jim represents a watershed in Conrad's output to the extent that it is a transition from the early Malayan phase of Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the islands, with their exotic setting in which an isolated individual tries to survive in a hostile environment, to the more political novels of Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, in which the position of the individual in society and its ethical implications are closely examined. In the present study the emphasis is laid on the centrality of the tragic as a mode of structuration of the text, and on the spectral modalities of writing which give the book its unmistakable modernist ring.