French Literature Reviews - 2026

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, Le Palimpseste mémoriel
Other Literary Studies

To remember with and for texts, to write, to listen, to see, and also to translate—such is the subtle poetics woven throughout Le Palimpseste mémoriel offered to us by Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio.

A single gesture intertwines the threads of every aesthetic encounter, where a shared quality of attention connects them in transparency, as language turns into music and the image opens up to the interstitial. What does "modernism" mean here, to require the plural, yet from Virginia Woolf to Luchino Visconti, Walter Benjamin to Amos Oz, Anthony Minghella to Katherine Mansfield, Sigmund Freud to Pablo Neruda, a return is traced, a shared condition is heard, and a common experiential layer unfolds? What do these plural yet singular modernisms approach, that demands such a quality of listening, such memorial attention?

From chapter to chapter, modernism and that which it leaves in its wake circulate from novel to film, from symphony to poem, returning to us and altering themselves to better express what the reading of an estrangement tracks down. Anachronic intertextuality renews this inner exile, this evasion of meaning, capturing it at the very moment meaning is born—counterintuitively, in a fertile, melancholic displacement.

For modernism must be understood here as an "under-language" awaiting inscription, the negative condition of a meaning struggling to invent itself in a wavering present, whose paradoxical promise can only return as a "memorial palimpsest."

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Table of Contents:

Preface by Catherine Bernard

Introduction

I - "Something pale and questioning like the reflection of a light": translation, recollection, working-through, from To the Lighthouse to Al Faro

II - "From the depths of darkness": photosensitive memory processes in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse

III - The under-language in interpretation: intra-artistic readings of a turn of the century: Freud, Mahler, Visconti

IV - Hester the stranger: memorial intertextuality in Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea, a Woolfian reading

V - "If suddenly you cease to exist": Neruda/Minghella: poetics of haunting in Truly, Madly, Deeply

VI - The hinterland of writing: between childhood and France, reminiscence and journey. Katherine Mansfield's "An Indiscreet Journey"

VII - Turn of the century, turn of childhood: the melancholic enigma of memory: Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin

Coda. The navel of the text: Amos Oz, writing to illuminate maternal melancholy

Bibliography

Name Index

Rooted in comparative literature and aesthetic inquiry, the volume engages with the enduring legacy of modernism across diverse mediums such as the novel, cinema, music, and poetry. By examining figures ranging from Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin to Luchino Visconti and Amos Oz, the study traces how cultural memory operates across artistic boundaries. This intertextual approach situates itself within modern critical traditions that explore translation, melancholy, and the persistence of the past in artistic creation, offering a nuanced perspective on how texts and images converse across time.

The book will appeal to scholars, students, and readers interested in modernist studies, comparative arts, and the philosophy of memory. It offers valuable tools for those investigating the intersections of psychoanalysis, artistic interpretation, and exile. By addressing the subtle mechanisms of recollection and the aesthetic representation of loss, the work invites a deeper contemplation of how contemporary cultural criticism interprets the resonant echoes of turn-of-the-century modernism in literature and the visual arts.