New Journal: Révue des Études Proustiennes

The Classiques Garnier Publishing House announced the first issue of Révue des Études Proustiennes, a new bi-annual journal devoted to themes and special issues on all aspects of the work of the French author, Marcel Proust. The inaugural issue includes articles by top scholars including Geneviève Henrot Sostero and Florence Lautel-Ribstein. Opening with a chapter on methods, the volume examines titles, semiotics, semantics, orality, lexical challenges in various languages, and intertextuality, and ends with the most complete and up-to-date bibliography of translations of Proust’s works. Current issues can be found in the Literatures and Languages Library’s serial collection in room 200.

The Literatures and Languages Library subscribes to a number of journals on Proust:

The Bulletin Marcel Proust, published by the Society of Marcel Proust’s Friends and Friends from Cambray, whose own review was the predecessor of the Bulletin, may be consulted both in print and online.

From Cambray, let’s move to the Netherlands where the well-known publisher Brill issues Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, an international bilingual review whose goal is to interest scholars and ordinary readers through thematic and regular issues of the journal. Our library holds all the annual issues since it first appeared in 2003.

The Cahier Marcel Proust is another periodical of importance available in our library. Issued by the famous Gallimard Publisher of Paris, this journal covers the personality and work of Proust for the reader of his novels, the scholar, and the student. The Revue des Lettres Modernes. Marcel Proust was ordered by our librarians for the past decade, and is a useful resource for readers interested in criticism and interpretation.

These journals can either be found in the Literatures and Languages Library’s serial collection in room 200 or in the Proustiana Collection, now located in the center of room 225.

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Fear and Loathing of the English Passive

A new study on the English passive has been published. The author is Geoffrey K. Pullum, who has been Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh since 2009. He has written:

“Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.”

The article has been made available online here: “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive,” Geoffrey K. Pullum, epub January 10, 2014, to appear in Language and Communication, 2014.

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