French Literature Reviews - 2026
Victor Hugo and Language
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Victor Hugo and Language, edited by Florence Naugrette and Guy Rosa, Bréal, 2005.
Cerisy Colloquium, August 2002. Groupe Hugo, Paris 7 University.
ISBN 2 7495 0101 6
34 euros.
This volume brings together the proceedings of the "Hugo and Language" decennial conference held in 2002 at the International Cultural Center of Cerisy-la-Salle. It gathered Hugo specialists and researchers from other fields to examine how Hugo operates at the crossroads of language and languages, the written and the spoken, the linguistic and other sign systems. For him, thinking, acting, and creating meant both utilizing pre-existing languages and—through an engagement with their history, their blending, or their collision—inventing a new way of articulating the world, of revealing other things with the same words, and yet-unheard-of words for yet-invisible things.
This volume explores both Hugo's language and language according to Hugo: his crafting of words and sentences, his own voice and that of his characters, contemporary critical judgments on his style, the interplay between his writing and other arts, and, finally, what he considered to be the historical, political, and ontological nature of language. The aim here is to understand how he employed language and his conception of it, in order to grasp the stakes for the writer who, in a "fragment," noted: "Only poets speak a language adequate to the future".
Contents
Where Hugo is seen writing
Myriam ROMAN: The Last Day of a Condemned Man: style versus rhetoric.
Agnès FONTVIEILLE: Apposition, between rhetoric and style, in Châtiments.
Jacques DÜRRENMATT: Commas and blanks: a matter of importance?
Colette GRYNER: Temporal structures in Les Contemplations. The poems of memory.
Yvette PARENT: The word "people" in Notre-Dame de Paris.
Jean MAURICE: Language and signs of the Middle Ages in Mangeront-ils?
Vincent WALLEZ: Dramatic fragments: re-de-composition.
Judith WULF: The polyp and the madrepore as novelistic discursive formations.
Olivier DECROIX: Logics of discourse expansion in the pre-exilic poetic oeuvre.
Where Hugo and his characters are heard speaking
Patricia A. WARD: Victor Hugo's political invective: oath, performative utterance, moral imperative, the case of Napoleon the Little.
Vincent LAISNEY: Verba manent: the spoken memoirs of Victor Hugo.
Françoise SYLVOS: Witticism and short form.
Anne UBERSFELD: The speech of the self in Hugo's theater.
Gabrielle CHAMARAT-MALANDAIN: Language, speech, and knowledge in Ninety-Three.
Philippe DUFOUR: From language to languages: Les Misérables.
Where Hugo's language is judged
Françoise COURT-PEREZ: Gautier reading Hugo.
Sylvie VIELLEDENT: Gibberish.
Marie Françoise MELMOUX-MONTAUBIN: From nonsense to insenséisme: Hugo's language read by the Decadents.
Where one moves from one art to another
Chantal BRIERE: Interwoven architectural structures and novelistic characters.
Olivier BARA: The language of Hugo's prose dramas and the language of melodrama.
Florence NAUGRETTE: Pantomime and tableau.
Brigitte BUFFARD-MORET: Toward a definition of the Hugolian song: an essay in stylistics and versification.
Hervé LACOMBE: "What music deposits along Hugo's verses." Decomposing / recomposing: the musician's action on the poetic text.
Where one learns what this thing called "language" is
Alain VAILLANT: Victor Hugo's verse, "like a resonant shred".
Françoise CHENET-FAUGERAS: Silence or the "mute problem".
Franck LAURENT: Language and Nation.
Claude MILLET: History of the language.
This volume gathers contributions from the decennial conference held at the International Cultural Center of Cerisy-la-Salle, bringing together scholars to examine the multifaceted dimensions of Victor Hugo's linguistic practice. The collection investigates how the author engages with the boundaries between the written and the spoken, the interplay of various sign systems, and the dynamic relationship between pre-existing linguistic structures and innovative creation. By examining his poetic works, novels, and dramatic writings, the contributions address both the technical craftsmanship of his style and his broader theoretical reflections on the nature of expression.
The essays are organized into several thematic sections covering stylistic choices, character speech, contemporary reception, intersections with other arts such as music and architecture, and philosophical conceptions of language in relation to history and the nation. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and scholarship dedicated to Victor Hugo may find this collection of conference proceedings a useful reference. The volume offers diverse perspectives on how the writer conceived of language as a vital force capable of addressing the political, historical, and ontological stakes of his era.