Foreword
Par Witold Ucherek et Sanja Boskovic et Justyna Bajda
Publication en ligne le 18 février 2014
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Foreword (version PDF) (application/pdf – 202k)
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1The present issue of the Center for European Slavic Studies Revue contains mostly proceedings of two conferences organised at the initiative of the Center for European Slavic Studies (CESS) in 2012 and 2013.
2The first of those academic meetings, whose subject was « Slavic linguistic, literary and cultural itinerary » took place at the University of Poitiers within the international « Languages and translations : Francophony and Slavic itinerary » workshop (1-11 July 2012), an event that gathered approximately 80 students and 20 teachers from nine Central and Eastern European countries.
3The second conference, devoted entirely to the reception of French language and culture in Eastern European countries, took place at the University of Poitiers as a side-event of the 27-29 May 2013 workshop, which provided an opportunity to gather members of CESS from abroad. Its organisation was supported chiefly by the Francophone University Agency (AUF), towards which all members and partners of CESS wish to express gratitude.
4The first part of this issue contains four papers on the position and teaching of French in four Slavic countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Russia and Serbia. Christina Kossogorova brings up the subject of the traditional attachment of the Russians to the French language, always perceived as a carrier of great cultural prestige, and worries about its rapid disappearance from schools due to the predominance of English. Besides, she enumerates several reasons for which it is worth to study French, in Russia in general and at the Uchinskiy Pedagogical University of Yaroslavl in particular. Witold Ucherek briefly outlines the history of French studies at the University of Wrocław, provides a review of the principal fields of scientific investigation of its Romance studies specialists, and discusses the current problems of French studies in Poland. Dragana Lukajic describes the situation of French in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in the Bosnian Serb Republic, and explains the role of the principal promoters of the French language in this region, the most important of which is the French Language and Literature Department of the University of Banja Luka. Finally, Selena Stankovic and Vesna Simovic, after outlining the position of teaching French as a foreign language at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Niš in Serbia, concentrate on the recently created French Language and Literature Department, describing its functioning, academic staff activities and the students.
5The next part, entitled « Inter-linguistic French-Slavic crossovers », contains three papers, each of which is devoted to a different pair of languages. Witold Ucherek touches upon a bilingual lexicography problem: having analysed almost 200 prepositional entries from 16 Polish-French dictionaries, he arrives at a conclusion that their structure hinders their reception and proposes a number of improvements to their internal organization. Dragana Lukajic, who is interested in the problem of verbal aspect in a contrastive perspective, proves that in Serbian, unlike in non-Slavic languages, the Vendlerian implication ‘perfectivity → telicity’ does not occur, and consequently those notions shall be separated in research on semantic aspect in Serbian. Christophe Cusimano, comparing the pronominal systems of French and Czech, reproaches French teachers and course books for paying insufficient attention to the differences in morphosyntactic behaviour of stressed and unstressed pronouns, which results in numerous errors, even among advanced learners.
6The last part, also consisting of three papers, is devoted to various aspects of the cultural impact of French in Central and Eastern European countries. It opens with Justyna Bajda’s thorough study of the influence of the French culture on the Polish culture in several fields of life, such as literature, art or language, at the end of the 19th century. Next, Ksenia Baleevskikh presents a paper on the literary work of the Russian-born French author Andreï Makine, in which she attempts to classify the numerous exoticisms and words carrying cultural presuppositions, and to determine their role in Makine’s writing. The second paper by Justyna Bajda concerns the relations between the works of two artists prominent in the Belle Époque: the Frenchman Eugène Grasset and the Pole Stanisław Wyspiański.