Contenu du sommaire : Couleur(s) d'Amérique

Color is a central epistemological issue in photography. This article looks at the emergence of the use of color in creative American photography in the 1960s-1980s, focussing particularly on the works of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Joel Meyerowitz. It argues for a sociological and not only aesthetic explanation for the late introduction of color in creative practices, and suggests that the fast development of color photography paradoxically indicates a distancing with reality and a crisis of the faith in the power and meaning of objects.

Whatever the personal, historical, and ideological motivations, naming places identifies them and occasionally highlights their distinct geographical features. Whereas Kentucky's Bluegrass and Colorado's White Mountains testify to a pragmatic spirit, more eloquent names such as Alba Mountain and Anthracite Creek indicate the perception 19th century settlers must have had of their environment. With Baton-Rouge recalling the French-Indian past, and Colorado, the Spanish conquista, American toponymy exhibits more than linguistic variations as it also raises the delicate issue of assimilation. In addition, with such patriotic colors as the “red, white, and blue,” the question might be asked as to how, and how significantly, they have been bestowed upon the land through the naming process. Relying on place names dictionaries as well as American studies related to the naming process, the present paper focuses on the motives for giving color names to places, with a focus on the differences between subjective and realistic interpretations of the environment. A final interpretation considers the question of how America's colors find a symbolic equivalent on the maps.

In Rabbit Redux, Updike tackles the political, social, racial and gender upheavals of the late 60s, a period “which made us stare at our bloody hands and confront the rapacious motives underneath the tricolor slogans and question our favored-nation status under God.” Considered by its author “the most violent and bizarre” of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, Rabbit Redux fuses history and fiction in an apocalyptic narrative. Using the original 1971 hardback cover (with a background of red, grey and blue stripes) as its starting point, this essay focuses on the semiotic use of chromatic values and color imagery that transforms this chronicle of troubled times into a visionary happening: first, the fading of the starless banner in the spectral blankness of this summer of the moon; then the transformation of the green pastures of America into the deathly emblem of a world at war, at home and abroad; and finally the crossing of the color line in which the black man becomes the white of the page. The novel's ambiguity culminates in an open, suspended, interrogative ending which maintains the reader in the grey zone of an unstable and complex truth.

The Last of the Mohicans defines the colour red as an embattled imaginary site for negotiating political and aesthetic claims. While devising narrative tactics which eradicate the “Red Skins” from the national landscape, this “Narrative of 1757” fantasizes in retrospect the advent of an all-white nation that could yet declare the legacy of the colour red as the mark of its indigenous character. Aesthetically, the novel pursues contradictory aims: if the colour red is foregrounded as the sign of the new nation's vitality, it must nevertheless be subdued, as it conjures up the genocidal violence unleashed by territorial conquest. This study suggests how the romance exposes the myth of a “substantial” colour as an ideological construct supporting the dream of a “natural” nation. It then argues that in scenes of cross-dressing and face painting, Cooper's text, exploring the use of the colour as cosmetics, also becomes the vehicle of metamorphic shapes which defeat the plot's monochromatic scheme.

This paper aims at showing the importance of colours in the work of Tim Burton through the example of Sleepy Hollow, adapted from Washington Irving's classic tale. Indeed, colours enable Burton to highlight the main narrative and formal features of his film. Colours help define and dramatize space, express the contrast between reality and fancy or dream. They are part of the characterization of the main protagonists, in particular Ichabod Crane, and they also partake of the symbolic network of the film. Colours are also referential in a different way as they are a sign, among others, of the rich intertextuality that pervades the film.

The present study analyses Walt Whitman's visual poetics. The poet tries to paint himself as a seer more than as a sayer. Colour, in this regard, enables him to invest signifiers with a new strength and tentatively make the reader fully participate in a language experiment aiming to take poetry away from mimesis to bring it closer to methexis (participation).

Ernest Hemingway mistrusted abstraction: he sought to put into words the experience of the senses without betraying its nonverbal essence. The representation of color is a crucial point in this aesthetic pursuit; but because language addresses the mind, not the senses, color is often used as a semiotic tool of significance in literary texts. In Hemingway's fiction, however, color plays no semiotic part. Drawing its strength from an unusually strong demand on the reader's imagination, the non-semiotic use of color is very potent as a verbal rendition of sensorial experience.