APHORISMOS

SCRIPTURA A Hint of Scruples

Foudil DAHOU — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The question isquite simple, both in its formulation and in its expression: doesgreatLiteraturestill have scruples at a time when, seduced by the Grand Prizes, literarywriting has transformeditself, has become the hollowvessel of Contemporaneitywith a depraved conscience

Translations and Children’s Literature Issues and Strategies

Saïd SAÏDI — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Abstract— Even as education wins notable battles against illiteracy around the world, reading, which is just as essential as literacy itself, if not more so, is steadily declining. Children's literature, the first constructive step in a child's intellectual development, seems to be losing ground to the image-based culture and, above all, the fascination of the screen. Paradoxically, educators, educational psychologists and some parents are well aware that reading is the best language school imaginable, and writers are its unrivalled teachers.

So why this almost total desertion of texts? The increasingly hectic pace of life, no doubt, increasingly busy school curricula, and the chronic unavailability of parents seem to be the objective causes

When Children’s Picture Books Become Masters of French Learning The Capacity for Agency

Dalila ABADI — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Children’s picture books are an essential educational tool for learning French. By combining text and images, these books offer an immersive and stimulating approach that facilitates vocabulary acquisition, grammatical structures, and linguistic skills. This study examines how picture books contribute to learning French by analyzing their linguistic, pedagogical, and cultural benefits. Through concrete examples, we highlight their role in language development, learner motivation, and cultural transmission. Based on theoretical references and field studies, this research demonstrates that children’s picture books are not just reading materials but powerful learning and interaction tools

UntranslatableTerms Intercultural Nuggets

Saïd SAÏDI — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

There are terms and expressions that defeat the most inventive translators. But remains the saving recourse to the infrapaginal notes which, when they explain that the concept, the idea, the reality designated by this or that other term is untranslatable, and when they try, somehow, often using from a long digression what is involved, open up intercultural paths to no other similar in the enrichment they bring in the translated languages, in the readers or why not listeners, non-native. There emerges the immense contribution of translation, which thus transcends this transposition from one language to another, in this step towards discovery, towards true enrichment, showing to the subjects of the different linguistic communities the fundamental differences on which they are built. the great senses, the true semantics, inexhaustible sources of wonder, but also of questioning and objective attempts at understandings, adhesions and civilizing impulses projected towards the other, the others in what they have of specific, authentically specific. Bridges will thus be thrown between the peoples who will surpass all the real bridges made much more to separate than to reunite.

These terms impossible to translate are true nuggets of knowledge giving the full extent but also the need for translation, because far from all the narcissistic and ethnocentric affirmations, the men will understand, in this global village increasingly cramped and where reigns more and more deafness, that they have so much to learn from each other, especially through what differentiates them.

It’s the Childhood of Art “Treat Me like a Child”

Foudil DAHOU — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

In a contemporary world of extremedeculturation and a modern society of absolute gratification, tyrannizedauthorshiptakes refuge in the infancy of art – the cocoon of the primitive text. By fusing percept, affect, and intellect, the singular nature of the act of writingthus opens onto the aesthetics of a primordial, original, and inaugural word; a guardian of authentic traditions thatbygoneerassought to pervert and future times willstrive to corrupt, while the presentage, lost in the labyrinths of post-truth, struggles to soothereactionary or progressive consciences. Over the course of time, flowingcareless and implacable, there has emerged a darkpoetics of tropism in whichauthorship and readershipmirror, encounter, and imprisonthemselves at the veryheart of literality.

On the Edge of Narrative Rupture Le Pendule de Foucault by Umberto Eco

Saïd SAÏDI — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The omnipresence and “obviousness” of narrative make it a mode of expression that becomes invisible and fades into the background behind what it recounts. But sometimes – when a semiotician takes hold of it – narrative recounts that it is in the process of recounting.

And this mode of narration takes centre stage and partially or almost completely obscures the facts being recounted. This atypical case is admirably portrayed in Foucault’s Pendulum. Indeed, after working as a theorist, critic and semiotician, Umberto Eco turned to writing and achieved phenomenal success with Le nom de la rose. He repeated this success with Le Pendule de Foucault. In it, he reveals his full talent as a semiotician. By stretching the narrative to its limits. Extending it beyond all measure. Taking it to the brink of collapse. But preserving its integrity thanks to an ingenious narrative technique. That of memory. However, he does so with a specific twist: cultivating erudite digression in every nook and cranny of the story. The result is a fabulous narrative, labyrinthine to perfection, and a true introduction to semiotics.