By the turn of the century Claude Simon had written fourteen novels and published a variety of shorter works including two volumes of photographs. His production spanned nearly sixty years, from Le Tricheur, begun in 1941 and published in 1945, to Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). Like Les Géorgiques and L'Acacia, which preceded it in 1981 and 1989, Le Jardin des Plantes is a work on a grand scale, at once a personal memoir and a sweeping historical fresco. Like them, it recapitulates many of the main themes of his oeuvre, reworks familiar incidents and motifs, and rewrites his literary and personal past. It also offers new insights into Simon's own conception of the relationship between autobiography and fiction, of that between his novels and the nouveau roman, and of his place in literary history. Thus Le Jardin des Plantes invites Simon's readers and critics to reflect anew on the whole turning constellation of his work in the light of this bright new star. In this spirit was the present collection of essays conceived: contributors were invited to look back over Simon's work and to open new avenues suggested by Le Jardin des Plantes. A number of the essays in this volume were given their first airing at a conference held in London in May 1999. It had been hoped that Claude Simon would attend the conference. In the event he was unable to do so; the trace of his intention is to be found in the encouraging and very generous message that precedes this introduction. The bearer of that message was Madame Simon, whose acute questioning sharpened the focus of various contributions and who in turn answered questions about just how in practice many of Claude Simon's later novels have been written, from manuscript, through successive typescripts – typed and discussed with her – and on to the correction of proofs. The purpose of this introduction is to set the volume in the broader context of Simon criticism and to give an outline of its contents.

Consideration of how in practice Simon's novels are written has not always been a characteristic of criticism devoted to his work. Indeed this focus contrasts sharply with the critical orthodoxy of earlier years. Within France, Simon's novels were for long seen in the context of the nouveau roman.

The role of the references to Poussin's painting in the work of Claude Simon is a familiar topic in the critical corpus. Stuart Sykes, Celia Britton and Michel Bertrand have provided penetrating commentaries on the role of Poussin's Landscape with Blind Orion in Simon's fiction and aesthetics, while Jean Rousset, Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, Mária Minich Brewer and Else Jongeneel have all offered subtle interpretations of the role of the description of The Victory of Joshua over the Amorites in La Bataille de Pharsale. My own publications on the topic have focused on the formal and thematic similarities between Simon's oeuvre and that of Poussin and Cézanne and the metafictional and generative functions of the description of certain paintings. The publication of Le Jardin des Plantes in 1997 established a new intriguing link in the Simon–Poussin chain and, of course, posed new interpretative problems. Among other references to Poussin, this novel incorporates a substantial description of his early Plague at Ashdod (JP, 106–07). On the most obvious level of interpretation, the description of The Plague contributes to the development of several themes that Simon shares with Baroque art and literature, most notably, order and disorder, the body and the senses, and death, decay and morbidity. While the tracking of these familiar themes in a new text offers the Simonien the undeniable pleasure of recognition, this article will focus principally on the contribution that the description of Poussin's painting makes to the development and foregrounding of a number of other issues, which are perhaps less striking on an initial reading of the passage, but which constitute important thematic strands running through Le Jardin des Plantes. Thus, the first section of my analysis will suggest, through an examination of the parallels between the subject of Poussin's painting and a number of other sections of the text, that the description of The Plague at Ashdod is part of a much more general meditation upon faith, the history of religion and the revisability of ‘divine truth’. The second section will argue that the relationship between some of the figure groups in the painting not only reflects the communicative gulf between S. and several of the other characters in the novel, but also draws attention to the contrast that is implicitly established, through these social encounters, between various types of functional discourse and écriture.

Aims

Using French Vocabulary is designed to provide students of French with a comprehensive and structured vocabulary book which can be used at all levels of undergraduate French programmes. To the dual or single honours student, it offers broad coverage of the concrete and abstract vocabulary relating to the physical, cultural, social, commercial and political environment, as well as exposure to commonly encountered technical terminology. While the principal target audience is the university or college student, many of the units could also be readily adapted to and integrated into ‘Language for Special Purposes’ courses.

Vocabulary acquisition is often a fraught issue for both teachers and learners of languages. No language teacher would dispute the importance of setting realistic and measurable learning objectives. However, while the many excellent language textbooks which have been published in recent years provide a wealth of authentic target language materials and co-ordinated exercises, the student's lexical exposure often remains limited to the vocabulary which ‘crops up’ in the texts and recordings studied in class. Many students devote considerable time and effort to the compilation of vocabulary notebooks in order to supplement classwork and to fill gaps in their knowledge, but, by its nature, such supplementary work is very time-consuming and somewhat erratic in its outcomes. Furthermore, students are often disheartened not only by the sheer labour involved in vocabulary notation, but also by their uncertainty regarding what they are expected to know and what they can expect of themselves at a given stage in their university or college course.