Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

Abstract

This book analyses French Caribbean writing from the point of view of its language and literary form: questions which until recently were somewhat neglected in postcolonial studies, but are now becoming an important area of research. It supplements postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how textual analysis illuminates the political and ideological positions of the writers. The focus varies from individual texts to more general discussions of literary genres and movements. In Part I (‘Genre, Intertextuality, Discourse’) the first three chapters explore the writers’ reactions to their reception by European readers: Tropiques’ ambivalent relationship to primitivism; ‘auto-exoticism’ as diagnosed by Ménil and treated very differently by Chamoiseau and Confiant; the implications of marketing French Caribbean literature as ‘edible’. The fiction of Gisèle Pineau, André and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé and Daniel Maximin is analysed in the remaining chapters. Part II is on Edouard Glissant, whose work on language and poetics has been uniquely influential in French Caribbean literature. The discursive structure of Le Quatrième Siècle relates to its search for a way to recover history; the evolving use of collective narrative voice in Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony expresses the problem of collective identity; and the deconstruction of personal and generic identity is analysed in Tout-Monde. The two final chapters discuss Glissant's theories of how languages interact in a globalized world, and his complex presentation of the relationship between the work and the real in the little-studied late work Une Nouvelle Région du monde. An interview with Condé forms an Appendix.