Francophone Literature Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar, edited by Anne Donadey

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar ed. by Anne Donadey Lia Nicole Brozgal Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar EDITED BY ANNE DONADEY Modern Language Association of America, 2017. x + 188 pp. ISBN 9781603292962 paper. When the immortelle Assia Djebar—as members of the illustrious Académie française are known—passed away in 2015, she left behind her more than a half-century's worth of path-breaking work, primarily novels, but also essays, film, theater, and criticism. Already in her lifetime, the Algerian writer had come to be revered as a major figure of Francophone letters and of postcolonial women's writing. If the somewhat lighter tone and themes of her first novel, La Soif (1957), once inspired comparisons with Françoise Sagan's coming-of-age tale Bonjour tristesse (1954), Djebar has since come to be associated with aesthetic and structural experimentation, thematic complexity, and multilingualism. At once deeply personal and historically engaged, her novels and films are often intensely hermetic, so much so that uninformed readers may founder in incomprehension and surrender, unwittingly depriving themselves of the joy of a eureka moment with Djebar. This collection of essays devoted to Assia Djebar's work is thus a most welcome addition to the MLA's pedagogically focused "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series. Here, the Francophone Algerian writer finds herself in the company of Orhan Pamuk, Nella Larsen, and Anton Chekov, among others. In keeping with the series format, the volume is organized into two parts: "Materials" and "Approaches." Part I, written by editor Anne Donadey, consists of a brief essay including a biographical sketch and a section titled "Editions, Translations, and Secondary Sources." Part II begins with a helpful introduction by Donadey, which explains the rationale and structure of the "Approaches" portion of the volume while laying out some of the challenges of teaching Djebar's novels and film. "Approaches" is subdivided into four parts: "Historiographical Approaches," "Interdisciplinary Approaches," "Teaching Assia Djebar in Dialogue," and "Cultural and Linguistic Contexts." The volume is rounded out by an afterword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—a longtime friend and sister-traveler of Djebar's—who reminds us that despite Djebar's longtime association with Francophone literature, "her most important stance is against identitarianism" (157). The contributors, all of whom are women, range from assistant professor to professor emerita, and they teach in a variety of institutional settings, from the small liberal arts college to the large research university. Their approaches to the genre of the "teaching essay" are necessarily varied. Some offer concrete tools, such as examples of pre-reading activities, in-class assignments, discussion topics, and suggestions for papers and projects, framed by meta commentary on how students have typically approached a text and how their ideas and analyses have changed as a result of this approach. The essays by Guyot-Bender, Mortimer, De Raedt, Bourget, and Rice are among the most useful examples of this "how-to" genre, with the cowritten text by Abdo and Bobroff emerging as especially successful in combining practical advice and intellectual reflection. Other essays, however, take a slightly more sidelong approach to the genre, modeling (rather [End Page 264] than explicating) textual analyses, contextualization, and comparative gestures (see Boutaghou, Lachman, and Rahman, for example). It is not surprising that the hermeneutic and pedagogical imperatives that emerge from this volume might be summed up as seeking to make Djebar's work accessible without papering over the work's fundamental inaccessibility. Another, unexpected but equally delightful, through-line is the volume's determination to emphasize literature qua literature. This desire is palpable, implicitly, in all the texts, but explicitly so in Elsayed's essay when she refers, rebukingly, to "the tendency to read historical fiction from other parts of the world as historical documents" (51) and also when Abdo and Bobroff remind us that "a piece of literature is not simply a window onto the real world, a way for us to gain knowledge about the veiled and exotic Other" (55). The collective mission of these nineteen readers of Djebar is condensed into a single declarative sentence in Spivak's afterword: "Literature is not evidence but an instrument for...

Degrowth and the State

This paper addresses a gap in degrowth scholarship: the lack of a theory of the state. Those who write about degrowth advocate radical policy and social change, but have no model to explain how, why and under what conditions such change could come about and what role the state would play in it. This is because they have no theory of what the state is, or when and why it changes. We review for the first time the Anglophone and Francophone literatures on state and degrowth and find both wanting. We propose a Gramscian theory of the state suitable for thinking about degrowth and show with the example of strategizing for a maximum income policy how this suits the degrowth literature’s emphasis on a combination of grassroots and institutional actions.

Exploring New and Renewed Eco‐Spiritualities

AbstractThis essay discusses five recent books, written in French, that contribute to refection in environmental ethics. Francophone literature on the topic is marked by resonant and divergent concerns, and rooted in a geography, politics, and history different from North America and marked by distinctive lines of intellectual influence. Jean‐Claude Eslin proposes recovering ecological resources from the Christian tradition and also suggests imagining new images of God: notably, God as pilote rather than artisan. Dominique Bourg takes a multi‐disciplinary approach that emphasizes the spiritual conditions for relating to the world ecologically and economically; he argues for sobriété (austerity) as a spiritual disposition and an economic model. Baptiste Morizot develops diplomacy as an ethical, political, and spiritual model for cohabiting with wolves, whose return to the French countryside has been highly controversial. Nastassja Martin offers an anthropological study of the indigenous Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska that accentuates the mix of Protestant missional influences and Gwich’in spiritual affirmations and practices at play in their relationship to the nonhuman world. Attending to this literature may helpfully decenter anglophone debates and enrich their conceptual vocabulary.

Au sujet d’une nouvelle histoire littéraire francophone transnationale

Abstract This article considers the Francophone literary canon based on a transnational reception study. It focuses on the circulation of French language literature within the Swedish academic system during the last thirty years. A longitudinal empirical study of bachelor and doctoral dissertations in French between 1986 and 2016 allows the author to examine the dynamics of canon formation and renewal, as well as the role of universities in this process, particularly in regard to the creation of a canon of Francophone literary works. In response to recent scholarly anthologies which have debated the Francophone canon, this study is able to confirm the existence of Francophone classics. Finally, it is argued that further reception studies focusing on areas outwith the Francophone literary system will be of prime importance if the question of the Francophone canon is to be fully assessed beyond the immediate context of the Hexagone.

La fanfiction et le FLE : une manière d’enrichir l’enseignement de la littérature à l’Université ?

The article presents a project where the concept of fanfiction is introduced in a Francophone literature course taught at Dalarna University (Sweden). The project presented in this study is based on the idea of online communities as an informal learning environment. The corpus consists of material gathered during four semesters, when the fanfiction project was introduced as a course assignment to undergraduate students of contemporary Francophone literature. The results indicate that the use of fanfiction in the University’s formalized learning environment creates some challenges. For instance, the fundamental online principle of anonymity and the use of English as the lingua franca of web-based communities cannot be easily transferred to an academic course where French is the target language – and where the students’ achievements must be assessed and graded by the teacher at the end of the term.
 Nonetheless, the overall conclusion of the project is positive. In order to write a fanfiction story based on an existing literary work, the students had to appropriate the original oeuvre; in the sense of incorporating it and making it their own. The work process was partly based on the principle of interaction. Thus, a collaborative learning environment was created, where students constructed knowledge and negotiated meaning together – a type of learning very much rooted in the sociocultural tradition.

On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt by Aimée Israel-Pelletier (review)

Reviewed by: On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt by Aimée Israel-Pelletier Deborah A. Starr Aimée Israel-Pelletier. On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 226 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000795 In recent years, there has been an encouraging increase in publications about the modern history and cultural production of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Aimée Israel-Pelletier's new book On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt provides a much-needed addition to this burgeoning field. Israel-Pelletier examines writings—poetry, prose, and essays—by five authors who were raised in the Francophone culture of the Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie and elites: Jacques [End Page 492] Hassoun, Jacqueline Kahanoff, Edmond Jabès, Paula Jacques, and André Aciman. The works Israel-Pelletier discusses were all composed following the writers' departures from Egypt and the dispersal of the Egyptian Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century. To date, little serious scholarly attention had been paid to the literature produced by Francophone Egyptian Jews as a unique corpus. Egyptian Jewish literature does not fit comfortably in the postcolonial paradigm of Francophone studies, dominated as it is by the Caribbean, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Further confounding classification, two of the writers—Kahanoff and Aciman—ultimately made careers writing in English. In the context of Jewish studies, paradoxically, while French served as the lingua franca of middle- and upper-class Egyptian Jews (and other foreign minorities, as well as the Egyptian elites), little scholarship has been published in English about the Francophone literary production of Egyptian Jews. Israel-Pelletier's book fills this gap. Do not be misled by the blurb on the back cover that tries to market the book as a work of "political and cultural history." While, as the blurb claims, the book indeed "confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust," it is an important work of literary criticism by an accomplished scholar of French and Francophone literature. On the Mediterranean and the Nile would have been stronger if it had fully embraced its scholarly contribution to the discipline of literary studies. In addition to the blurb on the back, the choice of title and the vaguely historical introduction together serve to obscure the disciplinary orientation of the book. This choice does the author, the reader, and the discipline of literary studies a disservice. The author's voice is strongest and her arguments most compelling when she engages in textual analysis. Chapter 1 establishes the writing of Jacques Hassoun as a critical framework for the analysis of the texts to follow. Hassoun, trained as a psychoanalyst, devotes himself both as a clinician and as a public intellectual to treating and writing about the traumas of forced migration. Israel-Pelletier weaves together two strands of Hassoun's writing: his fascination with the concept of "the stranger" and societies' "compulsion to exclude," and his efforts to articulate Egyptian Jewish history and heritage. I found Israel-Pelletier's synthesis and analysis of Hassoun's writings particularly compelling at this cultural moment when we are yet again witnessing the rise of populism and nativism in the West. Reading Israel-Pelletier's book makes me want to dive into Hassoun's The Stranger's Crossing (1995). The second chapter is devoted to Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's 1951 novel, Jacob's Ladder. Kahanoff was educated in French schools in Cairo, where she began her writing career in French. After leaving Egypt, Kahanoff first studied in the United States, then moved to Paris, before settling in Israel in the mid-1950s. Throughout her career, Kahanoff mostly wrote in English—although her most influential writings were published in Israel in Hebrew translation. I have long been partial to Kahanoff's work as an essayist. Israel-Pelletier's refreshing analysis of the novel gives me new appreciation for Kahanoff's artistry as a fiction writer. [End Page 493] In the strongest chapter of the book, Israel-Pelletier offers a lyrical analysis of Edmond Jabès's The Book of Questions. Unlike the other writers she discusses, Jabès is a central figure in...

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Intercultural Concepts in Place Cliché by Jacques Godbout

This article discusses the intercultural concepts conveyed in the essay Place Cliche by Jacques Godbout. The elaboration centers on how the narrator-actor “I” position himself in facing two cultures. This paper shows how the concepts related to interculturalism are elucidated within the text, especially through the narrator-actor “I”. The identity of the narrator that intertwines with two cultures, French and American, is discovered by exposing the symbols that represent the two cultures. The French and American culture that become a part of the intercultural condition is represented in the stereotypes found in the narrator’s focalization and the textual structure. Intercultural concepts such as hybrid identity and in-between identity will be found in the construction of the narrator’s identity. The presence of those cultural factors becomes the foundation that constructs the hybrid identity of narrator-actor “I” which is the Quebec identity (Quebecois). The aforementioned findings are acquired through cultural studies theories of Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall. The method that is utilized is a qualitative method with critical discourse analysis theories by Teun van Dijk and semiotics by Roland Barthes. Keywords: francophone literature; hybridity; identity; interculturalism

REALITY, DREAM AND FANTASY IN THE SELECTION «THE NIGHT OF POLASTRI» BY ALBERT AYGUESPARSE

Aim. The paper examines lexico-grammatical and syntactic specificity of the third novelistic collection by Albert Ayguesparse (1900–1996) – one of the more prominent Belgian Francophone writers of the 20th c. It aims at outlining the more important characteristics of individual novellas in the selection, where the reader comes to know the polyphony of the writer’s short prose, moving from Lyrical Realism through tragic episodes of life to the enigmatic and the fantastic. Research methodology. The article employs a systematic approach with the use of literary-historical and comparative methods. On the basis of these two methods, the specificity of the author’s writing, syntactic structure of the text, individualized language of the characters, places of the light-and-shadow, voice-and-silence, life-and-death playing have been determined. Results. The study provides a wider analysis of the selection’s first novella, viz. «Monica sans tête» [«Monica Without the Head»], as well as the novellas «Les Bottes» [«The High Boots»], full of horror stories; «Le Point rouge» [«The Red Spot»], presenting an interest by the functioning of the internal dialogue; the psychological triptych «Les chasses d’Eros» [«The Hunts of Eros»], «Je me nomme Jérôme» [«My Name Is Jérôme»], «Monsieur Oscar» [«Mr. Oscar»], the mystic in its conception novella «Les Survivants» [«Those Who Survived»]. Research novelty. The article is the first in Ukrainian Literary Studies research into the famous Belgian writer’s novellas, with whose novels the Ukrainian reader got acquainted owing to the translation of his work «Notre ombre nous précède» [«Our Shadow’s Ahead»], published in 1984/1985 on the pages of the «Vitchyzna» [«Motherland»] magazine. Practical value. The article may become the basis for a deeper reading of the work of one of the leading representatives of contemporary Belgian Francophone literature, lexical-stylistic features of the writer’s novellas.

Une poétique des espaces : lecture écocritique des géographies et langages hybrides dans Verre Cassé

Le roman Verre Cassé d’Alain Mabanckou présente une nouvelle réalité de l’Afrique. A travers les écrits du personnage éponyme, le lecteur entre dans la vie quotidienne d'un quartier pauvre à Pointe-Noire, au Congo. Le livre est un effort de donner une voix à cet espace normalement muet ; dans un langage qui est toujours à mi-chemin entre le français littéraire et le français populaire, Verre Cassé représente une manière de tenir compte de plusieurs espaces, tant global que local. Cet article se propose d’analyser le rôle que joue le langage dans cette ouverture aux complexités du monde et dans la mise en relation de plusieurs espaces géographiques. Verre Cassé semble nous donner un moyen d’existence « entre-deux » : entre le français littéraire et populaire, entre une prise de conscience locale et un engagement plus global. Cet article se propose donc d’examiner le rapport entre l’espace local (dans le quartier Trois-Cents) et l’espace global (le Congo, la France, ou le monde en général) dans Verre Cassé. Dans quelle mesure peut-on dire que le langage permet un enracinement et une ouverture en même temps? À partir de quelques notions géographiques de base, cet article analyse le roman de Mabanckou comme une poétique des espaces. Enfin, en examinant les théories de Glissant (Relation, Tout-monde, mondialité), l’étude explore la vision originale de l’espace que propose Mabanckou tout en démontrant la pertinence des approches écocritiques portant sur des littératures francophones.

Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature (1997–2017)

Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature (1997–2017)1 Helena Duffy In 1995, during the commemorative ceremony marking the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vél’hiv’, the newly elected French president, Jacques Chirac, implicated the broadly understood French state in the deportation of some 76,000 Jews to the Nazi concentration and death camps. Prior to that, French authorities blamed the Jewish tragedy largely on the Germans and in any case abstained from singularizing it, instead preferring to subsume it within the broader phenomenon of la déportation. In contrast to subsequent postwar administrations, including that of his immediate predecessor, François Mitterrand, Chirac broke with the Gaullist myth of the French as uniquely heroic resisters. Then, with Lionel Jospin’s 1997 speech, the Left itself took distance from Mitterrand’s position. Finally, the leading politicians’ iconoclastic pronouncements were followed by other acknowledgements of institutional responsibility: in 1997 the Catholic church asked for forgiveness for its wartime silence, and a police officers’ union offered an apology for the actions of their predecessors (Clifford 206–07). The recent intensification of French and Francophone writers’ interest in the Jewish tragedy, which is the subject of the present special issue, can certainly be attributed to the encroaching absence of survivors, the influence of thriving Anglophone Holocaust fiction, or the growing threat of negationist tendencies as well as, more broadly, of racism and populism. However, the afore-described breakthrough in French memory politics must be regarded as an important factor in—if not as the trigger of—the recent surge of French-language Holocaust literature. Customarily connected with Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial novel, Les Bienveillantes (2006),2 this surge can be traced back to Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder published nine years earlier. It can hardly be a coincidence [End Page 1] that Modiano, who had been chiefly interested in the ambiguities of the Occupation (Morris 22), wrote his only Holocaust-themed novel so far in the immediate aftermath of Chirac’s momentous speech. Moreover, as the narrator’s search for information about the eponymous Paris-born Jewish teenager develops, his tone becomes increasingly critical of the French state that he overtly blames for the arrest, internment, and deportation to Auschwitz of Dora and her parents. Since the publication of Modiano’s Dora Bruder many other French-language writers have taken up the subject of World War II and the massacre of Europe’s Jews; apart from Littell’s already-mentioned monumental novel, recent French-language narratives about the Holocaust include Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente (1998), Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara (2002), Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck (2007), Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence (2009), Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010), Arnaud Rykner’s Le Wagon (2010), or David Foenkinos’s Charlotte (2014). The present issue of French Forum takes stock of some of the developments in French and Francophone Holocaust literature published over the last twenty years. Without being able to deal with all the texts that appeared between 1997 and 2017, the articles gathered here manage nevertheless to explore writings by all three generations of Holocaust authors. The twelve articles also address a variety of genres, including the graphic novel and poetry, and, looking beyond the borders of the Hexagon, focus on texts produced by European and non-European Francophone writers. The analyses undertaken in this special issue have been contextualized by a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as Marianne Hirsch’s elaboration of postmemory as transgenerational transmission of trauma through objects, stories and photographic images in the context of Holocaust survival. While Hirsch’s theory has proven useful in the examination of the work of second- and third-generation novelists, Michael Rothberg’s study of multidirectional memory as a space where traumatic memories of violence can enter into dialogue with each other, has been helpful in reading Haitian and Mauritian literature. Raul Hilberg’s problematization of the bipolar opposition between victim and perpetrator with the category of bystander has in turn been deployed to interrogate our own position in relation to both Holocaust memory and the crises in...

Représentation des relations franco-maghrébines dans le roman Apocalypse bébé : apprendre la culture française-maghrébine à travers des textes littéraires

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0in">Learning a foreign language cannot
 be separated from literature and culture. One of the definitions of literature
 is a reflection of society; so through literature we can know the real image of
 society as well as the culture. Moreover, by knowing the foreign cultures of
 the countries from which we learn the language, we can not only read, but also
 understand the problems that appear in the texts studied. Similarly, French
 culture cannot be separated from Maghreb culture. The two cultures complement
 each other, later becoming the content of various literary, French literary and
 Francophone literary. The relationship between the two cultures is also part of
 the content of Virginie Despentes' novel <i>Apocalypse
 bébé</i>. Through this novel, we can see an image of the relationship between
 France and the Maghreb people in their social life. Thus, as a learner of
 French, we could know not only French culture through the textbooks published
 by French publishers, but also recognize the French culture associated with
 France both directly and indirectly. Therefore, the literary text entitled <i>Apocalypse bébé</i> can be an alternative
 source of learning French, not only in terms of language attached to vocabulary
 and grammar, but also to know French and Francophone culture so that students
 know the relationship for understanding and analyzing literary works.</p>

Review

Review

The Truth Does Not Exist: An Interview with Writer Antoine Bello

In this interview, French-American author Antoine Bello discusses his work An American Novel (2014) and the role of fiction and literature in creating truth. He also comments on current trends in television and cinema and his support for the Wikipedia Foundation. The interview was conducted after Bello’s presentation at the Winthrop-King conference Stars and Strife: Writing America in Recent French and Francophone Literature at Florida State University.

Queering the city: Spatiality and territoriality of LGBT lives in the cities of Southern Europe and the Global South

Since the 1980s several studies, particularly in Anglo-Saxon and francophone literature, have demonstrated how the settlement and the development of “gay villages” or LGBT neighbourhoods in specific parts of urban contexts around the world (but mostly in North America and Europe) have given rise to specific forms of living the city and have promoted the vitality of certain spaces, more or less open to the rest of the cities in which they are integrated. With similarities to many other areas t...

Ethnic Disavowal: Political Emancipation and Representation in Najat El Hachmi's La caçadora de cossos

Najat El Hachmi’s La cacadora de cossos (2011) has been described by critics as a failed novel: a failure that, after the great expectations raised by El Hachmi’s first novel, led many to question the state of Hispanophone literature. Although El Hachmi’s L’ultim patriarca had led many to believe that Catalonia’s Amazigh community was beginning to articulate a clear demand for recognition, her re-fusal to embrace this identity in her second novel disappointed critics and public alike. This essay aims to provide much-needed perspective to El Hachmi’s second novel by contextualizing her contentious disavowal of ethnic identity in the post-ethnic drive that has informed much of Francophone literature in the last two decades. I claim that recognition is not a first step towards political emancipa-tion, but rather that recognition and political emancipation are constantly being rearticulated to respond to fluid socio-economic challenges

L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930 by Vincent Lambert

Reviewed by: L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930 by Vincent Lambert Douglas L. Boudreau Lambert, Vincent. L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930. Nota Bene, 2018. ISBN 978-2-89518-585-7. Pp. 444. Québécois literature produced between 1860 and 1930, the province's so-called Dark Age, has acquired a reputation of being both unrealistic and passéiste, too obsessed with patriotic and religious idealism and far too literary to depict life in Canada in a realistic manner. Describing his work as an exercice de lecture, Lambert proposes a re-reading of the writing of this period, suggesting that this reputation may be due largely to what writers of the 1960s needed from their literary heritage. Lambert presents in detail criticism of the period regarding its failure to capture real life, attributing it variously to idealisms that demanded portraits that were beautiful and wholesome, or the inability of European forms of expression to capture American [End Page 214] phenomena, or to an intellectualism that led to seeing the natural world through the filter of literature against the evidence of one's own eyes. In his reconsideration of this literature, Lambert provides a detailed portrait of the literary forms and movements that dominated the era, along with an extensive discussion of the interplay between nature writing and painting, paying particular attention to the nature poems called esquisses. His study focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the works of five authors, Alfred Garneau (1836–1904), Eudore Évanturel (1852–1919), Albert Lozeau (1878–1924), Jean-Aubert Loranger (1896–1942), and Alfred DesRochers (1901–1978). Supported by correspondence and other writing from the period, Lambert reveals a profound preoccupation with representing the real. He argues that the label irréaliste applies, but not in the sense intended by later detractors. In the works under consideration, nature appears even more real by being revealed in unusual ways. A couple of examples should serve as illustration. In the case of Lozeau, whose physical infirmities kept him from close contact with the outside world, Lambert demonstrates that the window of the room in which he wrote was simultaneously a barrier separating him from the world and his connection to it. The chapter on DesRochers highlights the poet's rejection of idealism, crafting portraits of habitant life that are more heroic for their attention to the anti-heroic details of the daily grind. The conclusion focuses on parallels to the writing of Hector de Saint-Deny Garneau, suggesting that the gap between this "dark age" and the modern era may not be so very large. Lambert's writing style is agreeable to read, and his arguments are supported throughout with evidence from critical readings both contemporary to the authors under discussion and more recent. He argues convincingly that the literature of this period merits new reading. Readers who are less familiar with Québécois writing of the period will probably want a cheat sheet next to them as there are a lot of names to keep track of, a consequence of Lambert's objective to ground his re-reading in the literature's historical context. Scholars who study the connection between francophone literatures of North America and Europe, those who study Québécois literature in its American context, ecocritics, and others will find much here that is of interest. Douglas L. Boudreau Mercyhurst University (PA) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

On the path to self-discovery. New meanings in the novels of the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou "Blue White Red" and "Memoirs of a Porcupine"

The article analyses the literary work of the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou as the first one in African Francophone literature to implant autofictional writing into traditional everyday writing context. In this article, the analysis of Alain Mabanckou’s novels is made for the first time in African literary studies, both Russian and foreign. The author emphasises the novelty of the writer's style, which is expressed in the strengthening of subjectivity, in the accentuated introduction of the autobiographical element into the fictional text. The article points out one of the strongest points of Alain Mabanckou creative writing – the subtle psychologism, which distinguishes him from other Congolese writers, his amazing ability for a metaphysical perception of life. In the opinion of the author of the article, Alain Mabanckou intellectually elevates above the typical for Francophone African writers description with its clichéd images, typical situations and features of local flavour.

Translingualism in Francophone Writing from South Asia

French is a South Asian language. Since the nineteenth century, a number of South Asian authors have written short stories, novels, and plays in French. The corpus of francophone literature from the region resonates with echoes of other languages, such as English, Hindi, and Tamil. Drawing on the work of Steven G. Kellman and Jacqueline Dutton, this article provides an overview of the history and current state of francophone literature from South Asia, paying special attention to the translingual practices of two contemporary Pondicherrian writers, K. Madavane and Ari Gautier.

Rhizomatic Influence: The Antigenealogy of Glissant and Deleuze

To identify literary influences is, conventionally, to build a genealogy—to, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “name one’s parents.” But can this family-tree view of literary influence hold up in postcolonial literature—a body of work that has so thoroughly deconstructed concepts of genealogy? This article turns to a pivotal case of “influence” in postcolonial Francophone literature and philosophy: among Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The latter two writers are thought to have influenced Glissant’s thinking with their concept of the “rhizome,” but the rhizome directly counters such genealogizing as this “influence” would imply. In fact, this article shows, Glissant develops his own version of the rhizome from his very earliest writings, particularly his first poems. An analysis of them alongside Glissant’s subsequent essays and Deleuze and Guattari’s own writing, allows for a more complicated, multidirectional—that is, rhizomatic—theory of postcolonial influence.