This article aims at browsing the reasons why French-speaking authors of ethnic origin had to “fight” for their place in the Quebec literary pantheon and how they have succeeded in doing it. The battle for the recognition of the immigrant writer has proceeded in parallel to the battle fought in the name of recognition of the immigrant himself in the society. It was, in fact, due not only to the outstanding quality of some of these francophone authors’ works, but also to the socio-political circumstances related to the changes occurring in Quebec since the 1960’s. However, as it has been underlined through the “Affaire LaRue”, the only criteria of recognition of anyone’s text should be the quality of their work, otherwise, we fall into other, endless discourses concerning identity, immigration policies, etc. that take us away from literature.

Key words: Literature, Quebec, immigrant, LaRue, recognition.

This article tackles the issue of alienation in the Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, by Alfred Jarry. To do so, it analyzes a few of the metaphorical islands found in Book III, “De Paris à Paris par mer”. The analysis also posits a link with a lacanian concept: lalangue.

Key words: Alfred Jarry, Jacques Lacan, alienation, Island

This paper shows how the image of the uncanny Flanders, elaborated in the early nineteenth century by Madame de Staël as well as by French writers and voyagers contributed to the specificity of Belgian francophone literature and especially to the creation of the concept of the Belgian school of the bizarre. He examines the impact of the hetero-image on self-image and the role of literature in the formation and perpetuation of the stereotype of Belgium, land of strange. It reveals how Belgian writers used, petrified and propagated this image to build their difference and show their belgité in order to make it a specificity of Belgium.

Our purpose is to study how the island is manifested in the relationship between the movement in space and identity in the Caribbean literary discourse. We took Chamoiseau for paradigmatic case of contemporary writer. Our idea is this: the question of the subject is a way to make a double social and literary attack in the intellectual universe. And subjectivity is only possible by a self‑inner journey to another. This approach remains partial in Elbadawi which itself is limited to the exploration of an ego that suffers. And the conditions of possibility of this approach are threefold and is measured in space possible.

Key words: Chamoiseau, Elbadawi, comparative literature, Island, francophone literature

In the nineteenth century, Paris was an uncertain place due to several causes. The middle-class felt a threat to a society which was being redefined in an unexpected way and lost its traditional marks. Paris, as a mythical and symbolic city, offers then an ideal framework to the detective novel from its origins, kind of novels that spreads the insinuation of the danger in the city. Emile Gaboriau, father of the French detective novel, plays on the fear and the anxiety towards this changing world. The capital presents a dark and scary atmosphere convenient to the mystery and crime. Thus, the lower class is seen as wild and dangerous; the city which spreads out presents blurred and disturbing borders; finally, the night strengthens the dark face of Paris exciting the fantasies and emphasizing the fears.

Key words: detective novel, Paris, nineteenth century, night, crime, border, popular class

Syngué sabour and Maudit soit Dostoïevski by Atiq Rahimi : the Feminine and the Masculine in the Fundamentalist World

The article aims at the analysis of Syngué sabour and Maudit soit Dostoïevski by Atiq Rahimi. The study is concentrated on the ideological construction of femininity and masculinity in the world dominated by fundamentalism and war (Afghanistan civil war in the 90s). The article researches some intertextual relations (between Rahimi and Dostoïevski) and the narrative strategies which represent the relationship between the individual and the political power.

Key words: civil war in Afghanistan, fundamentalism, femininity and masculinity, narrative strategies, intertextual relations.

The goal of this paper is to show how Édouard Glissant’s understanding of Antillean culture and literature evolve from the project of antillanité to the idea of creolization. The former (put forward in Le discours antillais published in 1981), bears the mark of an “insular” perception of the West Indies, but it simultaneously gives birth to some concepts stressing a relational character of the Antillean social and cultural reality. In a more detailed and elaborated form, this “archipelagic” perspective will be in the very center of Glissant’s aesthetic program presented in Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du Tout‑monde (1997), which extend the range of analyzed issues in order to encompass the globalization phenomenon.

Key words: creolization, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, Édouard Glissant, antillanité, cultural transfers, literature and globalization

In 1695 Charles Perrault offered to Mademoiselle, a Grand-niece of Louis XIV, a book calligraphed by a copyist. It contained five “Tales of Mother Goose” and one of them carried the title “Bluebeard”. Originally, Bluebeard was a character from oral tradition stories describing him attacking his successive wives and children. He is also associated with the awful history of Gilles de Rais, sodomite and assassin. Gilles de Rais (or Retz) was a great Lord belonging to one of the most influential French families at the beginning of the 15th century. As a former companion in arms of Joan of Arc, he “supposedly lost his mind at the same time, as his friend was losing life”. The bloody nature of his crimes is obvious, as much as in the story of Perrault, where we encounter dead women with slit throats, attached to the wall, whose bodies “shined with curdled blood”. In literary tradition, the character still arouses interest of writers and undergoes many transformations. Thus, it is interesting to provide a brief overview of this Knight in retreat, alchemist and practitioner of occult arts, “who has committed countless crimes in his castles of Machecoul and Tiffauges, […]” and who was arrested and hanged in 1440.

Key words: Tales, collective memory, literary and historical character, archetype, life story of Gilles de Rais, Alchemy

The article aims to study the evolution of the genre of an epistolary novel in contemporary French-speaking literature (Senegalese, Moroccan and Belgian). It goes without saying that the transformation of the epistolary novel is socially determined. It arises from social changes and the hybrid nature of the genre: the letter as an authentic, even paraliterary form, can overlap with other discursive forms, for example the intimate journal. Indeed, the epistolary form adapts well to the resources of the first-person narration. This is why the article follows a historical-literary approach, which allows for the examination of the evolution of the form as well as recurring themes and motifs. The evolution of the epistolary novel in the 20th and 21st centuries clearly illustrates that so-called “civilizational” problems replace the exaltation of love. This concerns, for example, the problem of polygamy in certain regions of Africa, obesity and finally the war in Afghanistan. The Francophone epistolary novel is an untouched territory. While reconnecting with the European tradition of the 18th century, particularly French, it sets a new trend in the evolution of the genre, which can be defined as epistolary autofiction.

The article aims to analyze L’Écrivain public and L’Enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun, focusing on the issue of hybrydity which is discussed from the postcolonial and postmodern perspective (Bhabha, De Toro). The analysis concentrates on the oriental tale which deconstructs the paradigm of the novel and the autobiography. However, the article also depicts that Tahar Ben Jelloun derives his ideas from the oral tradition so as to, similarly as Jorge Luis Borges, give his works an intertextual and intercultural dimension. Through the nomadic structure of the tale, which is present both in the novel and in the autobiography, the writer rejects the idea of a conservative and monolithic Moroccan society and opposes stereotypes.

Key words: Hybridity, tale, postmodern autobiography, Moroccan novel in French.

The article concerns the place of corporeality in the poetry of a Maurician francophone poet Umar Timol. One can distinguish four main attitudes towards the human body in Timol’s texts: body as an object of worship or – on the contrary – of disdain and condemnation, body as a humanitarian challenge and as an object of self-reflection. The absence of typically Western dualism of physical versus spiritual in Mauritian poet’s philosophy procures a new and exotic perspective for European readers. The author ponders the purpose and motifs which could stay behind such standpoints mainly by analysing the poems in the context of Mauritian culture and comparing them to other Muslim or Indian texts.

Albert Memmi, one of the forerunners of the postcolonial thought, perceived the Jewish condition as an emblem, even an archetype, of any dominated, oppressed, dispossessed condition. The highly specific consciousness of the colonised condition which the Jewish writer manifests seems to be shaped by the centuries-long communal experience, which exceeds the historical and political frames of postcolonialism sensu stricto, as the Jewish identity is stigmatised from its beginnings (conceived of as a narrative conveyed by the biblical tradition) by the experience of oppression and the threat of extermination or assimilation. These transhistorical factors determine to a large extent linguistic strategies typical for Jewish literature written in European (non-Jewish) languages. It is from this perspective that the present article discusses the role of the linguistic superconsciousness of Albert Cohen and Piotr Rawicz, two francophone Jewish writers, whose works — precursory to the postmodern condition — reveal identitarian, ethical and esthetic challenges related to the use of the language of the other in the creative process.

Key words: Jewish literature, linguistic superconsciousness, oppression, postmodern condition.

Currently one of the most controversial writers, Éric Chevillard shapes the foundations and the raison d’être of his apparently ludic aesthetics in a polemic and creative dialogue with the literary tradition. Experimenting in his subsequent texts with narrative forms that subvert generic boundaries and conventional stylistics, he exploits in L’Autofictif the new possibilities offered by the digital revolution. Kept on the web since 2007, his literary notebook has also been published as a book, thus becoming a multimodal project, which perfectly fits the contemporary culture of convergence, based on the interplay between the old and the new media. Playing with the media, Chevillard again proves his anticonformist attitude to conventional patterns and refuses to succumb to the prevailing trends. By situating literature at the borderline between high and mass cultures, he endows it with a new shape in the times, when it is commonly assumed to be doomed to oblivion.

Key words: Literary blog, culture of convergence, narrative experiments, ludic aesthetics.

Nomadism and hybridity (métissage) are two keys words when it comes to Creole island societies. J.M.G. Le Clézio, Édouard Maunick and Ananda Devi of Mauritius all explore memory and language to erase (often constructed) boundaries between past and present, reality and the imaginary, land and sea, French and Creole. It is a way to transgress literary canons. Their poetics favour liminal spaces, a plurality of voices and meanings and an openness to the Other that may offer a new way of reading works written in the in‑between space of exile — a condition becoming more and more common in today’s globalised world.

Key words: Mauritian Francophone Literature; nomadism; hybridity; poetics of liminality

The article investigates into the conflict of virtue and ‘pleasure principle’ in Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923). Throughout his life, the main character of this novel, Zeno Cosini, sees himself confronted with the demand of leading a virtuous life corresponding to the definition given by his social environment. Engaging himself into this project with resolutions which are equally categorical, firm and ready to be turned round to their opposite, more pleasant side, Zeno Cosini denies his inevitable progression on the slippery slope, his resolutions providing the promising basic condition for his various forbidden pleasures, which at the same time allow him to fathom out the borders and limits of good and evil. The more he digresses from his aim, the more he insists on increasingly exacerbated resolutions, for his emphatic obstinacy concerning his project of being “actively virtuous” allows him to indulge more and more in iteratively “last” deviations from his project which is obviously far beyond his possibilites. Nevertheless, Zeno Cosini manages to wash his hands off by making a virtue out of necessity. Thus, strokes of fate (for instance being diagnosed as having a mortal disease) appear to him as a relief or a blessing, and, looking back, he uses his entire life failure as a shelter from further demands of “reason”. In order to justify (also to himself) his recidivous existence, Zeno Cosini pleads the apparent powerlessness of the modern individual in the face of life which appears to him as per se contingent, ambivalent and full of imponderabilities. He thus delegates the moral responsibility to life itself which he judges to be “original”. From this point of view adapted cynically to his needs, Zeno Cosini realizes that what can be conceived as an “illness” is by no means his vice, his recidivism or his bad conscience, but life itself — which can be catered for with a great deal of good will, analyzed and fathomed out conscientiously via transgression — according to him, is nothing but a manifestation of illness — moreover, an incurable and mortal one — for which there is no remedy, but which can at least be truffled with transgressions.

Key words: Transgression, contingency, ambivalence, irony.

The article describes the vision of Corsica emerging from the works of Prosper Mérimée. Known for its picturesque landscapes and the vendetta practiced by its inhabitants, the island became a popular literary motif already in the second half of 18th century. However, Mérimée copes with this “Corsican myth” in a very original way. By deriding the boredom of many young Europeans of his times, he makes them fascinated with the savage island, to really terrify them, afterwards, with its terrible cruelty. Moreover, those who want to forget this traumatic Corsican experience do not manage to do it as the perverse dream has made them addicted to its cursed beauty.

Key words: Mérimée, Corse, boredom, Colomba, beauty, curse, dream

The aim of this paper is to discuss some questions concerning French-Belgian literature between 1881 and 1980. Since 1830, when Belgium became an independent country, controversies about autonomy and dependence of its national writing have involved many authors or theorists, and divided its literary scene. The magazine La Jeune Belgique argued with the old generation of writers and fought against the idea of social art and symbolists’ innovations and exaggerations in literature. Then, some regionalist authors rejected French domination by focusing on local scenery and characters. They were criticized soon by writers forming a group called groupe du Lundi, who claimed the affiliation to French literature. This view was challenged in the 70s and 80s, first, by the notion of belgitude, then, in La Belgique malgré tout.

Key words: Controversy, Belgian literature in French, identity, autonomy, dependence.

On the example of two writers of the African diaspora in France, Alain Mabanckou and Léonora Miano, the following paper examines how the notion of the author can be manipulated by the media and become a generator of controversy. Moreover, it deals with the impact of their media coverage (limited to the Parisian press and Websites) of their recent productions: Black Bazar (2009) and Demain, j’aurai vingt ans (2010) by Alain Mabanckou and Les Aubes écarlates (2009) and Blues pour Elise (2010) by Léonora Miano. This impact is evaluated through the comparative analysis of the writers’ works and perspectives.

Key words: Francophone literature, African literature, French literature, contemporary novel, media device.

The present paper focuses on La Morte amoureuse [Clarimonde] by Théophile Gautier telling the story of a young priest who just before his ordination falls in love with a beautiful and mysterious courtesan. Nevertheless, he neglects his love and sets off to the parish entrusted to him. One day he is asked to visit a dying woman who turns out to be his beloved. Unable to restrain his desire, the priest kisses the dead Clarimonde, who comes back to live. Afterwards, she pays him a visit every night and takes him to Venice where they live a voluptuous life. Unable to stand the double existence of a priest and a young lord, the protagonist accepts to destroy the corpse of his beloved, which ends their relationship. Alternative to God’s love, mysterious Clarimonde, evil or vampire, becomes an interesting concept reflecting the Romantic dreams and
anxieties.

Key words : Gautier, Clarimonde, vampire, Romanticism, God, love, death

Silvia Baron Supervielle’s work brings an original voice to contemporary French and Francophone literature. The work of this writer, born in Argentina but living in France and writing in French, is that of a nomad who has never been uprooted. Her work not only constructs dialogues between two languages, between two continents, but also between poets and painters, between words and photographs, between prose and poetry. Indeed, it is part of the exploration for new forms of poetic novels, autobiographical texts and essay collections. Finally, this work is a great humanist endeavour which, built on the absence of the mother, celebrates fidelity and love.

An enthusiast of Nathalie Sarraute’s writings, Jean-Paul Sartre convinced the author that her first novel Portrait d’un inconnu (1948) would not have found a publisher unless he wrote a preface to it. While underscoring her original writing technique, Sartre used terms and expressions that render the receptions of the novel considerably unfaithful to Sarraute’s intentions. Sarraute repeatedly commented upon it, admitting she would prefer to have written an article about the novel by herself, according to Sartre’s earlier promise.

Key words: Sarraute, narrator, tropism, roman, others.

This article compares the functions of rituals in the novels of Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun (La mémoire tatouée, Harrouda, L’Enfant de sable, La Nuit sacrée). The aim of the study is to show that Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun represent the traditional rituals of the body as elements of a hybrid language (corpslangue). This “language tattooed on the body” expresses the plurality of the North African culture and the contradictions of Moroccan society. It shows the Moroccan individual torn between the loyalty to tradition and the need for transgression.

Key words: Moroccan culture, rituals, tradition, transgression