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Régine Robin

To start with a personal remark concerning my first encounters with Régine Robin, this short paper will touch on the main topics she concreted in her writing, as for example, her preoccupation with memory, loss and obliteration of historical and ideological traces in Germany, especially in Berlin after the Wall came down. Her critical attachment to Berlin and Germany is one of her major themes and takes up a large part in her work as can be seen in Berlin chantiers : Essais sur les passés fragiles (2001) and Un roman d’Allemagne (2016).

In all her writings, Régine Robin regularly pays tribute to her favorite companions: among them, there is a particular emphasis on Jewish writers or authors who vaguely claim Jewish origins. First of all there is Kafka, whose book is on the table of a black and white picture of Régine, Paul Celan, the two Roth (Jozef and Philip), Romain Gary, philosophers Steiner, Derrida, Arendt, and Nobel laureates such as Patrick Modiano and Emile Ajar (Romain Gary). The last one preoccupied her in the last book she published: Ces lampes qu’on a oublié d’éteindre, but nobody seems more prominent in her formation and vision on literature than Georges Perec. Indeed, the famous member of OuLiPo (founded in 1960) is sharing multiple things with Robin: first of all, both are hidden children (she is three years older than Perec), second, they grew up in the same “arrondissement,” and thirdly, both practice literature as a way to keep both the memory of the past alive and to transcend its traumatic nature. Literature is never “Spielerei” but must be innovative and it is this last domain that I illustrate as brilliantly “conversive.” Both intersperse the places of everyday life with their own “memories” and take solace in music and movies when writing is too much a burden. Both think about the future of the arts, on the impact of modern life and the invention of the personal computer. The relationship between jazz and its mirroring effect in the narrative (the sudden breaks, the repetition and improvisation) are corresponding tools that alleviate the pain and kill the void of everyday life. In that respect, Dylan (in Cybermigrances) and the list of famous jazz-[wo]men in Je me souviens (Perec) are worth “pereckoning”… between the principle of free jazz (creation) and “contrainte” (foundation of OuLiPo) both authors navigate brilliantly.

In order to fully comprehend the vast extent of Régine Robin’s knowledge, one must engage with all of her works. Spanning across various genres including essays, critiques, history, linguistics, and sociology, her body of work is a blend of everyday-life experiences and historical events. However, her literary style enables readers to discern the intricacies of this complex figure. By examining her novel La Québécoite and the relationship Robin established with the literary institution in Québec, we can form hypotheses on why its reception was controversial and limited. The novel’s style serves as a significant introduction to literature and, as an author included in the category of “écritures migrantes”, Robin critiques the meaning of the concept, revealing its essentialism and exposing its underlying biases. This analysis then shifts focus to the Italian reception of Robin’s work, and the possibility for her novel to gain recognition in Italy.

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.

In the article, the author analyses the fantasy elements noticeable in some of Ananda Devi’s novels. In her first novels as well as in her recent ones, the writer resorts to solutions from the fantasy genre. In L’Arbre fouet, Moi, l’interdite, La Vie de Joséphin le Fou, Pagli, Soupir, Indian tango, Les Jours vivants, Manger l’autre and in Le Jour des caméléons, the Mauritian novelist presents mysterious incipits and open-ended, dreamlike endings, introduces hybridised, often insane characters half animal half human, describes metamorphoses and transformations of man into animal, mentions imaginary sobriquets, ghosts. The aim of the analysis is also to try to explain for what purpose the writer uses fantasy in her work. In the analysis, the author also draws on the research of T. Todorov, P.-G. Castex, L. Vax and V. Tritter.

Published in 2006, Comment peut-on être français ? by Chahdortt Djavann, a partly epistolary novel, evokes the figure of Montesquieu’s Roxane. This article proposes an analysis of the representation of exile inscribed in three symbolic spaces: that of language, that of the female body and that of text. It is around these three concepts that this work is organized to study the alienation of the female subject in a Franco-Iranian intercultural position.

François Blais, one of the most interesting writers of the new generation in Quebec, most often places the action of his novels in Mauricie where he was born. What is more, his texts are rich in cultural elements, especially intertextual, that are the part of the author’s game with a reader. All in all, Blais is interested in the banality, the everyday life, often illustrated with the adventures of universal and banal characters, who could come from anywhere. The reader is therefore dealing on the one hand with the novel deeply inscribed in contemporary Quebec culture, on the other hand, the daily life of Blais’s characters seems to be common for all people. The paper focuses on the possibilities of translating François Blais’s novels, in particular on a possible transfer of the specificity of the literature that plays with the universal and the local.