Einzelprojekte

For Another Nouveau Roman: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the Formal Turn

How are we to understand the fact that the turbulent decades when France lost its empire coincided with a formal turn in French literature and literary theory? Perhaps by way of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the politics of literature as being political by means of its intrusion in the partition of the sensible world, and not by means of direct commitment. But behind Rancière's theory there is a unified understanding of the notion of world, which is problematic when considering literatures that operate across worlds. This project aims at opening up the Rancièrian perspective by exploring the connections between the French formal turn, known as the Nouveau Roman, and the Francophone African and Caribbean. Interestingly, the resistance to acknowledging connections between the formal turn in French literature and the francophone novel has reappeared recently in the "littérature-monde manifesto" in which a renewed attention to story-telling, linear narratives, and referentiality would characterize a French world literature while formal complexity is considered to be an irrelevant heritage from the 1950s.

In textual analysis informed by narratology and rhetorics of novels written during the 1960s and 70s by authors from different Francophone regions (Nedjma by Algerian Kateb Yacine, Malemort by Martinican Édouard Glissant, Les Affres d'un défi by Haitian Frank Étienne, and Les Soleils des indépendances by Ahmadou Kourouma from the Ivory Coast), the project argues that whereas the vernacular has traditionally been associated with the folkloric, essentialism and a return to the referent (tendencies scorned by structuralism and post-structuralism), imprints of the vernacular in Francophone African and Caribbean novels are in fact stylistic and formal features. As such the project offers a reconceptualization of the vernacular by reconsidering its aesthetic uses.

Quelle der Beschreibung: Information des Anbieters

Forschungsgebiete

World Literature/Weltliteratur, Roman
Nouveau Roman

Links

Ansprechpartner

Einrichtungen

Uppsala universitet / Uppsala University (UU)

Verknüpfte Ressourcen

Projekte und Forschung

World Literatures. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics; Theorising the Vernacular
Datum der Veröffentlichung: 03.06.2019
Letzte Änderung: 03.06.2019