Documents found
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323.More information
AbstractClaire Martin's autobiography, Dans un gant de fer, provoked a lively controversy when it was published in 1965 because of its sensational revelations on family violence and young girls' education in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution. The book would obviously not have had the same impact if the author had presented her story as a novel. This article analyzes the public and private reception of Dans un gant de fer in relation to the question of referentiality, an element essential to any autobiography, yet one that is difficult to define. In enumerating the passionate stands taken for or against the book's “truth”, and the author's equally passionate replies to her critics, the article emphasizes the book's importance not only as a work of literature but also as a historical document.
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328.More information
Pseudo-translations may not actually be translations in the strict sense of the word. They must, however, reproduce all the characteristics of a translation, and the deception on which they are based causes them to reveal many of the (preconceived) ideas on translation of a given time. The overall literary topos of pseudo-translation merits the attention of translation scholars because it gives expression to translation principles relating to the meaning of translation, to translation issues and the importance attached to translation, while invariably questioning many translation axioms. This contribution will recontextualize two specific cases of pseudo-translation, Andrei Makine's first two novels, La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique and Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu (1992), with a view to studying the reasons for their production, characteristics and effects.
Keywords: pseudo-traduction, Andreï Makine, mystification littéraire, pseudonyme, cliché, pseudo-translation, Andreï Makine, literary hoax, pseudonym, cliché
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329.More information
This essay uses the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to reformulate the traditional distinction between story and narrative discourse, or diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of narrative, as a distinction between story and narrative act. In describing the transformations performed by the narrative act, the author elaborates the principle of narrative uncertainty, which dictates that the more definite the account of story or plot, the more indefinite the account of the narrative act — and vice versa. In this conceptual framework, the essay then characterizes the narrative act as the differential, within a given fictional text, of two of more types of stories (or plots), and articulates the relationship between narrative act, narrator, and cultural context.
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330.More information
When they undertake to define the novel, novelists often mouth only one word: “freedom.” They do not hesitate to return to the word and repeat it because fiction, in their eyes, is clearly the free genre par excellence. This article focuses on the “obsessional” motif of freedom in a collection of essays on fiction written by novelists in the second half of the twentieth century: mainly Le roman en liberté (Félicien Marceau), Roman du roman (Jacques Laurent), L'invitation au mensonge (Gilles Barbedette) and Les testaments trahis (Milan Kundera). In these texts, fiction is not declared to be the “freest genre in existence” without personifying this literary genre, narrating its history and confronting it with various antagonists who try to domesticate it or subject it to rules. What are these rules? Can fiction function without rules? And, above all, is the freedom of fiction really a definitional issue?