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Marie-Claire Blais's unpublished writing notebooks (Carnets) provide us with access to her creative personality, her artistic drawings and her intellectual position in relation to her work in progress. The Carnets have undeniable value in shedding light on origins, representing a layer of manuscripts or a set of preparatory autographs that show the genesis of many novels as they are being produced. This study focuses on notebooks from the period when Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, Testament de Jean Le Maigre à ses frères and David Sterne were being written; they were used to record ideas and projects and give substance to the fiction that needed to be written. Offering space for every kind of freedom, Blais's Carnets are also saturated with diagrams, illustrated plans, sketches, and portraits painted or drawn by the author. These manuscripts allow us to follow the slow and progressive development of the three novels from a textual and visual point of view (from the pre-writing to the writing phase, and from diagrams to sketches, then portraits). The life and movement of this literary and iconographic production are restored through attention to writing experiments and unexpected impulses apparent in the lines of sketches and portraits.