atelier 9. Nouvelles Littératures
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Présidence :
M. Dvorak (Rennes 2), M. Renouard (Rennes 2), C. Carey-Abrioux (Paris 10)
Dominique Dubois
Wilson Harris's "Infinite Rehearsal" or the imaginative reconstruction of history.
L'écrivain guyanais, Wilson Harris, pense que l'histoire, et notamment l'histoire troublée de la Caraïbe, peut être riche d'enseignement pour construire la société plurielle de demain. C'est pourquoi il encourage l'homme moderne à entreprendre une reconstruction imaginative de l'histoire, c'est-à-dire à revenir sur ses pas et à interpréter le présent à la lumière du passé afin d'éviter de répéter les mêmes erreurs et de commettre les mêmes exactions qui ont conduit à la polarisation du monde actuel.L objet de cet article est donc d'analyser comment "l'Infinie Répétition" fictionalise l'histoire en proposant une révision de certains des mythes les plus anciens de l'humanité et offre ainsi une redéfinition du concept même d'histoire dans une perspective post-coloniale.
Carole Durix (U. Dijon) : “Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts : Islands of Fiction in a Sea of History”.
Salhia BEN-MESSAHEL
Weaving History into Story in Tim Winton's Fictionalized Australia
This communication was submitted to Commonwealth under the following title: « The Boomerang Effect of Time and Place in Tim Winton's Fictionalized Australia. »This analysis studies the importance of history in two novels by West Australian writer Tim Winton, Shallows, published in 1984 and The Riders released ten years later at the time of the great Republican debate in Australia. The purpose of this essay is to examine how the historical dimension of the work is necessary to the building up of fiction and how fiction constantly aims at deconstructing history to make up a story, the personal history of the characters. A close look at themes and structure endeavours to establish the author's constant reference to history and mythology. Winton's characters experience the effects of time within a space where time in itself is a never-ending process, it is a whirl that comes and goes like a boomerang, in order to shape the characters' lives and give a meaning to their shabby existence. Time is defined as part of the history of the character while history is the definer for the search of identity in a split environment. Both novels tend to portray Australia as the land where history generates confusion, and as the place where the fusion of various historical event.,, is comparable to a great Australian emptiness of history. Hence, in Winton's writing fiction and history intertwine in order to unveil the reality of the characters' lives. The two novels convey a historical vision of the past in a way that could be identified to an optical illusion and the historical dimension of the works is tightly woven around the quintessential theme of unity and fragmentation that appears in Winton's fiction.
Michael Greene (U. Vancouver)
“«A Real Historical Fiction» : Allegories of Discourse in Canadian Literary Historiography ”.
This essay examines the deconstruction of historical ‘objectivity’ in George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980) and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). Unlike traditional historical discourse, which secures its apparent objectivity by rendering its agency invisible, the historical fiction of these postmodern writers foregrounds (rather than effaces) some of the constituent similarities shared by historical and literary discourse and accentuates the complementary functions of creation and reception, writing and reading. In Burning Water and Collected Works, the interrogation of history is enacted through a series of metatextual gestures that analogize of the process of discourse itself, highlighting the modalities of interpretation and narrativization on which both history- and fiction-writing are based. Simultaneously, by highlighting writing and reading, these works alter the traditional politics of historical discourse as well, casting the reader as a dynamic and necessary co-creator of value and meaning rather than a passive recipient of historical ‘truth.’Alain Séverac
Chichuna Achebe, history-teller
With few exceptions, European novelists and dramatists have used historical events to nourish their stories. After Homer, and following the example of their story-telling fathers, ever since Mofolo the most significant African novelists and dramatists have used their stories to establish history. More than any of his contemporaries and very much like the Zulu writer, Achebe welds the techniques of the story-teller and the historian. He is not content with establishing facts and denouncing social and political evils, he analyses the former and diagnoses the latter while recreating his people in their flesh and soul and unearthing their mythological essence. His work is the remarkable proof that African writers, through story-telling, are the most competent retrievers of their history from European hands.Benaouda Lebdai (IUT d’Angers) : Osiris Rising: History Revisited by Ayi Kwei Armah”.
Michel Nauman (U. Metz)
THE NAXALITE MOVEMENT AND THE NOVEL IN INDIA: MUDRA RAKSHASA'S THE HUNTED.
The Hunted, by Mudra Rakshasa, a novel written in Hindi, truly comes out of the Naxalites' burning years of revolution and guerilla wars. Through anecdotes and typical situations it provides a realistic picture of Indian politics, Dalit (untouchables) condition and Naxalite struggles. It also brings in the story a number of great Indian Myths, especially the Shiva-Daksha myth. As it appears that only the character who embodies Shiva achieves some revolutionary efficiency, the confrontation between the Yunan maoist myth and the Shiva myth can be seen as a critical stance against the too conformist pro-chinese culture of many Naxalites. This stance should be connected with an important self-critical document published by revolutionary leaders like Suren Bose against Mazumbar's strategy.Many metaphors suggest that there is a link between artistic creation and revolution. Obviously Literature comes out of the smouldering ashes of History, between a defeat and a more enlightened revolutionary attempt. Using Käte Humberger's theories on tense and Literature, the paper tries to show that literary tenses establish an original kind of presence to History, with a distance which removes blind passions and a closeness which removes cold rationalization. An original cognitive experience can therefore take place thanks to Literature. It associates Reason and intuitive passionate knowledge and subsequently carries the artist from History towards the redeeming literary approach and then brings this higher kind of knowledge back to History.
