Le détective, entre intime et société
International audience
South (2016) et North (2018) de Frank Owen : diptyque post-apocalyptique américain ou sud-africain ?
National audience; La présente communication se propose d'examiner les représentations d'un avenir post-apocalyptique dans le diptyque South (2016) et North (2018) de Frank Owen et de s'interroger sur une possible hybridation des imaginaires post-apocalyptiques. Bien qu'écrits par un duo d'auteurs sud-africains (Frank Owen étant en réalité le pseudonyme adopté par Diane Awerbuck et Alex Latimer pour écrire ces romans à quatre mains), South et North se déroulent tous deux aux Etats-Unis. Dans le monde post-apocalyptique dépeint dans le diptyque, le pays est divisé en deux et des vents mortels soufflent sur le sud, décimant la population, qui a dû retourner à un mode de vie primitif où domine…
Postcolonial Ghosts / Fantômes Postcoloniaux
As liminal beings, ghosts seem particularly appropriate to define, question or challenge hybrid cultures where several, seemingly irreconcilable, identities coexist. The present volume wonders how they manifest themselves in the English-speaking world, and whether there is a specifically postcolonial kind of haunting. The 22 articles deal with textual, translational or historical ghosts, and take us to Canada, Australia, Africa, India or the Caribbean. Poems by Gerry Turcotte literally haunt the volume, which thus juxtaposes theory and practice in a dynamic and fruitful way.
Gothic Technologies in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland
International audience
Le "changement de langue" d’Antjie Krog : "Babel heureuse"?
This article examines the relationship between Afrikaans and English in post-apartheid South Africa though the prism of a specific example, Antjie Krog's Change of Tongue, whose generic and linguistic statuses plays on ambiguity and bilingualism.
Another Life
Many writers started their professional lives in very diverse fields before embracing writing, or on the contrary have turned away from writing. The present volume seeks to explore the complex relationship between that ‘other life’ and writing. The aim is to determine whether a writer’s ‘other life’ appears in, influences or even shapes his/her work, and to what extent. What is the part of gestation and that of rupture? A diversity of writers is examined: Patrick Chamoiseau, J. M. Coetzee, Jan J. Dominique, Janet Frame, Amitav Ghosh, L. K. Johnson, Wilson Harris, Dany Laferrière, Yannick Lahens, NourbeSe Philip, Emmelie Prophète, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, but also Bartolomé de las Casas a…
Commemorating Piet Retief : Justin Cartwright’s Up Against the Night
International audience
The Hangman's Game: Karen King-Aribisala's "diary of creation"
The structure of King Aribisala's multi-layered novel "The Hangman's Game" is complex: each narrative thread reverberates onto the other, creating an intricate network of (sometimes distorting) mirrors, suggesting an interconnectedness between past and present, reality and fiction, living and writing. This paper endeavours to explore this complex relationship and to demonstrate how the protean phenomenon of resurgence informs "The Hangman's Game".
“Into the city, deep under the city”: Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, a hardboiled novel?
International audience
Geographical and Generic Displacements in Lynn Freed’s work
International audience
Corps individuels, corps social : Nexus, le "roman à thèse" posthumain de Ramez Naam ?
International audience; Cet article analyse comment la dissolution des frontières entre l'homme et la machine, mais aussi entre l'humain et le posthuman, se manifeste dans "Nexus", le premier volet de la trilogie de science-fiction de Ramez Naam, et comment celui-ci adapte son écriture à son propos. Cet ouvrage est lu, à la lumière des essais de Naam, comme un "roman à thèse" qui redéfinit humain et posthumain, en particulier grâce à des stratégies narratives innovantes.
L'analyse de supports: pour une contextualisation des supports
National audience
The Famished Road: Ben Okri's Family Romance?
International audience; This article suggests that by breaking the cycle of the abiku in The Famished Road, Okri inserts Azaro into a lineage that turns him into a storyteller. It explores the nature of parent-child relationships in the novel from this perspective, using the concept of family romance to show how the association of family with storytelling reverberates in Okri’s writing.
A Chain of Voices: A "Masters and Slaves" Narrative
Because no less than thirty different narrators take turns to tell us the story of a slave revolt, A Chain of Voices can be read as Brink's attempt at revisiting the classical "slave narrative", turning it into a polyphonic "masters and slaves" narrative in which everyone is given a say. This article examines how this polyphonic, and even multifocal, mode of narration enables Brink to write back to both classical slave narratives and to their twentieth-century counterparts, the neo-slave narratives. What it suggests is that although A Chain of Voices bears many resemblances to neo-slave narratives in terms of form, especially because of its recourse to polyphony, it is also extremely close …
Le Cahier Recherche - Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
International audience
André Brink and the Afrikaner Heritage
This paper shows how André Brink, dissident Afrikaans writer, tried to write against his heritage. The most visible strategy consisted in redefining Afrikanerdom as dissidence and as africanity. The notion of betrayal was systematically reversed so that the Afrikaners who supported the Afrikaner regime were presented as the real traitors. Yet dissidence was not an easy position for Brink and both he and his heroes had ambivalent positions.
Identité et espace chez André Brink: Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain et Imaginings of Sand
This article explores André Brink's conception of identity in terms of space. Examining three novels which all revolve around a first-person narrator exploring his/her own identity, Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain and Imaginings of Sand, it shows that Brink's conception of identity is both spatial and familial: characters try to become "rooted" in South African soil, but this rooting process is achieved only in the post-apartheid novel, Imaginings of Sand. A brief comparison with Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon tries to shed light on the source of Brink's spatial conception of identity.
“In this city of bombs and pain": representing Cape Town in Mike Nicol’s Revenge Trilogy
International audience
“Everything is insistently alive and pushing to enter": Henrietta Rose-Innes's border-crossings
International audience
La figure du détective dans quelques ouvrages théoriques sur la detective fiction : récurrence et sérialité
International audience
Guérir les blessures de l'Afrique du Sud
On the eve of the democratic elections scheduled in South Africa in 2009, this collection of essays analyses the many ways in which South Africans have been trying to heal the wounds of apartheid, as advocated in Nelson Mandela’s famous 1994 speech, delivered at the dawn of the ‘ new ’ South Africa. The articles encompass such diverse fields as politics, literature, cinema, welfare policies or education, and they all seek to explore the sea change which totally reshaped South African identity in the last fifteen years that followed the demise of apartheid. The notion of ‘ healing the wounds’ is used both as a pretext and as a focal point to build up as complete a picture as possible of Sout…
Broken Monsters (2014): quand le monstre fait signe
International audience
La littérature sud-africaine pendant et après l'apartheid. Table ronde avec André Brink, Denise Coussy, Jean Guiloineau et Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
Transcript of a round table on South African literature, during and after apartheid, with particular focus on the links between literature and reality.
First-Hand Becomes Second-Hand: André Brink's A Dry White Season
This paper offers a reading of André Brink's novel A Dry White Season in relation to his own essay The Novel:. Language and Narrative From Cervantes to Calvino. The aim is to demonstrate that Brink's theory can help highlight aspects of his apartheid writings which have often been neglected. The paper explores, in particular, the metafictional features of a novel more famous for its committed nature than for its self-reflexivity
Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André Brink
International audience
Writing woman back into history. Magic realism in André Brink's Imaginings of Sand
International audience
Maîtres, domestiques et serviteurs : récits d’une intimité ambiguë dans le monde anglophone du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours
International audience
"For beyond this trading community lies family life" : filiation et écriture dans Crossing the River
This paper examines the relationship between filiation, affiliation and writing in Crossing the River. First, it examines the diversity of literary genres incorporated, revisited and juxtaposed in a novel often defined by its polyphonic structure. This analysis leads to a study of the ways in which family ties, and particularly the links between parents and children, are staged in the text through a complex pattern of repetitions and inversions. The echoes which connect, and sometimes oppose, the various parts of the novel suggest that repetition and inversion are the tools through which family identity is constructed throughout the novel. The reason behind these textual strategies may also…
"La musique du paysage": une écriture paysagère guyanienne
National audience; This chapter introduces Wilson Harris's work to lay readers, with specific emphasis on landscape writing and the combination of real and symbolical spaces in Harris's novels. It also elaborates on issues tackled by Fred D'Aguiar's essay about Harris, a translation of which is included in the same volume.
"Ré-imaginer le réel": la mémoire familiale dans deux romans d'André Brink."
International audience
Filiations textuelles, nationales et culturelles : les genres littéraires en contexte postcolonial
Mapping genre, space and identity in South African (crime) fiction
International audience
Post-apartheid Gothic: negotiating new environments in recent South African "white writing”
International audience
Les genres mineurs dans le monde postcolonial : l’exemple de l’Afrique du Sud
International audience
Kicking Tongues de Karen King-Aribisala : Journeys Into Otherness
Disponible en ligne: http://e-crit3224.univ-fcomte.fr/download/3224-ecrit/document/numero_1/l_article_joseph-vilain_149_64.pdf; Cette communication proposait d'utiliser la notion de « translation » définie par Salman Rushdie dans son célèbre articles sur les « patries imaginaires » pour comprendre comment Kicking Tongues, de Karen King-Aribisala, utilise et transforme les Canterbury Tales de Chaucer pour créer une œuvre hybride et, étonnamment, nigériane
Un post-humain post-apartheid ? Moxyland et Zoo Fiction de Lauren Beukes
International audience
Le théâtre dans Looking on Darkness d'André Brink: le roman d'un acteur
International audience
Teaching The Handmaid's Tale
National audience
Translating culture: Charles Mungoshi's Waiting for the Rain
In Waiting for the Rain Charles Mungoshi chose a western form, the novel, and a western language, English, to try and convey the deep changes at work in Zimbabwean society at the time. This paper focuses on both aspects: first, the adaptation of the novelistic genre to Zimbabwean culture, and second, the defamiliarization of the English language, which is not Mungoshi's mother tongue. What is questioned is whether the incorporation of essentially oral elements, belonging to and borrowed from a specific culture and language, which are initially peripheral and foreign to the dominant "English" culture, can transform both Zimbabwean culture and English culture – in other words, Waiting for the…
Devil's Valley: une histoire littéraire de l'Afrique du Sud
International audience
Cartographies génériques, spatiales et identitaires en Afrique du Sud : Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes, Henrietta Rose-Innes
This article examines how three South African novelists, Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes and Henrietta Rose-Innes, use crime fiction to write their country. After a brief survey of the rapid development of crime fiction in South Africa and of the critical response it received, the article proposes a reading of Like Clockwork, Zoo City and Nineveh, whereby their respective contribution to crime fiction displays three major features : first, Orford’s novel chimes in with generic conventions ; second, Beukes’s novel combines features borrowed from both crime fiction and science fiction ; and last, Rose-Innes’s novel displaces the detective story narrative into a context where « murder » is invest…
André Brink : Under the Sign of Dialogue
This paper explores the question of self-translation. The aim is to understand why André Brink chose to translate his own novels into English, and to analyse the relationships between different versions of the same novel.
Homecomings: Mythologies of the (M) Otherland in Three Novels by André Brink
International audience
« WILSON HARRIS, L’ÉCRIVAIN HYDROGRAPHE » (2012), Fred d'Aguiar
National audience; This chapter is a translation of an essay by Fred d'Aguiar first published in the volume "Postcolonial Ghosts / Fantômes postcoloniaux" (M. Joseph-Vilain & Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds.). It analyzes Wilson Harris's uses of the landscape of Guyana in his novels.
Corps et corporalité dans Moxyland de Lauren Beukes
International audience; Cet article explore les métamorphoses du corps et la façon dont, dans Moxyland, les frontières de celui-ci sont repoussées, redéfinies et modifiées. On s'intéresse à la fois au corps humain et au corps de l'oeuvre.
Le détective en famille : introduction
International audience
Teaching The Buddha of Suburbia
National audience
Les topologies imaginaires de Lauren Beukes dans Moxyland (2008) et The Shining Girls (2013)
International audience; This article examines two novels published by South African writer Lauren Beukes. More specifically, it explores the way in which the two cities in which the novels are set blur a number of boundaries, thus creating paradoxical, and intermedial, topologies.
Discours autoritaires et résistances aux XXe et XXIe siècles
International audience
A presentation of Robert Tally Jr., Spatiality. Routledge, 2013.
National audience
Post-Apartheid Gothic. White South African Writers and Space
International audience; Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space analyzes the representation of space in recent works by South African writers. By combining analytical tools borrowed from Gothic studies with geocritical and postcolonial approaches, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain assesses the literary mechanisms utilized by Damon Galgut, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauren Beukes, Justin Carwright, and Lynn Freed to negotiate the complexities of post-apartheid identities in their fiction. Joseph-Vilain argues that the literary representations of emblematic places, real or imagined (the home, the farm, the city or the “non-places” of dystopia), express and reveal anxieties linked to the s…
“Something Hungry and Wild is Still Calling”: Post-Apartheid Gothic
International audience; The postcolonial Gothic is now a mode widely covered by literary criticism, but South Africa has often been left out of investigations. This paper argues that only now that apartheid has ended can writers and critics explore how the Gothic manifests itself in South African literature. Showing possible connections between the postcolonial Gothic and recent South African fiction, it seeks to define a new category that can help define the contours of the literary field in South Africa: post-apartheid Gothic.