HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft

Élans, troubles, ruptures : La littérature face à la violence au vingtième siècle

Isabella von Treskow — 2024-04-22

La transformation de l’avant-garde : la Grande Guerre dans l’oeuvre de Blaise Cendrars

Albrecht Buschmann — 2024-04-22

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) is regarded today as one of the most important voices in French literature on the First World War. In addition to a few poems written at the start of the war ("Shrapnells"), it was J'ai tué (1918), printed in red letters, that marked the author's image at the time. However, it was not until 1944, when he was reliving an experience of war, that he revisited his notebooks and a few unpublished texts to write La Main coupée (1946), a key book about the war that oscillates between a collection of stories, an autobiographical novel and an essay on the experience of physical pain.
Following an introduction to Cendrars's writings on the war, the analysis focuses on La Main coupée, highlighting the way in which the text was developed as a synthesis of inherited and avant-garde forms, all of which were subordinated to the aim of enabling the reader to grasp the experience of war.

« Et nul ne peut savoir ce que sera demain » : la poésie de 14/18 publiée dans la presse des prisonniers français en Allemagne

Isabella von Treskow — 2024-04-22

The poems written by prisoners, both military and civilian, interned during the First World War, have practically been forgotten. It is this literary production, more precisely the poetry published in the French prisoners’ press, produced and distributed in the camps, that we propose to discover here. Reflecting the experience of captivity (life as a prisoner, pains of exile, dreams of return, hope), these poems bear witness to a form of resilience that is as much about the ability to re-appropriate classical forms as it is about the will to forge a community united by reading and cultural allusions. They perform a multiplicity of functions: distracting from a difficult daily life, overcoming individual and collective traumas, discreetly reaffirming patriotic convictions, creating a collective discursive space. This article examines selected poems in detail, with particular emphasis on the importance of the medium, the prisoners’ press, in the analysis of this poetry of internment, highlighting the crucial role of context in the literary practices of the prisoners.

La correspondance comme instrument de combat de l’écrivain engagé

Mykyta Steshenko — 2024-04-22

Writing a letter is more than just a technical act aiming at conveying some precise data, it is an act which should be analysed according to its psychological, historical and stylistic imprints. The epistolary correspondence exceeds communicational limits and the letter writer uses it just like he would use poetry or a novel. Moreover, a letter may go beyond the frontiers of genres and have a distinct use during particular historical events, such as war.
This article proposes to analyse the epistolary correspondence during the WWI and WWII. Various writers used this means of communication in different ways: to inform, to describe, to share, etc. And above all, it is an important historical and literary document enabling the letter writer to use it as a powerful instrument of warfare, capable not only of convincing the recipient, but also of defending and even attacking the opponent.

« La science-fiction, c’est le vrai ‹ nouveau roman › » : Les romans extraordinaires de René Barjavel entre tradition et innovation

Stefanie Boßhammer — 2024-04-22

Like the authors of the Nouveau Roman, the French writer, journalist and scenarist René Barjavel (1911-1985) attempted with his romans extraordinaires (extraordinary novels) to adapt the French novel to the everyday reality of his time. The article focusses on three of Barjavel’s romans extraordinaires, published during the German Occupation of France and immediately after the Second World War. In his novels, Barjavel reflects on the advantages and dangers of scientific progress by referring to his own war experiences. The analysis of the three novels Ravage, Le voyageur imprudent and Le diable l’emporte shows that Barjavel employs motifs and forms similar to those used by American science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, while remaining faithful to European literary traditions such as the Menippean satire and utopia.

Albert Cohen lecteur de Proust : Une écriture juive de la jalousie

Melanie Koch-Fröhlich — 2024-04-22

The present article examines the role of jealousy in the fictional and essayistic writings of Jewish author Albert Cohen. Its intention is to consider jealousy across genre boundaries as one of the main themes in Cohen’s work which reflects an aesthetic juxtaposition of two major sources of influence within the specific context of the twentieth century: Jewish heritage and identity as well as Proust’s poetics of love.

Entre tradition et innovation : La représentation de la violence et de ses effets traumatisants dans Les Bienveillantes (2006) de Jonathan Littell

Angelika Groß — 2024-04-22

In contemporary literature, we cannot but notice a certain tendency to narrative as well as thematic transgressions and Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2006), can be cited as an example par excellence. The reader finds himself face to face with an autodiegetic narrator who presents the story as his biography, but also as a historical novel and first and foremost as a testimony in the tradition of the literature of the Shoah but adopting the perpetrator’s perspective. Littell takes up traditional literary genres such as the ones mentioned above and modifies or deforms them and – most notably – combines them, producing a complex text based on narrative as well as thematic transgressions situated in the context of the Second World War which pushes the limits of what is considered culturally acceptable as well as spatial or temporal limits. The present contribution investigates this oscillation between tradition and innovation, focusing on the representation of violence and its traumatising effects as well as the marks left in the text.

Écrire et témoigner à contre-courant : Mouloud Feraoun dans l’histoire littéraire algérienne

Boualem Belkhis — 2024-04-22

The Journal of Mouloud Feraoun (1962) is a singular work in the literary history of Algeria. It diverts an intimate genre to put it at the service of historical testimony on the Algerian War (1954–1962). The diarist becomes a witness to this war that its own people is fighting for its freedom. The context of this diary is mainly collective, and its author kept it private for seven years aiming to make it public. From the complex current events made of political and military violence, he shows an objective view and an intensive look, while questioning the causes and effects of French colonization. The script is imbued with the writer’s humanism, his testimony and his analyses stand against the political, literary, journalistic propagandist speeches, revealing to the reader Feraoun’s ethic witnesses. Currently, this work is at the core of the historical and literary documents from which various specialists of the Algerian War draw.

Formes héritées et transformation littéraire dans les nouvelles d’Assia Djebar

Katharina Gröber — 2024-04-22

In the short story collection Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Assia Djebar presents the ‘inherited’ form of her childhood’s language and the ‘inherited’ image of an Algerian woman, while simultaneously striving to transform them. The result is her very own language which combines French with elements of dialectal Arabic and Berber language. She integrates orality into the written text and merges this approach with the transformation of an ‘inherited’ form of the traditional Algerian society – the female oral tradition of history and stories to subsequent generations.
This article elaborates how Djabar’s short stories pursue this tradition by focussing on aspects of orality and acknowledging the presentation of traditional as well as modern women who have overcome strict roles – like the author herself. Finally, the contribution takes the title of the congress’s 12th section into consideration and examines whether the short stories can be described as ‘War Writing’.

La Mulâtresse Solitude d’André Schwarz-Bart : ambiguïtés et réversibilités dans la mise en scène de l’Histoire

Cécile Rousselet — 2024-04-22

The writing of persecution and violence in La Mulâtresse Solitude is based on two central elements. One the one hand, the novel calls for a “reversibility” between Jewish history and black history: Solitude, the legendary figure of the Martinican Marronage, is a mirror of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance in Le Dernier des Justes. Antillean history and Jewish history unite for a designation of universal violence, which the author had already sketched, from a diachronic point of view, in Le Dernier des Justes. On the other hand, the author depicts Solitude as a subaltern, able to be a witness and even to surpass her condition. The originality of this paper focuses on the perspective of intertextualities as possibilities to open spaces of ambiguity in the text allowing both to say the persecution and to go beyond it as part of an eschatological cycle.

Témoigner sur scène : Rwanda 94 de Groupov

Silke Segler-Meßner — 2024-04-22

Faced with Europe's silence on the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, Groupov, a Liège-based collective of artists from a variety of disciplines and nationalities, has created a theatrical project in cooperation with Rwandan survivors that aims to do justice to those who have not been heard: the dead. In the publication of the drama titled Rwanda 94 by Éditions Théâtrales in 2002, the objective of the spectacle is formulated by its authors as a subtitle on the first page: « An attempt of symbolic reparation towards the dead for the use of the living. » At the heart of our contribution is the question of the Groupov collective's strategies for bearing witness to genocide on stage. We analyze the revival and adaptation of tragic elements to give a voice to the dead and to create a postcatastrophic aesthetic.