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Or, Wh- And Not: Free Choice And Polarity In Malagasy, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper explores the distribution of Free Choice Items (FCI) and Negative Polarity Items (NPI) in Malagasy. Both FCIs and NPIs in Malagasy are syntactically complex: they are expressed by disjunctions of wh-words. It is shown that this morphosyntactic structure directly reflects their semantics. In other words, FCIs and NPIs are semantically as well as syntactically disjunctive. Moreover, the Malagasy data support analyses of disjunction as a polarity sensitive element.

African Literature (Francophone), Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The term "Francophone African literature" is widely used to designate sub-Saharan African literature written in French by authors living in Africa or abroad. It derives from Francophonie, the nineteenth-century neologism coined by the French geographer Onesine Redus (1837-1916). In the African context, the concept gained relevance in the 1960s under the aegis of Leopold Senghor and Habib Bourguiba, two African presidents who advocated the creation of an organization linking all the nations sharing the French language and culture.

Spivak After Marx After Derrida, Philip Leonard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an …

Chaos Temporel Et Chaos Romanesque Dans Allah N'Est Pas Obligé D'Ahmadou Kourouma, Nathalie Roy

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper proposes an analysis of time representation in Allah n’est pas obligé with concepts taken from Temps et récit. It aims to show that in relation to Kourouma’s novel, one of Ricoeur’s hypothesis is revealingly insufficient. This hypothesis actually questions representation modes occuring in the text, exposing one of the sources of fictional chaos.

Parties Annexes

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Transcrire L'Horreur Sur L'Espace De La Page, Bernadette Ginestet-Levine

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Rachid Boudjedra’s Timimoun uses the theatrical convention of a minibus taking tourists to the desert. In this mini-bus, news from the outside world is brought through the radio, which plays the part of a messenger. The narration moves forward by a progression of press releases that report bombings committed by terrorists. The barbarian nature of the acts is transcribed on the page by means of typography. The spatial/visual convention itself is set in concentric lexical fields – liquid, then desertic – erected as fences in an attempt to confine the unbearable.

Trop De Soleil Tue L'Amour : Une Expression De L'Écriture Du Mal-Être De Mongo Beti, Rodolphine Sylvie Wamba

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The classical and dissident African writer Mongo Beti perpetually uses the theme of man’s quest for freedom in everything he does. In fact, the philosophy of “Rubénism” is found in each of his works. Given that man must survive in the “ocean of shit” he lives in, the writer, using a popular language, freely chooses to add some humour to everyday life. Thus, the text we studied appeared as a genuine thriller, complete with comedy and tragedy, which presents a deviation from more formal writing. This is the main idea of this analysis, which consists of showing Trop de soleil …

Édouard Glissant : Du Dé-Lire Verbal Au Discours Maîtrisé, Katell Colin-Thébaudeau

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article questions the experience of delirium of the character of Marie Celat and places it in relation to the violence of identity and cultural alienation linked to the history of the West Indies. Using the word “Odono” as a pretext, which was transmitted to the character by a family tale, the text tackles the problem of the identity and origin of the subject. In Marie Celat’s delirium, the reference to “Odono” opens the way for diverse positions on the subject of enunciation, stretching the historical truth into an a-temporal, a-spatial, “out of chronology” event. The words juxtapose each other …

La Vie Et Demie Ou Les Corps Chaotiques Des Mots Et Des Êtres, Caroline Giguère

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Due to its polysemy, corporality has several functions in the works of Sony Labou Tansi. More than descriptive or thematic elements, the novelistic bodies in La vie et demie are at the same time meeting points for multiple meanings, objects and producers of discourse. This study aims to demonstrate how the writing of the body is symbolic of a disorder that characterizes the forms and contents of Sony Labou Tansi’s novels and invites the reader to reflect on language and its power.

Folie De L'Écriture, Écriture De La Folie Dans La Littératureféminine Des Antilles Françaises, Pascale De Souza

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

There are many female characters with sick/mutilated bodies in Guadeloupe and Martinique’s female literature. Madness, anorexia, self-mutilation, even the suicide of these female characters not only denounce a repressive social order inherited from the history of slavery, but also represent means to affect a social environment that is not responsive to the female quest for identity. Madness, crisis or acts of self-mutilation allow them to escape (“marronnage”) a system, which tries to negate their very existence.

Face À La Meute – Narration Et Folie Dans Les Romans De Boubacar Boris Diop, Susanne Gehrmann

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The article analyses the narrative techniques and the theme of madness in three novels by the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, caracterised by narrative polyphony and metatextual reflexion on the production of a story. The speech of protagonists affected by “intellectual madness” plays a strategic role in the structure of the novel which, as a hybrid genre, draws on oral and literary traditions in a still splintered aesthetic. The image of the pack represents an unreasonnable society condemning a so-called mad individual whose madness consists in bringing a counter-memory of the foundation myths.

Folie Et Écriture Dans Calomnies De Linda Lê, Ching Selao

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article proposes to explore the many faces of madness through a reading of Linda Lê’s Calomnies, in which two narrative voices are presented. The following shall demonstrate how this novel reproduces a “romantic” perception of madness as encountered in Michel Foucault’s work. Although this narrative text introduces a mad narrator speaking in the “I” persona, it nonetheless points out the difficulties of letting madness speak for itself. These difficulties are also examined in this study.

Les Pouvoirs Du Récit : Un Remède Au Chaos Du Monde? En Attentant Le Vote Des Bêtes Sauvages, Madeleine Borgomano

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Right from his first novel, Les Soleils des Indépendances (1970), Kourouma introduced the theme of the reversed world, a baroque metaphor for the state of Africa after Independence. In Monnè (1990), telling the history of this reversal, he insisted on its linguistic roots. Consequently, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) shows how this reversal in the context of Cold War, favoured the genesis and development of dictatorial powers leading to an actual apocalypse. This victory of Chaos is told as a donsomana, traditional song of expiation among the Malinke hunters. The forms and magic virtues of this song …

Le Goût Des Jeunes Filles De Dany Laferrière : Du Chaos À La Reconstruction Du Sens, Nathalie Courcy

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper analyses the way politics, society and the representation of speech is structured in Le goût des jeunes filles, Dany Laferrière’s fourth novel. How do the events told and the disorganised narration itself symbolise the unspeakable? Moreover, how does the characters’ speech rebuild the meaning of existence, and how does Laferrière see the future? Chaos, madness, all that overtakes or destroys the norm, anchors fiction in an attempt to reorganize reality and the imaginary.

Werewere Liking Et La Poétique Du Jeu Pour Libérer L'Imaginaire Postcolonial Africain, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay addresses the issue of poetics and political stakes in Werewere Liking's novel, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail. While this novel has been presented as illustrative of the Negro-African aesthetics rooted in orality, the present article argues that Liking's poetics of hybridity is a postcolonial strategy whose aim is the liberation of African imagination and creativity. The essay ends by suggesting some similarities between Liking's project and that of the Congolese philosopher, especially in his philosophical essay, L'Afrique va-t-elle mourir? Bouscu/er l'imaginaire africain. Through their works, Ka Mana and Werewere Liking are examining the conditions for a …

Gommage Et Résistance Dans Le Processus De Mythification Postcoloniale, Robert Fotsing Mangoua

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Using the central figures of Um Nyobe and Patrice Lumumba, this paper aims to show that postcolonial mythology is a confrontation of two tendencies: on one hand, the colonial and postcolonial States, whose efforts tend to rub out history and its great faces, and on the other, artists and thinkers from Africa or abroad who want to establish the memory and the deeds of the missing as a source of inspiration for the present and next generation.

Subversion D'Un Mythe Colonial : Le« Grand Blanc De Lambaréné » Dans Le Roman Francophone D'Afrique, Sylvère Mbondobari

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Among its goals, this study aims to throw new light on the representation of the West in African Francophone literature. In this respect, it will examine some characteristic aspects of the image of the "Grand Blanc de Lambarene" - Albert Schweitzer - produced by the African imagination. For the first time, this paper shows which discursive and structural strategies are used by Sylvain Bemba and Seraphin Ndaot to represent Albert Schweitzer, to express their convictions, and how they confer a thematic or aesthetic aspect to their text. To be fully heuristic, the representation of Schweitzer requires that we reconstitute the …

Mango Beti Et Les Mythologies Postcoloniales : Héritier Et Inspirateur, Nathalie Etoke

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Mango Beti belongs to a nationalist tradition embodied by Ruben Um Nyobe, the Cameroonian revolutionary. This paper analyzes how the writer manages to rebuild the aborted Rubenist ideal through fictional devices. Charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who have been able to bring about social change and improve the living conditions of their people, also nurture Beti's political commitment. What is the link between the writer and these inspiring men? Is Mongo Beti himself a similar inspiration for other African writers?

L'Image Des Réfugiés Et Des Personnes Déplacées Dans La Fiction Africaine Francophone, Augustin H. Asaah

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In their capacity as moralists and committed intellectuals, African Francophone writers such as C.C. Sow, N.N. Ndjekery, M.S. Keita, F. Couao-Zotti, Ahmadou Kourouma, Nimrod and E. Dongala portray various images of refugees and internally displaced persons in their works. This depiction is driven by the perceived need to humanize these displaced members of society by establishing moral/affective bridges between unfortunate members of society and readers. It is also sustained by the desire to reduce the damage caused by wars and natural disasters, as well as the need to reveal the plural identities of humans to the world.

Patrice Emery Lumumba : Entre Metaphore Et Metonymie, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The purpose of this text is to analyze the historiography devoted to Patrice Lumumba and the use of rhetoric that launched him into legend. The metaphor characterizes Lumumba in his journey towards death and the alienation of identity, rendering concrete a kind of degradation, of the animated and the unanimated. Further, the metaphor breaks down into a string of fragments, or of metonymical qualities. Lumumba's struggle for justice, equality, purity, truth, and the ideal translates the drama of which he is a victim into an extreme search for the ideal. This drama expresses itself by a notable use of the …

Piero Chiara E La Tradizione, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Piero Chiara (Luino 1913- Varese 1986) wrote many novels and short stories that immediately met great public success. Critics devoted mixed attention to him but his works deserve a new critical assessment to analyze the rich and sophisticated web of cultural and literary references that permeate them. Through readings of Il piatto piange, “L’uovo al cianuro” and other novels and short stories, this paper analyses the complex textual relations Chiara entertains with Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal. Chiara investigates the themes of identity and the double. His narrative depicts an apparently lighthearted reality that in fact reveals despair. …

Écritures De Violence Et Contraintes De La Réception : Allah N’Est Pas Obligé Dans Les Critiques Journalistiques Française Et Québécoise, Isaac Bazié

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The treatment of violence in Francophone Literatures is not only a thematic issue but becomes a writing project that reveals different textual forms as well. Those texts in which violence appears in both aspects – themes and forms – require a particular kind of reception. This article deals with the newspaper’s reception of "Allah n’est pas obligé". The comparison between Quebec’s and France’s journalistic criticism points out that the complexity of Kourouma’s text allows readers to activate several levels of reception: a very contextualized historical one and an aesthetic one. The interaction between those two critical spheres illustrates the complexity …

La Critique Et Léopold Sédar Senghor / Léopold Sédar Senghor Et La Critique, Fernando Lambert

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

L. S. Senghor has maintained a double relation with criticism: his poetical work has provoked plentiful critical production and the poet has always been in dialogue with his critical examiners. Furthermore, he has practised literary criticism himself. Criticism relating to Senghor comes from two quite different sources. From 1945 to 1960, the European criticism is outstanding, while the African criticism confines itself more to peripheral questions in the Senghorian poetical work: French language

and "Negritude". The withdrawal of the poet from the political stage in 1980 is a significant date for critical production in Africa. Let us add that the …

L’Aventure Du Discours Critique, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The text traces the course of African Literature’s critical adventure. For a long time, studies have been focused on African identity. The critic is often ethnologic, anthropological, cultural and attracted by exoticism. The critic is also attentive to everything that indicates the difference with occidental culture and without which the African text would only be an outline. There is also the frequent intrusion of empty concepts in African Literature criticism (for example : tradition, relatives, ethnic group, oral character, traditional religion, African rhythm, solidarity, communion between the living and the dead). From the criticism of humor and sources, to criticism …

Le Rôle De La Critique Dans La Réception De L’Oeuvre Romanesque De Rachid Boudjedra, Valérie Lotodé

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The favorable reception given by French criticism to some of Rachid Boudjedra’s novels can’t be explained by their literary quality only. In fact, the media’s opinion has been influenced by the image of the "authentically Algerian writer" that Boudjedra conveyed, as well as by the political context. Since the emergence of Algerian Literature in French journalistic and academic literary criticism, critics are bounded by ideological a priori.

Y A-T-Il Une Réception Critique De La Littérature Vietnamienne Francophone?, Ching Selao

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Three approaches seem to characterize the reception of Vietnamese Literature in French: socio-historical, "essentialist" and feminist discourses. This article proposes to analyse the lack of theoretical thought and pertinence in some of the works published on the subject, which appear to introduce and promote this literature rather than study it. Without denying contributions that are indeed interesting, this paper, however, emphasizes works that raise questions and oblige us to ask: is there a critical reception of Vietnamese Francophone Literature?

Linda Lê : Schizo-Positive?, Isabelle Favre

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In her novel entitled "Calomnies", Linda Lê depicts a "mad uncle" and a young female writer fascinated with her uncle’s marginality. In this book, Lê presents a complex view of schizophrenia. Sometimes, the actions and thoughts of the uncle are reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as le corps sans organe and la machine célibataire. Some other times however, Lê pays attention to the past of the uncle and shows how, in Vietnam, he witnessed the hypocrisy of his family during the war. These passages are then closer to Laing’s theories, since the environment and conditions in which he …

Black Polar, Françoise Naudillon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

We would like to present some examples of the French Mystery Novel as it is being written by sub-Saharan and Maghrebin authors, as Yasmina Khadra, an author from Algeria. After outlining a history of the genre itself, we will follow a few of the thematic trails taken up by the authors in question. We would like to call specific attention to the strategies of transformation, appropriation and transmutation being used on an already well defined and respected genre whose roots lie in a completely different cultural background (European and North American).

Variations Sur La Langue De Molière; L’Enseignementdu Français Aux États-Unis, Thomas C. Spear

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

French has always been among the top foreign languages taught in the American university, even if Spanish occupies the first place. As a result of the social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s and the development of new fields of learning, changes were also introduced gradually into French department programs to include francophone literatures, although in a manner that some have deemed disturbing.

This openness, which is not found in France, has brought about the creation of new faculty positions, some of which are occupied by teachers and writers from Africa and the Caribbean who are making a significant contribution …

Espace Francophone Et Politiques Linguistiques : Glottophagie Ou Diversité Culturelle?, Zacharie Petnkeu Nzepa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper is illustrative of the conflict of languages in a sociolinguistic landscape. It asserts that in French-speaking world, notably Black Africa and the West Indies, politics in collusion with French language policies work for the imperceptible, but gradual disappearance of vernaculars on behalf of the prestige of French language. The International Organization of "Francophonie" is depicted as being instrumental in the ongoing strategy. The article ends up suggesting criteria for a harmonious cohabitation of languages in the above-mentioned ommunities.