Comunicare interculturală și literatură / Communication Interculturelle et Littérature

Cuprins

* * * — 2025-05-06

Cuprins

Deux approches centrées sur le personnage

Adrien GUIGNARD — 2025-05-05

The present article complacently falls into the trap of more or less bombastic show-offish quoting – in particular when it comes to the conceptualizing of narrative. The only noteworthy quote really is not one; with its open quotation marks, it is both faulty and open. That misquote forms the title of the conclusion: «Neither the sun, nor... , nor... The argument of the article might be of interest for three different reasons. «First, it draws attention to facile (neostructuroliberoneurobehaviorist) practices of «the therapeutic function of narrative» (Eco). Second, the article draws on two good examples. Thirdly, the article takes its cue from a (reliable) commentary on Guibert’s Aids Trilogy, on,the one hand, and a (more personal) commentary on Mars on the other. It proposes, possibly, that if mimesis III is to make its way toward the horizon of the humanities, one needs to be able to think death through. Such «thinking» is of the order of «impossible necessity» (Derrida). Anger (Zorn) and immediacy Guibert are approximations to such thinking.

Raconter l’enfance, entre projection et rétrospective

Christine CAMPINI — 2025-05-05

Through two research works on very different topics – the formative years of an education specialist, Jacques Ardoino, on the one hand, and alternative education practices as told by parents on the other –, we examine the various processes of discourse production, their writing and the way they vary according to their target audience and the projects at their origin. In the first research, the narrative, or fiction (reconstructed long after the facts) of a forgotten childhood, will appear as an intelligibility resource like Ricoeur's "laboratory of forms": by combining an imaginary narrative and an examined reality, the narrative will allow J. Ardoino's family historyto emerge in a “bio-fiction”. In the second research, the approach is not
retrospective but projective, for the parents' formative narrative constructs the child's. In this case, the analysis modes will look for other possible constructions of reality, both in the discourse's structure and in its social representations. For both, the role of reading and writing is essential. Writing becomes a fictional backing of one way of reading a reality.

Récits et mise en mots des bifurcations professionnelles dans les parcours de vie

Catherine NÉGRONIfr — 2025-05-05

This paper questions people’s bifurcation stories in life course. This research is based on a set of 55 life stories from people who had experienced professional voluntary conversion. First we investigate the effect of narrative and of storytelling on decision making process. In professional bifurcations, discourse seems to be a base for action. It works on two levels. On the one hand, when the person reveals their intention of professional conversion, the discourse engages action. « Telling opens the possibility of action ». On the other hand, discourse could have a performative effect: « telling is like acting ». Individuals use discourse as a tool for reconversion. We suggest that acting is already included in storytelling, the action is anticipated. The organisation of discourse prefigures action at the same time. R. Koselleck with his concept of “experience” highlight the fact that perception of past and future anticipation is in a perpetual movement, where fundamental events represent irreversibility. A second question will concern significant configurations in bifurcation telling.

L’ipséité nationale face à l’ipséité personnelle dans le roman d’Emmanuel Carrère « Limonov »

Svetlana SHEYPAK — 2025-05-05

The article describes how Emmanuel Carrère resurrects a painful period in Russian history through the life story of a politician and writer in his novel "Limonov". It is noted that the approach to a second degree national history achieved in the novel is doubled by the construction of a second degree narrative identity of the character. It concludes that the book as authentic testimony of the past contributes to the restoration of Russia's national selfness which is vital to the perception of its new national identity at the turn of the totalitarian past to the future democracy. This authenticity is realized by the reader because the central character and the author are both faithful to their individual selfness preserved throughout their narrative
identity.

Dévoiler l'histoire de l'autre. Récits de soi et fictions collectives

Nicolas FASSEUR — 2025-05-05

The narration of ordinary stories is sometimes tied to political activism (de Certeau 1980, Foucault 1977, 2009). It is a means to give a narrative value to the least considered people in society. Whether it be poverty (Lewis, 1963), migration, literacy or the path of a woman from the working class (Catini, 1982), the researcher always unveils a desire to rehabilitate in the public space (Habermas, 2005), often with a transforming purpose (Marie- Michèle et Pineau, 1983). Narration stems somewhere between the desire of the researcher and the indulgence/ complacency of the informer. Telling one’s self can mean conforming to the expected model (Goffman, 1959), if not reaching a form of legitimate domination (Arendt, 1995). Who is the subject who gives up his own history? The focus of this questioning will be the status of the researcher and his relationship to the narrator. How can one tell one’s self truthfully when submitted to biographising , what kind of emancipation comes from a narration that turns into an injunction. A narration is nothing but a relationship to the other, I tell myself to that particular other (Butler, 2005) at that particular moment in my story (Ricoeur, 1985). This presentation will aim at shedding light on the relationship between the involved researcher and narration of resistance bordering testimony.

Les Souvenirs de Buru de Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006). Mémoires et reconnaissances d’un prisonnier politique

Étienne NAVEAU — 2025-05-05

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) alias Pram was the most famous novelist as well as the best known political prisoner in Indonesia. His work, which is translated in several European languages, begins in a Dutch prison, at the end of the Independence war. The Mute’s Soliloquy gives a pathetic account of his ten years’ deportation in the island of Buru (in the Moluccas) between 1969 and 1979, during the regime of general Soeharto. This autobiographical book includes personal memories and philosophical reflections upon human civilization. The topic of memory is linked with those of recognition and acknowledgment. Pram tells us his life story and his carrier. He recalls his difficulties to write in the camp. As a writer, he acts as an archivist who records the details of the prisoners’ lives. He tries to give voice to victims. He strives to keep their names in memory. His book fights an official history which forgets the oppressed people, particularly the women. Remember them allows him to combine individual and collective memory. Pram claims to make the prisoner’s rights to be acknowledged. He expresses his gratitude to the persons who helped them to save their personal identities.

Le travail de mémoire fictionnelle dans Le Mirador d’Élisabeth Gille

Halia Koo — 2025-05-05

Élisabeth Gille, the youngest daughter of novelist Irène Némirovsky, was only five years old when her mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Although Gille hardly remembered anything about her mother, she later wrote Le Mirador : mémoires rêvés, a “dreamed biography” of her, relying on surviving documents, the memories of friends and family, and her own imagination. In this fictional memoir written from her mother’s point of view, Némirovsky’s story is intertwined with glimpses of Gille’s own childhood. Part biography, part autobiography and part fiction, Le Mirador is an attempt to come to terms with the pain and suffering associated with a mother’s untimely disappearance, as well as with the void and lack of memory that it has created. Ultimately, this form of fictional memory practised by Gille proves to be the only narrative strategy that allows the survivor to express and deal with an unspeakable past that cannot be remembered, and yet is at the same time unforgettable.

Clio, Mnémosyne et création d’identité dans les récits personnels de Yourcenar et de Kazantzaki

Marina GRIGOROPOULOU — 2025-05-05

In this paper, we intend to analyze the place of History and its dialectic connection to Memory in The Labyrinth of the world of Marguerite Yourcenar and the Report to Greco of Nikos Kazantzakis, the authors’ personal and familial narratives. Therefore, we think that the historic vision of Yourcenar’s memories is influenced by Bergson’s « fonction fabulatrice » which relates the specific to the general; in other words, her family history is being attached to the sphere of history’s universality. The French author’s writing indicates that historic reality doesn’t mean a lot to her; what really counts is the imaginary significance created upon the event. During the circle of History, human is mostly important. For the Greek author however, surpassing human is what really counts. In Kazantzakis’ life narration, the historic inspiration refers either to great historic figures or to Crete’s historic events marking his memory; what really counts is not the event’s presence, but the author’s imaginary meditation regenerating the glance onto the past. In both works consequently, imagination’s implication transforms the quest of real identity to creation of an imaginary identity.

Le différent de la représentation : poétiques de l’expérience concentrationnaire

Nathanaël WADBLED — 2025-05-05

Most of the authors assert that the respect for the experience of a dark event’s victims supposes the refusal of any form of fiction and comment. It would mean the trivialisation of their experience. However, some witnesses assume the shape of fictional narrative to make understand what was lived. They refuse to exclude the victims of the humanity as made them their executioners. This opposite perspectives theorized and embodied by Claude Lanzmann and Robert Antelme, show the possibility of reporting an event of diverse legitimates manners. There would be a plurality of speeches corresponding to various manners to understand a dark life experience and to include it in the history.

Mémoire et création littéraire dans les romans de Toni Morrison

Ayah Juliette GBASSI — 2025-05-05

The relationship between remembrance and literary imagination is the basis of Toni Morrison’s works. Willing to compensate the silence of the official History concerning Black experience in the United States, Morrison uses authentic facts. She contextualizes them in a precise way according to her inspiration, and in doing so, creates new meaning. The writing of the present in her prose derives from the fictionalization of fragments of History. Narrative focalization, which raises the question of who holds the memory, is central to her work. The use of memory aims at not only understanding an essence, but also at building an identity. Using subversive and innovative narrative techniques, the African-American writer depicts a saga of black people. Morrison criticizes in her novels a society that tends to forget about her cultural roots. She therefore opens the way to a collective memory that not only reconciles, but also brings perplexity because of the displacement of what Robert Hans Jauss calls the “horizon” of expectation of the reader.

Un surréaliste au temps de la Révolution Nationale

Myriam MALLART — 2025-05-05

After the French defeat of 1940 a few prisoner-of-war testimonies were published, but it was only at the Liberation that members of the Resistanc began recounting their captivity. In 1945 Philippe Soupault published Le Temps des assassins. Histoire du détenu 1234, the account of his incarceration in Tunisia, which he would refuse to republish. A victim of the Révolution nationale, he provides the historian with an account of a Resistance prisoner in the French colonies, a little-known episode of the war. Where as in 14-18 poetry had been his lifeline, in 1945 Soupault, terrified by reality, felt the need to bear witness “sincerely and truly,” without “creating literature, writing a novel.” Like this he would give fresh impetus to the debate about the appropriateness or possibility of being creative by drawing inspiration from unbearable historical experiences. Through the modest accounts of other prisoners, Soupault managed to paint a portrait of Vichy that twenty years later other historians would ratify. How did this viscerally surrealist poet, who aspired not to be a novelist and defined his novels as testimonies, write History? Was he able to bear witness without using artifice? Why then did he place himself under the aegis of Rimbaud by titling his text Le Temps des assassins?

Le journalisme subjectif de Marguerite Duras, à mi-chemin de l’Histoire et de la fiction

Daniela Catau VERES — 2025-05-05

The famous writer, the signature of the autobiographical pact (Lejeune, 1997), even of a subjective pact with the History, Marguerite Duras sets herself up as in the posture of journalist and writes an article of scandal about the case Grégory in 1985, for the French newspaper Libération. It is a question about an article focusing the attention on a presumed infanticide mother, Christine Villemin, whose murderous gesture bowled over France at that time. Duras reconstitutes and rebuilds the History strating from a subjective present, autofictional, and even mythical one. Our paper approaches the concept of ''subjective journalism'' and proposes an analysis of the limits, objects of disputes and of various reactions referring to this new concept in context of the 80s in France. This pact that Duras concludes with the History and the Fiction on the scene of the journalism relates to some risks for a writer tempted by the adventure of the language, who always liked to mix up the limits between the Real and the Fictional, supporting a new use of the literature and in all her time introducing herself as a fervent supporter of the feminist condition in society.

Histoire et représentations de l’Afrique coloniale française dans le récit autobiographique d’Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Pascal SCALLON-CHOUINARD — 2025-05-06

Life stories often seem plaintive due to a lack of testimony from those who may be termed the "forgotten" of history [Jewsiewicki-Koss, 1987 : 213]. In the specific case of African colonial history, this type of text may be an invaluable source that expresses the point of view of the "colonised" and puts forth an experienced or perceived social reality [Schuerkens, 1994 : 15]. The published memoirs of Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a leading figure in Francophone Africa, are an example of this. Immersed in a world of traditions and customs from his early childhood; it was under French rule that he evolved and found his place. His experience at colonial school directed him toward a position in the colonial administration in West Africa.
Remaining committed to the values of his childhood Amadou Hampâté Bâ came to exist in a nuanced world that was both traditional and colonial. His point of view offers a singular portrait of colonial Africa and its players; simultaneously, a reflection of the author himself becomes accessible.

Configurations spatio-identitaires dans Le Boulevard périphérique de Henry Bauchau

Liliana FOȘALĂU — 2025-05-06

Henry Bauchau is a writer whose work and life cover the most important events of the 20th century. There are two ways of reading History in his novels, plays and poetry anthologies: firstly, there is a personal story, secondly, there is “la grande Histoire” (the great History), as the writer likes to call it. On the canvas of the world, history “weaves” individual charming stories, very often auto- and allo-biographic plots, where the writer dedicates a lot of importance to space. Le Boulevard périphérique is a novel published in 2008 in which the author, on a biographical background of exciting and varied stories, often fictionalized, questions the two major faces of history: the individual and the collective one, highlighting their dramatic dimension, the importance of writing and the salvation through art. One of the most important aspects of the novel is the very poetic analysis, where autobiography and fiction merge, of the space-identity relation in the becoming of the person.

Raconter sa propre mort: éléments d’une autothanatographie dans le récit blanchotien L’instant de ma mort

Roula TSITOURI — 2025-05-06

In the brief text under the title L’instant de ma mort Maurice Blanchot recounts a singular event experienced by the character of his fiction: a young man was nearly executed towards the end of the second world war and escaped death by pure chance. Blanchot uses third-person narration and switches to first person only in the last sentence, creating a feeling of doubt about the truthfulness of the narrated incident and making the reader wonder whether the character, the narrator and the author himself are more than one person. The mystery seems unraveled thanks to former first-person references to the same event in La folie du jour. However, rather than assuming that this is a proof of fiction giving way to autobiography, one should see a bigger enjeu, which concerns the only experience capable of driving to the threshold of literature. This very experience transgresses the boundaries of the writer’s identity, questioning even the possibility of writing in the first person. L’instant de ma mort cannot be seen as a typical récit de vie for a further reason: what is narrated is actually a moment in a lifetime. It embraces the whole life as it concerns the borderline experience par excellence but the focal point is displaced: rather than the narration of one’s life, it is the narration of a suspended death. This suspended death, always behind us and yet to come, haunts every Blanchotian narration. It is this very question of death – deeply related to the literary experience and largelyexceeding literary genres – as well as the (im)possibility of testyfying for it that the paper examines.

De Pascalet Boucarut à Henri Bosco et vice versa. Fictions identitaires dans l'oeuvre d'Henri Bosco

Stefana SQUATRITO — 2025-05-06

In Henri Bosco’s récits de jeunesse and Souvenirs, fiction and autobiography meet each other creating an alteration of the generic frontiers. From an intertextual perspective we can observe that repetitions, summaries, sequels are very common in these works. Also, a frequent confusion between the author and the narrator proves to us that Pascalet Boucarut is in a way an ‘alter ego’ of the writer. Moving from Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact (1975) and the new frontiers of Serge
Doubrovsky’s definition of autofiction, we can decode in Henri Bosco’s works a real poetization of the self.

Traduire et retraduire l’autobiographie

Raluca Nicoleta BALAŢCHI — 2025-05-06

Our paper is a contribution to the analysis of the translation and retranslation of autobiographies from French into Romanian (Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Marguerite Yourcenar, Souvenirs pieux). We will focus on the implications that the act of translating has on the autobiographical pact. Translation strategies, especially those that affect subjective units (Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s subjectivèmes) wil be thoroughly analysed, with a view to see at what point the translator’s voice and subjectivity recreate rather than render a style. Retranslation, understood as the new translation of a text already translated into a language, seems to be a practice which leads to the emergency of the translator’s subjectivity, thus overlapping with that of the author’s or the narrator’s, with interesting consequences on the notion of identity. If an autobiography is a reconstruction of a past and of an identity, to what extent do translation and retranslation ensure its transfer into a different cultural context, addressing a different audience?

A propos des récits de vie en sociologie et de leurs limites

Vanessa STETTINGER — 2025-05-06

The life story is a determining tool for the sociologist who seeks to know and to understand the life of individuals. It gives access not only to the perspective with which individuals carry their own story but also to the contexts in which their individual stories fit. But if the life story gives access the knowledge of an individual’s story and, thus, describes a social universe, the limits of its contributions to the comprehension of this story must be questioned. What can we find in the whole ensemble of information that constitutes a life story? Is it reasonable to think that it is possible to discover in it the triggering fact from which later events will follow and will shape the individual as he or she is, characterizing and composing his or hers uniqueness? In this presentation, we will initially present the limits of the life story as a tool to be used in sociology, especially when applied for establishing an explanatory link between the past and present. We then explore the importance and the contributions of this tool for this discipline.

Le rôle de la mémoire dans les écritures personnelles de Jacques Chessex

Otilia Carmen Cojan — 2025-05-06

The personals writings of the Swiss Romand writer Jacques Chessex place themselves in-between two fertile spheres. Firstly, we have to mention that they are a part of the system which includes the narrative fiction and the invented story; secondly, we can definitely argue that they prove the existence at this level of some real autobiographical facts. The back and forth between these two poles is provided by Memory which diminishes and at the same time reinforces the values of fiction and reality. It is this Memory the one that establishes the balance between autobiography and autofiction, between an “I” of the Past and an “I” of the Present. But does or can Memory really ensure fidelity when it comes to the transfer of memories from Past to Present? Or does it act like a traitor? The discontinuities of Memory seem to be real strategies used by the “I” in order to ventilate the conscience of a Narrator constantly submitted to internal conflicts. What is the place of oblivion in this context? These are some of the questions to which we will try to find an answer by means of our study, analyzing three of Chessex’s texts: L’Imparfait (1996), Monsieur (2006), Pardon Mère (2008).

L’archéologie de la mémoire dans La Nuit des origines de Nourredine Saadi

Meriem BENKELFAT — 2025-05-06

Memory is the fundamental element that recurs in the story of life of many novelists. We are particularly interested in individual or collective memory, in connection with fiction of certain Maghreb writers, especially the contemporary Maghreb French-speaking author Nourredine Saadi. In his novel "The Night of origins", he immerses the reader in a romantic setting full of symbols transporting him from the past and the present, fictional world where memory and imagination are intimately linked to talk about "the origins ". This implies that the author is trying to draw from fiction in order to find an answer to his identity questioning from which many writers novelists are suffering, i.e, making from a scattered memory a fiction. After having been exiled, Nourredine Saadi wanted to come back to his origins in space and time. He set up the iconic characters that are going to and from between Algeria (the birthplace of the author) and France the land of shelter.
It’s all about a spatial and temporal scatterings as well as a completely split memory. The Exile then leads the main to an internal exile because of his bicultural identity. A thematic framework derives from this story dealing mainly with the identity of the man and his dark origins which constitutes the bottom of the story. Thus the fiction that relies on imagination to build a path leading to the origins, converges to a result, in the sense that all those who have tried to look for the origin of fiction came to the following conclusion: in reality, there is only one fiction of origins. That’s why we need to dissect this pathway to the origin of fiction.

Spiritul filozofic faţă cu Revoluţia. Eugen Simion despre Mai ‘68

Caius DOBRESCU — 2025-05-06

Concentrating on the Parisian diary Timpul trăirii-Timpul mărturisirii (A Time for Living – A Time for Confession) of the prominant Romania literary critic Eugen Simion, the paper proposes that, as an intellectual coming to the French capital at the beginning of the 1970s with the experience of what used to be termed “the communist camp”, the author retrospectively construes the moment of May ’68 and weighs its consequences with the feeling that he deals simultaneously with a form of
“typological” past, a counterfactual present and an alternative future of his own domestic society and culture. As a committed Proustian, Eugen Simion experiments with transferring the experience of reverting the temporal flux, which is perfectly possible within the bounds of our personal memory, at the scale of the collective experience and of the civilizational processes.

Plicul negru de Norman Manea, un roman smuls cenzurii

Brînduşa NICOLAESCU — 2025-05-06

Many works of literature were censured or even forbidden under the oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. But few had such an intricate destiny as the book The Black Envelope had. This novel was written by Norman Manea in the ‘80s, when the mechanisms of censorship, as “an instrument de domination” were more perfidious than ever. In fact, even though officially censorship had been ‘abolished’, the same rigorous political control was exerted, the same ideological commands stemming from the policies dubbed ‘theses of July 1971’ were applied. Our study aims at understanding, taking the example of this book, the impact of the censorship’s intrusions into the literary destiny of both artistic works and their creators, who strive to keep the feeble equilibrium between the historical constraints and the freedom of the writer as a signifier. We mainly refer to the essay “Censor’s Report. With Explanatory Notes by the Censored Author”, a precious, unique document in the history of Romanian literature, and we analyse the inescapable presence of the context within the text and the technique of writing between the lines.

Aspects of Constantin Fantaneru’s Memorialistic Prose

Petronela Gabriela TEBREAN — 2025-05-06

Side memoir of Constantin Fantaneru’s texts is a reflection of life and activity of a Romanian controversial intellectual, whose work begins to be revalued in contemporary critical perception. It requires attention, on the one hand, autobiographical texts of neat edition of Aurel Sasu Carti si o alta carte [Books and another book], that demonstrates writer’s propensity for literature and the attention paid to the aesthetic effects by adopting a playfulevocative style sometimes with dramatic accents and, on the other hand, the novel Slujba din hol [Lobby Service] with foreshadowing subjective portraits of some interwar personalities. Fragments of Memorial are full of retrospective impressions and writer’s considerations about literature, the word being essential in configuring world representation. The texts from Pagini [Pages] are “fleeting notations, without stylize”, fragments of a solitary life, coupled with introspections and existential reflections, also with brief analyzes of some literary works and artistic trends of the period. Selfreferential speech aims to define the writer himself compared with the others and opens to history and events, actually lived once and subsequently transformed into art.

Le phénomène de la réflexivité dans Ziar de lagăr. Caracal – 1945

Lavinia Ileana GEAMBEI — 2025-05-06

The literature of the Communist prisons and concentration camps (hence the Romanian Gulag) was discussed freely and openly in Romania only after 1989; „Non-fictional writing” (Ruxandra Cesereanu) was an important part of this literature. Most of the testimonials on the Romanian concentrationary hell were written after the authors had been released from prisons or from the camps. This is why they bear the imprint of time and thus an unavoidable degree of detachment. There is, however, one exception, a work that was written in the very place of expiation, Onisifor Ghibu’s concentration camp diary, Concentration Camp Journal. Caracal – 1945. He was able to write the diary there because in 1945, when the author was
imprisoned, the Romanian Gulag was not yet very thoroughly organized; it was more of a pre-Gulag set-up. But Onisifor Ghibu’s dairy fills up a void, being a direct testimonial, one unaltered by the passage of time, on the period immediately preceding Romanian Communism. Starting from these premises, this paper aims to analyze Onisifor Ghibu’s concentration camp diary in terms of its intentionality, as related to the time of the enunciation, the intensity of the emotions, the functions of the writing, as well as the educational dimension of this work.

La perspective temporelle dans les mémoires de la littérature roumaine du XIXe siècle. Observations sur le rapport entre «le temps vécu» et «le temps de l’évocation»

Cosmina LUNGOCI — 2025-05-06

Memorialistic texts are influenced by the time perspective, which, according to Alexandru Săndulescu, may have a selective function: it whether glorifies or criticises the past [Săndulescu, 2003: 5]. Starting from this consideration, I intend, in this paper, to analyse some fragments of three memorialistic texts belonging to 19th century Romanian literature, which I consider representative for several perspectives: the way in which they illustrate the transformation of the authors’ perception, in time, on places and people; the manner in which they emphasise the necessity and the importance of noting the events in the moments they happen; the emphasis on the possibility of recreating the past by investing it with new meanings. The
corpus of my analysis is composed of a travel memoir by Sextil Puşcariu, Călare de două veacuri, (On horseback for two centuries); an epistolary text by Barbu Delavrancea and a false intimate journal, Peregrinul transilvan (The Transylvanian Wanderer) by Ion Codru Drăguşanu - actually a travel memoir written in epistolary form after the travel was ended. The choice of these different literary species was based on the idea that, although the frontier between memorialistic texts is sometimes uncertain, from the perspective of the temporal report a higher coefficient of uncertainty was observed in the case of the memoirs, which relate events after a longer period of time than the journals, in which the chronologic precision is more accurate, and the confabulation functions less.