Postures francophones translingues

Abstract

The concept of literary posture, defined as “the unique way of occupying a ‘position’ in the literary field” (Meizoz 2007, 18), proves to be a valuable tool for observing the different strategies that translingual writers adopt in the French literary space, while facing some common constraints. Proposing the hypothesis of a correlation between translingual French writers’ posture and linguistic imaginary, this paper distinguishes four frequent configurations, admitting of course border zones and intersections: the “defector” posture, often correlated with the critique of the country of origin; the “facilitator” posture, by which the author poses as a mediator and often a translator between the culture of origin and French; the “wandering” posture, one of reciprocal questioning of the two linguistic and national spaces, that of origin and that of arrival; finally, the posture of the “uprooted,” including the refusal of a role of “ambassador” of the country of origin, advocating an “absolute” literature, free from any political constraint. The study of a few emblematic cases—Chahdortt Djavann, Simonetta Greggio, Michela Marzano, Velibor Čolić, Akira Mizubayashi—will also show that a posture can be constant or change over time and that reception plays an important role in the implementation of a postural strategy and its modifications.

Keywords:

• Translingual literature
• Literary posture
• Djavann
• Greggio
• Marzano
• Čolić

Notes

1 La théorie dite de la relativité linguistique s’appuie sur l’hypothèse Sapir-Whorf, d’ascendance humboldtienne, qui prend le nom de l’anthropologue Edward Sapir et du linguiste Benjamin Whorf. Selon cette hypothèse, la langue première conditionne la perception de la réalité de la communauté linguistique qui partage cette langue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara De Balsi

Sara De Balsi holds a Ph.D. in French and Comparative literature. She is professeure agrégée of Italian and associate researcher at CY Cergy Paris Université. She studies translingual literature in French and Italian. She has published Agota Kristof, écrivaine translingue (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2019).