Parodi, ilk olarak Aristoteles tarafından taklitçi şiirleri nitelemek için kullanılır. Orta Çağ Avrupa kültür hayatında, folklorunda önemli bir halk eğlence ve mizah biçimi haline gelen parodi, ...bayram şölen, karnaval gibi özel günlerde halkı eğlendirmek amacıyla üretilen taklide dayalı gülünç metinlere verilen addır. Ciddi metinlerin alaycı dönüşümüne, dayanan parodik metinler tragedya, destan gibi epik türlerle komedyanın harmanlandığı bir nesir edebiyatın ve romanın doğuşunda etkilidir. Bu nedenle romanın kökleri Orta Çağ karnaval yaşamına uzanır. Parodinin temeli bir metin, tür veya söylemin başka edebi metinler içinde taklit edilerek yeniden üretilmesine dayanır. Antik Yunan’daki yazarlık okullarından bu güne taklit özgün bir edebiyatın doğmasında etkilidir. Türk edebiyatında romanın doğuşu, Batı edebiyatının taklit edilmesi kadar, meddahlık, orta oyunu vb. gibi geleneksel halk hikâyelerinin parodik bir anlayışla taklit edilmesine veya yeniden yazımına dayanır. Bu iki yönlü etki ilk dönem romancıları olarak nitelenebilecek Namık Kemal, Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Hüseyin Rahmi vb. yazarlarda ortaya çıkar. Modern ve postmodern dönemde de Batı romanı ve geleneksel halk hikâyeciliğinden parodi, pastiş, alaycı dönüştürüm vb. metinlerarasılık yöntemleriyle faydalanılır. Türk romanı, bir yandan geleneksel türler ve Batı romanının izleri üzerinde yükselirken diğer taraftan Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, Adalet Ağaoğlu, Tahsin Yücel, Orhan Pamuk vb. yazarların elinde yeni kurgu ve anlatım yöntemleri arayışına girişerek özgünleşir. Bu süreçte parodi yazınsal eleştiri, yeniden üretim ve mizah vb. işlevleriyle önemli bir yazınsal yöntem olarak öne çıkar.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera who has lived in France since 1975 is all too familiar with betrayal, which punctuates both his life and his works. The publication of his novel The Unbearable ...Lightness of Being in 1984 sparked a heated debate among some of the most prominent Czech dissidents at home and leading Czech intellectuals in exile. Accusations of betrayal leveled against the author are central to the polemic, but the main area of contention addresses the larger questions of the role, rights, and freedoms of a writer of fiction, as expressed by two branches of Czechoslovak culture: exilic and dissident. By examining the dispute surrounding Kundera's best-known novel and tracing the trajectory of the betrayals he allegedly committed in exile, I seek to investigate the broader philosophical issue of a novelist's freedom, to delineate the complexities of an exilic writer's propensity to betray, and to demonstrate, using Kundera's own conception of the novel as a genre, that his betrayals are in fact positive, liberating, and felicitous.
During the twentieth century, the former Czechoslovakia was at the forefront of Communist takeover and control. Soviet influence regulated all aspects of life in the country. As a result, many ...well-known political figures, writers, and artists were forced to flee the country in order to evade imprisonment or death. One of the more notable examples is the writer Milan Kundera, who fled to France in 1975. Once in France, the notion of exile became a prominent theme in his writing as he sought to expose the political situation of his country to the western world—one of the main reasons why he chose to publish his work in French rather than in Czech. This thesis analyzes the themes of language and memory in connection with exile in two of Kundera’s novels, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli (1978) and L’Ignorance (2000). We contend that these concepts serve as anchors and tethers, stabilizing forces meant to help exiled characters recreate their identity outside of their homeland. By exploring notions of language and memory in these novels, Kundera demonstrates how the experience of exile affects the human condition during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Andreï Makine is a contemporary Russian-born author who writes in French. He borrows from both the French and Russian literary traditions to reshape his personal memories of Russia as well as his ...vision of Russian history. His novels are always constructed around a sense of loss and consistently trace a fictional character’s process of mourning for something he can’t quite express in the form of words, to which Makine often refers as the indicible, or the ‘unsayable.’ Critics have interpreted Makine’s quest for the ‘indicible’ as a search for a language that transcends the cultural divide between France and Russia, but few have investigated how such attempts to express the ‘indicible’ concern Makine’s approach to revisiting his Russian past. In this thesis, I will discuss five of Makine’s novels and two of his essays chronologically and thematically, exploring how Makine uses French to revisit Russia from a foreign and ‘spectral’ point of view. This distanced perspective permits Makine to transform and preserve personal memories of the Soviet era as he descends into the ‘gaps’ or silences in the collective memory of his generation in Russia. In considering Makine’s fictional narratives as a means of mourning for his native country, I will also demonstrate that over the course of his literary career, Makine’s writing has in fact grown closer to the Russian literary tradition, even though Makine continues to live and write in France.
In recent years, the concept of “World Literature” has become an important paradigm for literary institutions. Above all, the question of a World Literature in French emerged in 2007 with the < ...Manifeste pour une litterature-monde en francais > (Manifesto for a World Literature in French) signed by forty-four Francophone writers, and published in the French newspaper Le Monde. Since then, arguments for or against World Literature have reexamined current literary theoretical frameworks to deconstruct the legacies of cultural imperialism and to address the constrictive “labels” of peripheral canons. In regards to these debates, my research investigates the benefits, as well as the challenges, of bringing modern literatures together to shed light on the work of less-internationally prominent writers. Through a critical examination of the presence of nation in contemporary world literature – such as markers of linguistic, narrative, and cultural particularities (in Gayatri Spivak’s sense) – I seek to assess the need for as well as the limits of the current compartmentalization of World Literature (separated either by region or by language) in institutions. My analysis focuses on the representation of social ills – in parallel with the implications of globalization – in contemporary literatures in relation to our modern societies.The first four chapters of my dissertation rely on a comparative approach to the work of French, Sub-Saharan African, American, and Canadian writers. In these chapters, I examine recent realist iterations of the issues of identity, race, sexuality, despair, and alienation in novels by Michel Houellebecq (Les Particules elementaires, 1998; Plateforme, 2001), Ken Bugul (Le Baobab fou, 1982; Riwan ou le chemin de sable, 1999), Fatou Diome (Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, 2003), Alain Mabanckou (Black Bazar, 2009), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake, 2003), and Jacques Poulin (Volkswagen Blues, 1984; Chat sauvage, 1998; L’anglais n’est pas une langue magique, 2009). Chapter 5 addresses the arguments against World Literature, specifically the concept of “Untranslatables,” to foreground the linguistic and cultural value of modern translation. Here, I put Frank Wynne’s English translation of Houellebecq’s Les Particules elementaires into dialogue with the original French edition, using translation methodology sources to study excerpts of the translated version from a stylistic perspective. I then isolate cultural concepts appearing in specific passages – such as the use of humor – and analyze these signifiers as they appear in both languages.Overall, my dissertation strives to provide an interdisciplinary approach: in addition to linguistics, translation studies and those of postcolonial, post-migration and diaspora studies, I have found it necessary to draw upon the fields of sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis to elaborate my arguments.While visions of a literature without borders undoubtedly partake of a utopian component, this dissertation gives parameters to determine the stakes for the future of a World Literature which, I suggest, will be mapped out somewhere between already-established institutional structures and a new literary order, one that is more inclusive and yet aware of the threats of mono-ideological aesthetics contouring today’s global capitalist world.
In this dissertation I argue that multilingual authors can, and frequently do, produce texts in multiple languages in and through translation whose compositional complexity erases the distinction ...between original and translation; although these texts are often understood to be original-translation pairings, in actuality they seriously challenge the simplistic conception of equivalence such discrete categories imply. I term these texts “polytexts” in order to emphasize their genesis, and continued creative evolution, in and through the multiple languages spoken by these polyglot authors. I show that polytexts grow and expand an originary artistic impulse diachronically through multiple authorial interventions in the work as authors work cooperatively with their translators to produce new texts tailored for new linguistic and cultural audiences. I employ Lebanese-British author Hanan al-Shaykh’s literary corpus to illustrate the concept by analyzing in depth how she shifts her works through a process of translation and rewriting that produces two polytexts, one directed to her anglophone reading audience and one to her arabophone readership. I contend that al-Shaykh’s polytextual corpus, as well as the polytextual corpora of other canonical writers of world literature, challenges our dichotomous understanding of translations as inert mirror images of other texts, decentralizes the significance and synchronic nature of the holy (presumed) original, invalidates assumptions that composition is a monolingual and monocultural process, and validates the dynamism of authors’ diachronic interventions in their creative works across multiple linguistic and cultural spheres.
This dissertation examines aesthetics of in-betweenness and identity in the works of contemporary authors who migrated to France from non-francophone regions and chose to adopt French for literary ...expression: Vassilis Alexakis (Greece), Brina Svit (Slovenia), and Andreï Makine (Russia). Common approaches to translingualism tend to focus on the material interaction between languages in the text (plurilingual practices) or on authors’ impressions of changing tongues. This dissertation contributes to scholarship by accounting for aesthetic forms of in-betweenness that have been overshadowed by the bilingual lens. Throughout its three case studies, it argues that the original tension between native and adopted languages is explored under new poetic guises that are not limited to the thematization of bilingualism and migration. This project is informed by the reception and marketization of translingual literature in France. Specifically, it examines how the authors respond to the nation-state’s conditional hospitality and engage with reception in their own texts.The first chapter argues that in Vassilis Alexakis' autobiographic Paris-Athènes (1989), the text’s polyphonic character resides in the narrator’s ability to act as the creator and critic of his own text, rather than in the interaction between Greek and French languages. The second chapter on Brina Svit’s novel Coco Dias ou la Porte Dorée (2007) demonstrates that, by structurally imitating Argentine tango in writing, the tension typically found between native and adopted languages is transformed into an intermedial dialogue between literature and dance. Rereading autobiographic Moreno in light of Coco Dias brings to the fore an intersubjective dimension of Svit’s translingualism as being beyond traditional communities and conventional affiliations. The third chapter argues that Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français and Alternaissance (2011)–the latter written under his heteronymic identity Gabriel Osmonde–share an aesthetic quest for a poetic language of in-betweenness, despite the absence of the habitual Franco-Russian paradigm in the second novel.My dissertation reveals a tendency to convert linguistic displacement into an aesthetic position of in-betweenness that–rather than being reconciled–is recreated to assert linguistic freedom and test the limits of language by acting on its perception. Collectively, these three case studies call attention to the malleability and instability of translingual postures that challenge the writers’ status as “assimilationist” figures in reception.
Ce mémoire de maîtrise se consacre à l'étude des formes de brouillage dans la littérature française de l'extrême-contemporain de 2005 à 2015. Par brouillage, nous entendons les divers moyens mis en ...œuvre pour faire éclore, entretenir et perpétuer la confusion. C'est aux Éditions de Minuit que cette propension au mélange délibéré se déploie le plus radicalement : la prestigieuse maison d'édition, associée aux Nouveaux Romanciers, rapatrie le récit que ces derniers avaient conspué, mais se refuse à le laisser intact. À une remise en cause du roman traditionnel, les écrivains contemporains de chez Minuit, alimentant le flou, font se succéder une nouvelle remise en cause du roman traditionnel, qui s'attaque, cette fois, aux composantes narratives de la diégèse. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Christian Oster et Éric Chevillard sont parmi les auteurs les plus emblématiques de cette résurrection partielle. Les récits choisis pour les besoins de l'exercice, à raison de deux par auteur, sont Fuir (2005) et Nue (2013) de Jean-Philippe Toussaint, L'Imprévu (2005) et Dans la cathédrale (2010) de Christian Oster ainsi qu'Oreille rouge (2005) et L'Auteur et moi (2012) d'Éric Chevillard. Ces œuvres s'en prennent directement et systématiquement à trois composantes diégétiques que nous nous proposons d'étudier en succession, à savoir la construction de l'espace, du temps et du personnage-narrateur. Nous verrons comment ces trois dimensions se révèlent, dans ces récits, sous l'emprise d'entités joueuses, décidées à tout brouiller. Le présent mémoire propose, en prenant appui sur les théories de la narratologie, une lecture en close-reading des récits de Toussaint, Oster et Chevillard : ce sont les mécanismes internes de ces œuvres qui subissent les contrecoups de ce qu'il convient d'appeler une manie du cryptage.
This book uses new archival research to view the wider cultural scope of the translation issue involving the controversies surrounding Kundera's translated novels. It focuses on the language of the ...novels, Kundera's 'lost' works, writing as translation, interpretation, exile, censorship and the social responses to translated fiction.
