Description
Book SynopsisThis book analyses French Caribbean writing from the point of view of its language and literary form - questions which until recently were somewhat neglected in postcolonial studies but are now becoming an important area of research. Britton supplements postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of the writers. Topics including genre, intertextuality, narrative voice, discursive agency, orality, the ‘creolization’ of languages and the renewal of realism are discussed in relation to Glissant, Césaire, Ménil, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Depestre, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, Pineau and Maximin.
Trade Review'Britton makes an unanswerable case for a rebalancing of textually-based and world-based reading, a rebalancing of critical attention to language and form on the one hand, representation and political positioning on the other.'
Mary Gallagher
This publication, though consisting of previously published material, in its cumulative effect and sustained attention across the field as a whole, demonstrates the incisive originality and intelligence of this outstanding reader of French Caribbean literature.
French Studies'This remarkable book unravels the links between theoretical and philosophical discourses (Benveniste, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, feminist philosophy) and French Caribbean writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe (Me´nil, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Schwartz-Bart, Conde´, Maximin, Glissant).'
Richard Langer,
Oxford Journals'Britton is persuasive in arguing for the need to reevaluate the study of the formal aspects of literary texts produced in the French Caribbean. As she makes clear, eventually neither (post)structuralist nor postcolonial theory fully does justice to all French Caribbean texts. In concise chapters, the broad corpus she brings together establishes the way in which formal and textual analysis also uncovers the implications of the political.'
Jacqueline Couti,
New West Indian GuideTable of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I: Genre, Intertextuality, Discourse
- 1. How to be primitive: Tropiques, surrealism and ethnography
- 2. Problems of Cultural Self-Representation: René Ménil, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant
- 3. Eating their words: the consumption of French Caribbean literature
- 4. Intertextual Connections: The Jewish Holocaust in French Caribbean Novels
- 5. Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove
- 6. Discursive Agency and the (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit
- Part II: On Edouard Glissant
- 7. Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Le Quatrième Siècle
- 8. Collective narrative voice in Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony
- 9. Fictions of identity and the identities of fiction in Tout-monde
- 10. Mixing up Languages in the Tout-monde
- 11. ‘La parole du paysage’: Art and the Real in Une Nouvelle Région du monde
- Appendix Writing in the Present: Interview with Maryse Condé
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
