ABSTRACTS

From littérature voyageuse to littérature-monde: the manifesto in context

Charles Forsdick
(University of Liverpool)

The forty-four authors who signed Pour une littérature-monde en français' include four who provided texts for the earlier livre-manifeste' Pour une littérature voyageuse (Complexe, 1992): Alain Borer, Alain Dugrand, Gilles Lapouge and Michel Le Bris. This overlap is a clear reminder that the 2007 manifesto  and Pour une littérature-monde, the accompanying volume of essays published by Gallimard  emerged from, and in some ways form part of, a loose literary movement rooted in 1980s debates about the future of French literature in the fin de siécle. This continuity is evident in the importance of the Etonnants voyageurs festival (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2009) to the defense and illustration of both littérature voyageuse and littérature-monde; it is also apparent in the shared logic and rhetoric of the 1992 livre-manifeste' and the 2007 manifesto, both of which focus on the apparently suffocating literary environment of contemporary France, the present crisis in which literary production finds itself, and the need for the naissance' of a new tradition.

The aim of the paper is to historicize the 2007 manifesto, exploring its continuities with the various manifestations of the littérature voyageuse movement, but also highlighting the implications of certain discontinuities. Analysis will focus on four principal areas: (i) the need for any discussion of littérature-monde to address key issues relating to the sociology of literature, most notably the role of publishers and literary prizes in perpetuating certain tendencies not least that of the postcolonial exotic and what Huggan dubs the marketing of the margins'  in French-speaking cultures; (ii) the question of language  and the status of the en français' included in the title of the manifesto itself, but absent from that of the Gallimard collection; there is a risk that while littérature-monde may constitute an opening out of literary culture, its restriction to a single language might present new constraints; (iii) the importance of a pre-existing (but often ignored) critique of literary francophonie, evident for several decades amongst postcolonial critics and also amongst postcolonial authors writing in French; and (iv) questions of genre, exploring in particular the apparent primacy of fiction in references to littérature-monde and the antagonistic (as opposed to complementary) relationship between the travelogue and postcolonial works.