ABSTRACTS

Une question d'astuce et de ton: Fraud and World Literature in Sami Tchak's Hermina

Allison Crumly
(University of California at Los Angeles)

The 2007 Littérature-monde manifesto discusses the importance of what could be called a worldly literature that resists a tendency to endlessly refer to other texts and to its own textuality. To characterize metropolitan French literature as narcissistically self-reflexive and literature from elsewhere as vibrantly connected to the world, however, is to make a broad distinction that has polemical value but that implicitly calls for a more rigorous discussion of the nuanced variations on both these extremes. Sami Tchak's novel Hermina, published in 2003, can be considered an exemplary model of vivid, character-driven writing that would easily fall into the category of francophone literature; at the same time, it frequently quotes other novels from around the world and engages with the concept of littérature-monde both thematically and structurally. Hermina is significantly concerned with artistic production, and specifically with the production of literature in a 'globalized' economy. In this paper, I will examine Hermina's treatment of representations or enactments of fraud (including lying, counterfeit, and hypocrisy) as they relate to global literary circulation and transnational comparative frameworks. Hermina can fruitfully be read as an example of what Rebecca Walkowitz dubs comparison literature, a subgenre of 'world literature' that explores transnational comparative frameworks both thematically and formally. Although the Littérature-monde manifesto and Pour une littérature-monde could be understood as calls to replace the category of Francophone literature with a different category called littérature-monde, I suggest that it is also possible to use the idea of littérature-monde to read a text such as Hermina as a dynamic engagement with different frames of literary and historical reference, and as a way to examine such texts self-reflexive positioning within these contexts. In order to sketch one way of approaching littérature-monde as neither a normative nor a strictly descriptive label, I will ask how and to what extent Hermina theorizes the field of its own global circulation and explores the various dangers of inauthenticity, hypocrisy, performances of false tolerance, and the commodification of difference. In the end, I will argue, the connections that the novel traces between fraud and littérature-monde participate in an effort to tie debates about literary representation more closely to questions of justice and the context of global capitalism than to discourses of identity or subjectivity.