CM 1

Université Lumière-Lyon2
Département du Monde Anglophone,
Faculté des langues
CM Littérature du Monde Anglophone
Redouane.Abouddahab@univ-lyon2.fr

CM1 : présentation
(structure et enjeux du récit de fiction en prose)

R. Barthes :
[…] l’œuvre est un fragment de substance, elle occupe une portion de l’espace des livres (par exemple dans une bibliothèque). Le Texte, lui, est un champ méthodologique. L’opposition pourrait rappeler (mais nullement reproduire terme à terme) la distinction proposée par Lacan : la « réalité » se montre, le « réel » se démontre.
« De l’œuvre au texte », Le Bruissement de la langue, Seuil, p. 70-71, pp. 69-77.

I – What is a literary text ?

Diegesis
According to Gerald Prince, diegesis is

(1) The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur;
(2) Telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting. (A Dictionary of Narratology)

Mimesis:
A Greek word and notion mainly discussed by Plato and Aristotle. Both of them saw in mimesis the representation of nature. So, it is not the function of the poet to convey the truth, but only to copy it.
For him, all creation is imitation (nature itself, the world are an imitation of the truth and essence of God or the Ideal). In this sense, the writer is nothing but the imitator of an imitation.
So truth is not the concern of the poet or writer, but the concern of the philosopher only.

Roland Barthes:
[…] This type of illusion is not exclusive to historical discourse. It would be hard to count the novelists who imagined—in the epoch of Realism—that they were ‘objective' because they suppressed the signs of the 'Iext' in their discourse! Today linguistics and psychoanalysis have made us much more lucid with regard to privative utterances: we know that absences of signs are also in themselves significant

George Eliot:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.

Fredric Jameson
Once upon a time at the dawn of capitalism and middle-class society, there emerged something called the sign which seemed to entertain unproblematic relations with its referent.
[That was the] initial heyday of the sign, the moment of literal or referential language.

This autonomy of culture, this semi-autonomy of language, is the moment of modernism, and of a realm of the aesthetic which redoubles the world without being altogether of it. (The Linguistics of Writing)

Oscar Wilde:
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
(The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 2)

Roland Barthes :
L'enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c'est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte… Interpréter un texte, ce n'est pas lui donner un sens (plus ou moins fondé, plus ou moins libre), c'est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait. (SZ, pp. 10-11)

De ce texte absolument pluriel, les systèmes de sens peuvent s'emparer, mais leur nombre n'est jamais clos, ayant pour mesure l'infini du langage… il n'y a jamais un tout du texte" (ibid., p. 12).