Érudit's RSS Feed

Topiques narratives du langage et des langues. Introduction

Yen-Maï Tran-Gervat
This introduction presents volume 9 of Topiques, études satoriennes and the papers that are included in it.

Les langues de l’Afrique sub-saharienne dans la littérature viatique (XVIIe - XVIIIe siècles) ou l’Européen face à la linguistique africaine

Hélène Cussac
This article is the first part of a study on the relationship of European travelers to sub-Saharan Africa in the 17-18th centuries with African linguistics. Here it observes the reasons why communication proves not only difficult but sometimes impossible due to the multiple languages spoken by Africans, but also the problem of click languages that they discover. The article further highlights the extent to which communication even becomes deceptive and notes that lack of knowledge of languages leads most travelers to deny, as in other areas, any civilization to Africans. Reiterated from one travel story to another, their statement make it possible to draw up a set of topoi linked to communication.

« En moins de rien je le sus par coeur et même avec sa naturelle prononciation ». L’apprentissage facile et rapide des langues étrangères : un topos picaresque ?

Clémence Jaime
In Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Tristan L'Hermite's Le Page disgracié (1643) and Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), the narrator-character describes his learning of a foreign language. More specifically, these texts give rise to the topos "narrator learns a foreign language easily and quickly". This paper analyses the co-occurrence of this topos in three novels classified under the generic label of the picaresque. The recurrence of language topoi in the picaresque novel seems to point towards a genuine reflection on language and communication. The study of an opposite linguistic topos in our three novels: "learning Latin with great difficulty", as well as other topoi about the learning of language variants, in Spanish novels considered to be the founders of the genre, confirm that language learning does not permit a long social integration for the characters, but constitutes rather a driving force of the episodic plot, which follows a pessimistic Sisyphean pattern.

« Il me conseilla […] d’apprendre le sioux, l’iroquois et l’esquimau ». Topoi de la communication linguistique dans le Voyage en Amérique de Chateaubriand

Diego Stefanelli
The article analyses the representation of communicative interactions between European travelers and indigenous populations in Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique . By examining several travel accounts from the 18th century and the early 19th century, on which the writer based his text, the paper focuses on two intertwining recurring situations: the learning of Indigenous languages by European travelers and the actual linguistic interaction between travelers and Indigenous peoples. The analysis demonstrates that Chateaubriand does not represent himself as a traveler capable of a direct communication with the indigenous populations. However, the only scene in which there is direct interaction between the French traveler and an indigenous woman offers an unusual perspective on the complex relationship between reality and literature in Romantic travel writing.

« Apprendre la langue de l’autre » : en quête d’un topos narratif

Claudine Le Blanc
Though stories of formal language learning are common in classical fiction, the encounter with and learning of another’s language in real-life situations seem to be more often sidestepped. When the question of language is raised, the issue of how it is learnt is skirted around, as if recounting in one language how one learns another were not such an easy task. Here, through a journey across genres, centuries and diverse cultural areas, we set out in search of a topos—‘learning the language of the other’—whose absence, and then slow emergence, bear witness to its eminently historical nature, necessitating a historicised topical approach.

Le langage de l’autre monde, du Diable amoureux aux Frères Karamazov

Elizaveta Shevchenko
The language of a supernatural being, regardless of the channels or forms of expression it employs, acquires meaning only within a human perspective, whose capacity—real or presumed—to perceive the invisible makes such language meaningful. Through an analysis of the evolution of this language in four emblematic works reflecting changing conceptions of the other world from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, this article traces the progressive internalization of the supernatural voice. Gradually shedding its external forms, this voice comes to inhabit the human psyche. This process unfolds within the broader context of contemporary scientific inquiry.

De l’apprentissage du langage dominant au geste de traduction : réinvestissement et entremêlement de deux topoï dans Les Armoires vides et Ce qu’ils disent ou rien d’Annie Ernaux

Clara Cini
In Annie Ernaux’s first two novels, Les Armoires vides and Ce qu’ils disent ou rien, two topoi where language is the main topic are intimately intertwined: on the one hand, the topos of learning a diastratic variety of language, the standard language, and, on the other hand, the topos of translation. This interweaving may seem conventional; however, it constitutes for both the narrators and the author a way of reducing (often immediately) the inevitably worsening gap between the language of origin – sometimes rejected, sometimes regretted – and the language acquired during schooling from which it soon becomes impossible to escape. This twofold retaking of these topoi depicts the linguistic dimension of social violence and illustrate the evolution of the author’s position. When she abandons the novel in 1983 and embraces a « flat style », the direction of learning is reversed: henceforth, the original language – the source – is translated into the standard language – the target. The reader is invited to follow the same movement. The numerous variations on these topoi thus seem to indicate a topical « resurrection » which goes even further than the domain of the novel.

Sagesse animale et enchaînement topique. Fonction charnière de la parole dans le kalila wa dimna, le tuti nâmeh et la 27ème épître de « l’Encyclopédie » (risâ’il) des « Frères de la pureté » (ikhwân el-safâ)

Jean-Pierre Dubost
Through the animal speech as a carrier of topical recurrence, the fable is one of the most expansive and enduring intertext across time and space. It is itself a topical vehicle. In the discursive and even linguistic sense of the term, it conveys and transforms topoi to which it continually refers ("it is said that," "so-and-so wrote that," "it is good that," etc.) and which it exemplifies, reinscribing discursive topoi into narrative contents. If the topos is, in the sense given to it by the SATOR, a recurrent narrative configuration, animal speech is its timeless locus of reinvention. This article explores this pivotal function—between topos in the discursive sense and topos as a narrative construct transmitted and reinvented through animal discourse—using selected, representative examples from the Kalila wa Dimna, the Śukasaptati, the Tuti-nama, and the 27th epistle of the Brethren of Purity. It seeks to uncover the stakes of these subtle and complex topical interconnections, over the very long term and through the migration of texts from one culture to another, from the East to the West

L’Invention du roman chez Marivaux : quelques notes sur les situations discursives dans Les Effets surprenants de la sympathie et Pharsamon

Catherine Gallouët

An “Improbable” Book: Mendeleev’s Periodic Table and the Idea of Artistic Completion in France Daigle’s Petit crayon pour faire mine

Andrea Cabajsky