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Voix en résonance : entre origines et passages

Valérie Dusaillant-Fernandes

Transcendance et enfermement : femmes en exil dans les oeuvres de Kim Thúy, Aki Shimazaki et Ying Chen

Jia Xing
This article analyzes the female exile experience in works by three writers of Asian origin established in Quebec: Ru by Kim Thúy, Tsubaki by Aki Shimazaki, and Les lettres chinoises by Ying Chen. These authors share a writing style marked by refinement and subtlety, giving central importance to memory and female trauma caused by historical upheavals. This study explores the tension between transcendence and confinement that characterizes these works. I first examine how exile can generate social "class-crossing" and a redefinition of gender norms, while invariably accompanied by a loss of identity. I then analyze how natural elements (e.g., river, moon, and flower) represent the in-between experience and translate memorial fragmentation. Finally, I study forms of linguistic and psychic confinement, and how writing emerges as a space of survival. These novels articulate a singular poetics where female subjectivity is negotiated through ambiguity, between openness to the world and inner withdrawal. They thus offer a detailed mapping of female experiences in contexts of displacement, revealing how characters navigate between two worlds, redefining their cultural and social identity in a complex liminal space.

Une écriture transculturelle construite par la pratique du rapport à la langue chez Kim Thúy

Mirei Seki
As a young girl, Kim Thúy was forced to leave Vietnam like many other “boat people” and arrived in Quebec in 1978, where she began her literary career at the age of 41 with the publication of her first novel, Ru, in 2009. The novel won the Governor General's Literary Award, among other accolades. The writer went on to publish other literary works, such as À toi (2011), Mãn (2013), Vi (2016), and Em (2020). Kim Thúy's works reflect her personal life and the history of her exiled family. They form a narrative in which Vietnamese and Quebecois cultures intertwine through the narrator's memories, which transcend time and space. By comparing two cultures or two languages, the author does not simply analyze their differences, but seeks to outline an approach to communication marked by cultural hybridity. Work after work, Kim Thúy embarks on a quest for an original style of writing, capable of touching and giving shape to a new linguistic sensibility in a world marked by cultural diversity. By relativizing the styles of expression and modes of communication specific to each language, through the experiences of heroines confronted with language, the author nurtures linguistic, cultural, and communicational diversity in her writing and explores a form of expression that corresponds most closely to her. To make this approach visible, the writer often features a heroine who uses her linguistic experience as a gateway to a transcultural attitude. In this article, we will analyze the language practices prompted by encounters with new languages, as described in Kim Thúy's works cited above, as well as the way in which the main female characters, Nguyễn An Tịnh, Vi, and Mãn, are portrayed as eternal language learners. By observing the experience of each heroine, who lives between languages, we will show how Kim Thúy's writing, through the comparison of languages, opens up a broader perspective of relativization and thus tends towards transculturality..

Le pays natal : entre paradis et enfer chez Kim Thúy

Kyeongmi Kim-Bernard
In this study, I will analyze the collective and individual memories of the land of origin that Kim Thúy's migrant characters trace during integration into their host society. Kim Thúy, of Vietnamese origin, arrived in Canada in the seventies as a boat people at the age of ten. In her writing, the land of origin is represented through the distorting prism of the nostalgic and traumatic memories held by her protagonists. From the idealization of lost paradise to the image of an infernal place of persecution, Vietnam embodies in each of her protagonist’s imaginary a place from which one must escape to succeed to establish a new identity in their host land. I therefore propose to analyze the memories that Kim Thúy's migrant characters have of their country of origin and the processes of resilience of the two contradictory images of their homeland, which play a crucial role in their integration into the host country. I will focus this study on her two novels, Ru (2009) and vi (2016).

Les Lettres Chinoises by Ying Chen: Writing Exile and Epistolary Romance through non-dit

Xinyi Tan
This article examines Chinese Canadian author Ying Chen’s Les Lettres chinoises through the lens of non-belonging, translingual writing, and the poetics of the non-dit. Building on Rosalind Silvester’s concept of “non-belonging” and Roland Barthes’s notion of écriture blanche, it argues that Chen transforms neutrality and universalism into a translingual mode of meaning production grounded in silence, omission, and ambiguity. At the center of the novel lies a “double absence”: the suppression of Chinese in a text that paradoxically foregrounds it in its title, and the refusal to name the real cause of the couple’s estrangement. Through close readings of the novel’s epistolary form, its use of Chinese cultural imagery, and its multilingual references to Mandarin, Shanghainese, and French, this article demonstrates how the non-dit structures both the representation of exile and the unfolding of the love triangle. It further demonstrates that exile in Chen’s novel is not merely geographic, but also linguistic, affective, and psychological. Ultimately, Les Lettres chinoises reimagines non-belonging not as absence alone, but as a generative condition through which identity, desire, and memory are continuously negotiated.

Restaurer les mémoires silencieuses de la diaspora vietnamienne : pratiques littéraires dans deux oeuvres de Doan Bui

Aurore Nicolas
This article presents a comparative analysis of two complementary works by Doan Bui: Le Silence de mon père (2016) and La Tour ou un chien à Chinatown (2022). It shows how the author exhumes and reconstructs the fragmented memory of the Vietnamese diaspora in France by interrogating silences, taboos, and generational fractures within families and communities. The study highlights the complex mechanisms of familial and societal memory transmission in the specific case of post-refugee generations, confronted with inherited traumas and the dynamics of “postmemory.” Through the transition from a filiation narrative to a novel, Bui restores her family memory while giving voice to a collective history, developing a narrative strategy grounded in intermediality.

Apprendre le désastre : la poétique du secret dans Hamaguri d’Aki Shimazaki

Chiara Falangola
In Tsubaki, the first novel of Aki Shimazaki’s pentalogy Le poids des secrets, both the nuclear and the family disasters are conveyed in a rather lucid, direct, and detailed manner – one through the continued dialogue between grandmother and grandson, the other through the confessional narrative of the grandmother’s posthumous letter. Dates, personal reflections, and political analyses accompany the unfolding of the story, and the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are addressed and framed within a framework of the historical sequence that led to them. In contrast, in Hamaguri, the second volume of the same pentalogy, the writing about the nuclear disaster and an incestuous love between half-brother and half-sister operates in the mode of near-silence, in the poetics of a secret that struggles to be revealed. Yukio, the child-narrator, is constantly lagging behind the reality of his family history and reticent in the narration of the nuclear disaster he has lived through. By focusing on Yukio’s internal point of view, we will analyze how Hamaguri, through narrative, rhetorical, and typographic techniques, enacts a poetics of secrecy, conceived as a semiotic mode of learning about his family disaster.

Kenzaburô Ôé : entre « espoir de guérison et risque de décomposition de l’humain »

Philippe Basabose
This article analyzes, using a thematic approach, Gibier d’élevage, a novel by the 1994 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, the Japanese author Kanzaburô Ôé. Rooted in the memory of the Pacific War, this powerful text, published in 1958 in Japanese and in 1982 in French, prompts the reader to reflect on the bitter fruits of war by featuring a Black prisoner of war. The story, which unfolds amidst the paradoxical implications of the encounter with the other, and is narrated by a young man whose interactions with the stranger, combined with the intrigue’s conclusion, calls upon human beings to cease behaving like wolves toward their fellow human beings, and regardless of their individual differences. The article seeks to highlight this artistic project by submitting the novel to a close reading that captures its essence as a work of literature.

L’écrivain comme passeur : démarche transgénérique et transénonciative dans La Jeune fille de la paix de Ook Chung

Valérie Dusaillant-Fernandes
A Canadian author of Korean origin, born in Japan and raised in Quebec, Ook Chung positions himself as a mediator of personal and collective stories about these two East Asian countries that play a role in shaping his identity. His hybrid text, La Jeune fille de la paix (2021), is part of the migrant literature in Quebec, characterized by themes of movement and identity negotiation, while also offering a didactic and mediating dimension developed through the transmission of historical, cultural, and social knowledge about these two countries. This transcultural identity he shares is articulated through a transgeneric and transenunciative writing style, which we propose to explore in this study. In doing so, Chung gradually traces an intellectual trajectory that leads him to bring his multiple identities into dialogue, while reconciling with his roots and asserting his place in Canadian society by creating literary bridges.

Writing the Body, Writing for the Body: Does the Tattoo Emerge as an Emblem of Defiance or a Manifestation of Reluctance?

Latifa Zoulagh
This article delves into the intricate landscape of Moroccan society, a traditional Arab-Muslim milieu often perceived as a realm where women are confined. Yet, within this cloistered existence, the emergence of the female voice manifests a rich tapestry of women’s writing. This literary production is deeply woven into collective feminine traditions, such as the enduring practices of tattooing and henna calligraphy, which serve as the foundation for a contemporary artistic and literary expression. By illuminating the female body as a canvas of liberation, these archaic forms of writing emerge as vital markers in the reclamation of feminine identity, reflecting the resolute spirit of Moroccan women in their quest for empowerment.

Écriture de l’éclatement et invention de soi dans Thésée, sa vie nouvelle de Camille de Toledo

A. Stevellia Moussavou Nyama
The article attempts to highlight the link between Theseus' trauma and emotional disorder and the novel's fragmented writing style. The work sheds light on the intertwining of destinies and the desire for self-invention to escape the burden of an overwhelming heritage. Camille de Toledo, through his alter ego, Theseus, effectively leads us into the mazes of his family history to reveal the importance of epigenetics in the construction of our destinies. Theseus also questions his relationship with writing during these moments of profound suffering. The innovative and experimental writing style emphasizes a puzzle-like and fragmented form to better reflect internal chaos. This writing deconstructs the traditional narrative by offering a complex reading experience. The novel explores both grand and minor history, the individual and the collective, by unveiling the thread of Theseus' genealogy.

Créativités plurielles : reflets de la littérature d’Haïti au féminin. Christiane Ndiaye et Mylène Dorcé (éditrices). Études françaises, vol. 60 no. 2, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2024. 176 p.

Aude Jehan
The volume Créativités plurielles : reflets de la littérature d’Haïti au féminin (Études françaises, vol. 60, no 2, 2024) is part of a rapidly growing field of critical scholarship dedicated to women’s writing in Francophone literatures. As its title suggests, this relatively short but particularly dense volume highlights the diversity of Haitian women’s voices and their creative practices.

Jean Renoir et la pensée des cinéastes. L'exception d'une sagesse / Renoir et la pensée des cinéastes. L’exception d’une sagesse. Tome 1 : Le rêve, la violence et l’amour. Daniel Serceau. Mimésis, 2023. 298 p.

Frédéric Leveziel
Through a thematic analysis centered on a few major ideas — the role of dreams and their downsides, refuge and its contradictions, the structures of the love quartet — the author highlights the recurring conceptual trilogy in Renoir: dreamlike quality, violence and love, while placing it within a vast network of intertextual references, sometimes audacious.