Des littératures-mondes en français: écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine by Oana Panaïté (review)

In her book Des littératures-mondes en français: écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine, Oana Panaïté explores the notion of the “transfrontier” through a range of contemporary works of prose. Whether within the “real-world” dimension of the nation-state or the “imaginary” realm of memory, identity construction, and literary creation, Panaïté’s inquiry demonstrates the essentially porous nature of borders, better understood as “interfaces” (74). She maintains that each author and text examined occupies one or several “in-between” states (in terms of nationality, social status, genre, narrative voice and form) that allow for particular “reworkings” of political, historical, and cultural divides (26). Panaïté thus approaches her corpus through a decidedly “global” methodology, her work convincingly assembling disparate literary practices through the overarching framework of contemporary negotiations of self, world, and text.

After having established the general intellectual context out of which she positions her arguments, via a number of recent studies on genre, the French/Francophone divide, the notion of la littérature monde, the decline of absolute master narratives, etc., and ultimately locating her own approach at the crossroads of the “social” and the “literary” (74), Panaïté turns to a series of close readings of contemporary prose, seeking to allow social discourse and literary creation to inform one another mutually. Chapter two, then, focuses on textual depictions of subjectivity in the works of Jean Rouaud, Boubacar Boris Diop, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Pierre Michon, and Patrick Chamoiseau: notably through the melding of autobiography, biography, and fiction, but also via the importance placed on heritage and collective social phenomena as well as authorial voice and positioning. Chapter three centers on the subject in space and time, chiefly through the place accorded to history (the prehistoric in Éric Chevrillard and Pierre Michon; minor histories and testimonial memory in Patrick Chamoiseau and Pierre Bergounioux) and spatial hybridity and conflict (figures of immigration in Fatou Diome and Alain Mabanckou; marginality and heterogeneity in Diome and Jean Echenoz). Finally, the fourth chapter addresses language and the literary act as such, in both their innovative capacities (meta- and intertext in Éric Chevrillard and Alain Mabanckou; semantic and syntactic subversion in François Bon and Ananda Devi) and insufficiencies (the impossibility of writing in Gisèle Pineau and Marie-Célie Agnant, and of character in Linda Lê and Antoine Volodine).

Although each author and text actualizes a particular stance as to the nature of subjectivity and spatio-temporality, deploying specific linguistic and formal modalities to do so, each demonstrates, according to Panaïté, the fundamentally porous and even problematic character of any binary opposition. Yet these works do more than undermine such facile lines of distinction, those which separate the particular from the collective, memory from history, and text from world, for example; rather, they effectively supplant them with a non-absolute, forever-sliding amalgam of intermediary terms. Panaïté’s study thus also underscores the prominence of plurality or multiplicity in contemporary prose, as much in form and genre as in the knowledge mobilized within. Furthermore, by engendering a space in which literary and “real” world developments (globalization, migration, social discourse, etc.) mutually reflect one another, the book also calls into question the very status of the contemporary literary text, henceforth understood as fundamentally interdisciplinary: fused with the historical, the sociological, and the ethnographical, its own boundaries are blurred—and, as such, it is politically engaged (though certainly not in the Sartrean sense). This is perhaps the greatest strength of Panaïté’s book, for by employing la littérature-monde as an approach rather than as a category or genre, she effectively surpasses the French/Francophone dichotomy, reconciling the two terms through their shared practice of proposing diegetic solutions to “real-world” problems.

All in all, Panaïté’s textual...