From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Francophone literature had been questioned long before the publication of the manifesto. In 2006, dubbed “the year of Francophonies” (the Salon du Livre in Paris was dedicated to Francophone literatures), Amin Maalouf, for example, published an article titled “Against ‘Francophone literature’” in the March 10 issue of Le Monde des Livres. 2. The expression République des lettres has been used by writers and scholars, in either French or Latin, since the fifteenth century and more recently by Pascale Casanova in her book The World Republic of Letters. 3. The 2006 Goncourt, the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, the Renaudot, the Femina, and the Goncourt des Lycéens were all awarded to Francophone writers. 4. Prieto reminds us that Glissant not only signed the manifesto and contributed an essay to the collective volume Pour une littérature-monde, but that he has also been a central participant in the Étonnants Voyageurs festival, founded by Michel Le Bris and a platform for littérature-monde. Structured especially around Glissant’s notions of “opacity” and “analogy ,” Tout-monde, Prieto explains, is “more a mode of cognition than a geographical construct [that] . . . emphasizes a more properly global awareness, an intuition of the extent to which distant places and events impinge on my understanding of the immediate environment” (2010, 115). 5. In response to this debate in 2010 Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud edited another collection of essays (with Nathalie Skowronek) titled Je est un autre: Pour une identité-monde. Following Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic credo, the writers featured in this volume collectively stand against the possibility of any homogeneous national identity and celebrate instead what Le Bris calls “this buzzing multitude” (cette bruissante multitude) of 180 notes to pages xiv–xxv “being-together” (l’être-ensemble) (2010b, 14, 26). Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 6. Before knowing Raoult’s own comments, NDiaye herself had acknowledged in an interview broadcast on the French radio station Europe 1 that her earlier comments on Sarkozy’s “monstrous” France were “excessive.” However, following Raoult’s admonition, she went on to declare that the context was now different and that she maintained her initial opinion (“Marie NDiaye” 2009). 7. For Dominic Thomas the manifesto further undermines the criticism that it levels against literary Francocentricism by undervaluing the role of Quebec, for instance, “as a Francophone zone” and “those cases of national micro-publishing outlets in certain African countries (the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, etc.)” (2010a, 52). 8. Dominique Combe goes so far as to suggest that littérature-monde may be a war offensive plotted by Gallimard (which published the collective volume Pour une littérature-monde) against the Éditions de Minuit, its competitor and publisher of famous Nouveau Roman authors (2010, 217). 9. Eric Prieto highlights the contradiction underlying the fact that while Édouard Glissant, who signed the manifesto, can be seen as one of its most prominent conceptual contributors, he “is of all the signatories of the manifesto the one whose ongoing experiments in literary language are closest to those of the nouveau roman, especially to its Claude Simon, Faulknerian wing” (2010, 114–15) 10. Didier Cahen’s description of Je est un autre: Pour une identité-monde equally applies to Pour une littérature-monde: “a mosaic-like book which doesn’t conform to a model, imposes nothing, simply exposes its views, its ways of breathing or inspiring many literatures, only literature” (2010, 4). 11. As Jeannine Murray-Román indicates, Francophonie “has proven useful in Anglo-American contexts precisely because identity politics has served as an effective means of garnering resources since the 1960s and therefore provides a familiar approach to working towards inclusion” (2009, 293nn.). 12. Significantly one collection of essays stays clear of the controversy by being prudently all-inclusive in its title and putting the new, dissident terminology in quotation marks: “Littérature-Monde” francophone en mutation : Écritures en dissidence (Chemain-Degrange 2009). notes to pages xxvii–xxix 181 13. Pointing out the additional fact that the most noted laureate, among the many laureates “d’outre-France,” of the 2006 French literary prizes was the American writer Jonathan Littell for his novel Les bienveillantes, which received both the Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, Jonathan Derbyshire states that “The fact that the opening to the world of French...