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Abdelkébir Khatibi (Maroc) and Dany Laferrière (Haïti–Québec) belong to different cultural areas, but share the same linguistic practice in a postcolonial context. They are also similar in their conception of writing literature in a transitional world for a global age where the novel, as a Western form in its origin and under its authority, and also as an access point to modernity for the writers of the global South, aims at a certain form of transnational order. Both of these writers reject the dogmatic definition of identity from the perspective of an origin and of a supposed secular pact between fiction and nation. This paper examines the shift between francophone global fiction by way of a "regional criticism." However, this emerging global rhetoric, recently called "littérature-monde," may appear as a new utopian paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Annie Ernaux's Mémoire de fille, and drawing insight from both a recent interview with the author and from historian Arlette Farge's work on the use of archives, this paper considers briefly how Ernaux uses her archived letters to give voice to her "former self" and to a generation of girls whose public behavior was inevitably subject to evaluation and judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pygmalion (the complex of Pygmalion), Balthasar (the Feast of Balthasar), and Arcimboldo (the painter) present three different models of association between "Sense and Senses" in the novelistic writing of History. This paper argues that by shifting from one model to another, the contemporary fiction of History becomes a kind of "istorical novel" (without h), which embodies the "fiduciary paradigm" at work in current times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the New Novel's rhetoric (Nouveau Roman) in order to requalify, thanks to a dialectical approach, its positive definition in a negative way. Through a philosophical critique of the novelistic discourse, the aim is to highlight the theoretical power of novels which pay attention, in a rhetorical perspective, to the body thematic, the body considered as a fundamental and full component of a subjectivity determined by material and external structures. The New Novel, analyzed first as an expression of a "sensible objectivity," gives rise to a materialist and negative dialectic and has to be understood as an immanent critique of social, political, and historical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]