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Based on the manuscripts of the famous “Élégie pour la reine de Saba” held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this study proposes a genetic approach to the poem, shedding light on Senghor’s creative process. By examining the changes made from one version to the next, we can see the poet’s art at work, in each and every gesture. The archive reveals a dynamic weaving of sounds, tones and colours, in an intertwining of threads that exposes the creative movement in all its singularity.

Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, a fundamental text of French literature, is a fluid poem that changes at the same pace as its poet and the world around him. Moreover, we have neither a manuscript of the original version of the poem nor a true definitive version, since the so-called “definitive” version of 1956 is not the last existing version of the text. This fluidity is further complicated by the numerous translations of the Cahier, which multiply the possibilities of reading and interpreting it, because of the movement inherent in any act of translation that introduces diversity into the original text, and because of the fact that these translations are based on different “originals”. In this introduction, after a brief history of the genetic evolution of the poem, we will also highlight the fundamental role played by translation in the evolution of the text, which will allow us to continue its exploration and to contribute to a plural and multilingual reading of Césaire’s work.

The paper discusses the notion of places of power considering the successive rewriting of the scientific article, from its original version submitted to the publisher to its final stance authorized with its ready for press. During this phase, the article becomes the object of negociation; the research looses her authority on her writing and must compose with readers who amend her text. Drawing on the deciphering of graphic codes, on the one hand, and rhetoric norms on the other, the paper analyzes to what extent these corrections may reveal the conditions of acceptability of the writtent text, and with them, the existence of an editorial norm that is not fully explicit.

This work seeks to describe the occurrences of orally formulated reported speech (RS), during the production of etiological tales invented by a dyad of recently literate students. The analyzed corpus was filmed and collected in real classroom situations. The teacher asked her 7-year-old students, grouped in pairs, to produce a single text. We selected 10 scripture processes and their manuscripts produced by the dyad Caio and Igor. The analysis frame will focus on the types of RS in a set of 10 manuscripts of this student’s dyad and shall illustrate the genesis of the RS in a writing process from initial formulation to their textualization. In the theoretical framework of Textual Genetics and Enunciation Linguistics, this study will consider the procedural dimension of act while writing, looking at the role of each of the students during the constitution of the RS. We will acknowledge that the high occurrence of oral RS (113) compared to the written RS (29) seems to be related to the complexity of the graphic and enunciative forms of their representation through writing, given the loss of their enunciation possibilities.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Hebrew writer David Vogel (1891-1944) started to write a Yiddish novel for the first time. As an Austrian citizen living in France, he had been held in a camp for suspicious foreigners. His narrative, inspired by this experience, remained untitled after he was captured and sent to death by the Gestapo at the beginning of 1944. Its original version has never been published.This article gives an overview of critical approaches to this text that have been published up to now. It proposes an analysis based on Merleau-Ponty’s linguistic thought and on the principles of literary genetics. The manuscript, with its deletions and additions, is approached in the light of all the languages in which the author could have written in and that leave their mark on the narrative. The author of this article argues that the poetics of foreign language is more central than the question of Vogel’s linguistic identity. His writing in Yiddish thus poses the problem of the status of this language in a world where things are no longer called what they were.

The papers of André Pézard (1893-1984) have recently been acquired by the French national archives. They provide rich documentation about the professional and literary activities of one of the most eminent italianists of his day, translator of Dante and professor at the Collège de France. He was also the author of a memoir published in 1918 under the title Nous autres à Vauquois, in which he bears witness to his own experience during the First World War. The archives of André Pézard give us information about the conditions in which he wrote this text. The diaries he had been keeping since his youth and went on writing during the war, form the basis on which his narration was developed after1917. To these diaries, kept in notebooks day by day, he adds several other documents that are ‘indexed’ in order to associate them as precisely as possible with events he lived through during the war. These photos and letters are mentioned in the diaries. These different sources are remarkably complete and throw much light on the daily life of the soldiers at this time. Pézard’s manuscripts also allow us to understand something of the literary re-composition that he worked on between 1917 and 1918. The genesis of Nous autres à Vauquois can be followed practically step by step. Memories of the war never left Pézard, as his archives show, and he pursued the work of documenting and correcting his own book each time it was republished. It was a book which enjoyed considerable success, in particular amongst veterans of the war. Pézard received many letters about it, not only from French people, but also from Germans, since his book was translated into German in 1932. These letters, carefully preserved with Pézard’s papers, all suggest how the generations that had lived through the war needed to keep the memory of it. The papers also comprise some documents that throw light on the historiographical posterity of Vauquois and on the long-term accumulation of documents that make up Pézard's war archives.