Search

The article discusses the main premises of Anna Swoboda's monograph La Prose de Ken Bugul: entre le réel et le surnaturel. Swoboda assumes that the key to deciphering the characteristics of Ken Bugul's prose is the interpenetration of the two dimensions present in the work of this contemporary Senegalese writer: the real and the supernatural. The book analyzes the fantastic, marvelous and uncanny elements that constitute the supernatural aspect of Bugul's hybrid prose, as well as examines the fragmentation and multifaceted identity of the autofictional female protagonist (in the part devoted to the real elements). The eclectic methodology combines Western and African research on non-mimetic fiction with postcolonial and feminist theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the male protagonist of the second story of Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes) can be viewed as a fantastic character. The protagonist's hesitation in the face of unsettling phenomena -- both the external world and the traumatic events from his past -- constitutes the central pivot of his construction. The fantastic characteristics of Rudy Descas, whose voice is predominant in the text, reveal the multidimensionality of the supernatural in NDiaye's work, as the boundaries between the notion of the "character" and the "phenomenon" are not clearly defined. The analysis is based on literary theories concerning the nineteenth century fantastic, the new fantastic and the African fantastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]