French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary)

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AKBARI Nadjmeh; ESFANDI ESFANDIAR

Title

French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary)

Author(s)

AKBARI Nadjmeh | ESFANDI ESFANDIAR | Issue Writer Certificate

Keywords

French key word: Esthétique carnavalesque

Idéologie

Réception

Sociocritique

La vie devant soi (English key word:Carnival aesthetics

Ideology

Reception

Sociocriticism

The Life Before Us)

Abstract

French abstract: La litté rature a toujours é té la scè ne d’ é clatement des conflits sociaux. Or, elle ne s’ est jamais contenté e de les mettre en scè ne tels quels, ni rester indiffé rente par rapport à eux. Car la vocation principale de la litté rature est de ré agir aux discours et aux repré sentations sociaux et de les mettre en question. La vie devant soi de Romain Gary est l’ une des oeuvres dans lesquelles on peut voir la confrontation de deux discours sociaux. Celle-ci donne naissance à une forte tension idé ologique qui peut ê tre é tudié e dans la perspective ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique. Dans cette é tude, ayant recours aux concepts ré ceptionnistes proposé s par Jauss, ainsi qu’ à la Sociocritique pré senté e par Duchet, Zima et Bakhtin, nous nous proposons de faire une lecture du roman et nous tenterons de ré pondre aux questions suivantes: En quel sens l’ oeuvre de Gary pourrait-elle ê tre considé ré e comme une relecture de Les Misé rables et comment peut-on interpré ter cette relecture dans une perspective sociocriticienne? Comment le roman prend position par rapport à la tension idé ologique pré senté e? Comment l’ univers garien parvient-il à dé placer et à redé finir la frontiè re des repré sentations sociales? Afin de ré pondre à ces questions, nous allons partir d’ abord d’ une é tude ré ceptionniste du roman. Nous allons ensuite nous concentrer sur son analyse Sociocritique et finalement, nous allons aborder le fonctionnement de l’ esthé tique carnavalesque dans le roman. On verra comment l’ oeuvre choisie agit sur les repré sentations sociales. Cette é tude ré vè lera le positionnement critique de l’ oeuvre par rapport à la tension sociale mise en scè ne. English abstract: Literature has always been the scene of the outbreak of social conflicts and the space for confrontation between ideology and humanity. However, she has never contented herself with staging them as they are, nor remaining indifferent to them. Because the main vocation of literature is to react to social discourse and representations and to question them. In the twentieth century, the outbreak of wars all over the world, especially the two world wars, encouraged the tension between ideological and humanist discourses, spoken for or against human rights, their condition and their destiny. Twentieth-century literature is thus known for the image it reflects of these social tensions and also for the way in which it problematizes, confirms or questions them. Among the writers of the past century, Romain Gary is one of those whose positions are very critical; as much with regard to ideological discourses as with regard to pseudo-humanist discourses. Known for its diversity and its undeniable richness, the Gary’ s artwork is indeed one of those artworks that opposes the ideological to the human in a dark universe marked by the author's fatalistic vision. The Life Before Us (1975) is a novel that shows how fatality and constraint can threaten the boundaries of social representations and discourses. The work depicts the story of Belleville, the small society of immigrants from Paris during the 1970s. The novel owes its originality to its numerous references to Les Misé rables, the work Gary parodies in order to tell the story of a new generation even more miserable than that described by Hugo. Indeed, in The Life Before Us, Gary gives birth to a parodic universe where the absence of a rebellious and saving figure like Jean Valjean has caused the passivity of a new generation that is even more miserable. Left to their own devices, the inhabitants of Belleville succumb unjustly under the weight of the ideological distancing between whites and blacks without being able to protest or act on this social injustice. Indeed, the ideological constraint weighs on their will and prevents them from reacting until they lead them to their total downfall. So this parodied universe is built around a strong social tension between the ''ideological'' and the ''human''. Thanks to its parodic character, as well as to this tension which shares it, The Life Before Us can interest at the same time a receptionist and socio-critical study which go, one and the other, in a single direction. Indeed, both join the sociology of the "literary" in the broad sense of the term: sociocriticism deals with the formal and thematic textualization of social representations and thus tries to find a significant relationship between society of the text and that of the referent. Whereas the receptionist analysis deals with the social status of the work upstream and downstream; that is, the social conditions of its first production and its public reception. So, receptionist analysis is a sociological analysis which deals with before and after the production of the work while sociocriticism is the sociological analysis which deals with the work from within and is done in parallel with the work. However, today, there is no longer a single receptionist or socio-critical approach: these encompass a very rich methodological variety that allows the reader to adopt the perspective most relevant to his analysis. Regarding reception, we will therefore adopt the critical terminology proposed by Hans Robert Jauss in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982) based on three main stages, namely "aisthesis", "poiesis" and "catharsis". The "aisthesis" consists of identifying and describing the gap that a later work presents compared to an earlier work. The "poiesis" consists of studying this gap in sociological and sociocritical terms because it was born of a sociohistorical and sociolinguistic evolution. Finally, the "catharsis" aims to discover the critical positioning of the work in question, not only in relation to previous works, but also in relation to the social context in which the object of study is produced. In order to study this gap, it will therefore be essential to have recourse to sociocriticism which has at its base the analytical concepts proposed by Claude Duchet in "The sociocritical method, example of application: the sociogram of war" (1995) and those proposed by Mikhaï l Bakhtin that Pierre V. Zima takes up and reinterprets in Manuel of sociocriticism (2000). Since the interest of the socio-critical analysis of our corpus resides primarily in its parodic form, we proposed to formulate a receptionist and socio-critical problematic considering The Life Before Us as a parody of Les Misé rables and we will attempt to answer the following questions: In what sense could Gary's work be considered as a rereading of Les Misé rables and how can we interpret this rereading from a socio-critical perspective? How does the novel take a stand in relation to the ideological tension presented? How does the Gary’ s universe manage to shift and redefine the frontier of social representations? In order to answer these questions, we will start with a receptionist study of the novel which will consist of three parts: the study of the aesthetics of referentialization and its parodic and critical impact, that of the characters and their oxymoronic statuses and finally, that of the reconstruction of the space-time of the novel and its ideological symbolism. This first part will allow us to identify and describe the gap between the two works. Based on our first results, we will focus, in the second part, on the socio-critical analysis of the novel: we will study the different configurations of ideological tension and we will seek, in the attitude and the metamorphosis of the characters, the reaction to this tension. We will therefore try to interpret the gap in sociohistorical and sociolinguistic terms. The novel's critical positioning cannot be seen simply in the characters; it also resides in the carnival aesthetic whose romantic style largely benefits to reinforce the critical impact. So, in the final analysis, we will be looking for the critical positioning of the novel through the functioning of the carnival aesthetic: this analysis will be based first on the identification of the true narrative-enunciative “ I” and then on the discovery of other carnival elements and their impact. By way of conclusion, we will see in what lies the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic complexity of The Life Before Us, the novel in question: on the one hand, it is articulated around certain dichotomies which arise from distancing and domination in order to impose ideological boundaries. On the other hand, it is based on the total rejection of a medical discourse which gradually finds its importance in social debates and shares the sociolinguistic and socio-political situation in pros and cons. However, this discursive situation is called into question through both stylistic and thematic issues. Regarding the stylistic issue, the novel chooses a parodic form and takes full advantage of all the resources of the carnival aesthetic; indeed, it shows that despite any other reaction, laughter is the most effective attitude to question ideological dichotomies. Regarding the thematic issue, the novel attempts to stage the impact of ideological constraints on the contours of humanism by presenting two oxymoronic characters. Indeed, the whole of this study will reveal to us the critical positioning of the work in relation to the staged social tension.

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APA: Copy

AKBARI, Nadjmeh, & ESFANDI, ESFANDIAR. (2022). French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary). RECHERCHES EN LANGUE ET LITTERATURE FRANCAISES, 15(28 ), 1-21. SID. https://sid.ir/paper/953116/en

Vancouver: Copy

AKBARI Nadjmeh, ESFANDI ESFANDIAR. French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary). RECHERCHES EN LANGUE ET LITTERATURE FRANCAISES[Internet]. 2022;15(28 ):1-21. Available from: https://sid.ir/paper/953116/en

IEEE: Copy

Nadjmeh AKBARI, and ESFANDIAR ESFANDI, “French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary),” RECHERCHES EN LANGUE ET LITTERATURE FRANCAISES, vol. 15, no. 28 , pp. 1–21, 2022, [Online]. Available: https://sid.ir/paper/953116/en

No record.

Scientific Information Database

ISSN: 2588-4824

Journal Paper

French title: Retour d’ une Gé né ration Lecture Ré ceptionniste et Sociocritique de La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (English title: Return of a Generation Receptionist and Socio-critical Reading of The Life Before Us by Romain Gary)