If all translation, a metaphor for crossing by antonomasia, represents a challenge, the one posed by francophone postcolonial literature and the interculturality inherent to it is particularly fascinating. Linguistic and cultural specificities must be handled with the utmost care so as not to be erased; forms of hybridity and contamination, as well as deviant forms, must be rendered in the target language. The present study proposes to explore how the translator of La plus secrète mémoire des hommes managed the narrative polyphony, generic variety, multilingualism and diversity of linguistic registers, as well as the specific cultural references that characterize this novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
Mille kilomètres à pied by the Congolese novelist Zamenga stages the construction and deconstruction of Ikeleve’s ethos, the novel’s main character, caught within the borders he crosses in Europe and Africa. Trained in the colonial context to occupy the intermediary position of an “évolué,” he moves between two disjointed cultural worlds, whose gap he attempts to bridge through an imposed mixed identity. We propose here a discourse analysis grounded in the concepts of habitus, ethos, pathos, and logos, applied to the migratory experience. After establishing the theoretical framework, we will examine the protagonist’s identity boundaries and his upward and downward movements in Europe. We will then analyze his return to the Congo, where situational boundaries are reconfigured, marked by instability and indeterminacy.
Review of Philippe Hamman's book Les métropoles transfrontalières (2025), which presents a synthesis of the initiatives carried out in the name of cross-border regional cooperation within a metropolitan area.
This study offers a theoretical reflection on the possible origins of the differences in reception by Czech and French literary critics of two contemporary French novels – Courir by Jean Echenoz (2008) and HHhH by Laurent Binet (2010) – which offer interpretations of a specific period in Czech and Czechoslovak history. Starting from the hypothesis that there are limits to interpretation (Eco), the aim is therefore to observe the two ways of presenting the historical material and to study the narrative strategies that offer keys to their interpretation and favor certain attitudes towards the text over others. These keys, however, function differently in cultural contexts that are quite similar (French and Czech) but quite distant in terms of their approach to history. We therefore also propose to reflect on the choices of narrative strategies adopted by each of the two novelists (Echenoz versus Binet), which have a direct impact on how the history presented in the novel is read.
This article explores how contemporary literature responds to the challenges of the “post-truth” era by proposing epistemologies of the incredible. Addressing the fear of a blurring of boundaries between truth and opinion, it examines three modalities through which certain 21st-century narratives reinvent our relationship with belief: the unreliable (tales of impostors, as in Antoine Bello), the non-credible (extravagant conjectures, as in Pierre Senges, or impossible knowledge, as in some biographies of Caravaggio), and the excessive (subjects defying all representation, as in Cécile Portier). Far from encouraging relativism, these literary transgressions of the limits of interpretation engage the readership in a pact of lucid trust. By turning reading into an active exercise of shared make-believe, ranging from incredulity to religious credo, these works allow for the reconstruction of interpretive communities and reaffirm the heuristic value of literature in the face of manipulative discourses.
