Feintes folies du fantastique: effets de sens et stratégies narratives
Madness and fantastic literature: meaning-making process and narrative strategy

Summary/Abstract: The discourse of a mad narrator, as a specific act of enunciation, problematizes not only the relation between literature and madness, but also, and especially in fantastic fiction, the problematic relation between illusion and reality. In this perspective, the theme of madness, considered here as an fact of textuality, externalizes a particular and pathologised interiority, a distorted inner reality affected by perceptual errors and paranoid delusions. The rhetoric of madness and the metaphorical dimension of the language is intended to highlight irrationality and unreason, in a fictionalization of a peculiar relation to the external world, combining alteration of thinking, fantastic themes and effects of writing.

• Details
• Contents