Les Stratégies Discursives Du Paratexte Des Récits De Vie Littéraires : La Transtextualité Du Biographique
Discourse Strategies Of The Paratext Of Literary Life Stories: Transtextuality Of The Biographical Element

Summary/Abstract: Life stories, fictional biographies, biofictions,biographical novels, imaginary life, etc. have been one of themajor trends in French literature in the recent decades. Ourarticle deals with the analysis of the paratext (titles, subtitles,titles genre, epigraphs, editorial indices, etc.) which frame andrepresent these texts. We know that the paratext is notsecondary to text understanding, since, both literally andmetaphorically, it is the very threshold thereof and generatesthe reader’s first horizon of expectations. Actually, we supposethat the latter highlights the ambiguity generated in turn by theexistence of two pacts, of which the texts under study are ashining example.Admittedly, from a certain point of view, itseems that the paratext anchors the story in the “real world”,because it states, explicitly or implicitly, that the characterwhose life is recounted is a person who really existed (it iscommon knowledge that denotative or referential functions arecharacteristic of the biographical project). Sometimes,however, simultaneously and contradictorily, other paratextualindications (such as “novel”, “collection”, “fiction”, etc.)introduce a pact of fictional reading. In short, the paratext sometimes seems to indicate that “there is nothing true, nothingfalse” (Lamartine) in what we are about to read. We thenexamine the strategies of the paratext which establish thebiographical discourse, as well as the relationship representedin the texts by the pair “biographé / biographant”. In the finalphase of the approach we identify the main functions differentparatextuals can have in literary works as well as inbiographical discourse.

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