L’image de la mort ou l’histoire d’une sensibilité. Charlotte de David Foenkinos
The image of death or the story of a sensibility. Charlotte by David Foenkinos

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to examine the figure of an artist in the novel Charlotte by David Foenkinos. With his text, he desires to pay homage to Charlotte Salomon, a Jewish painter murdered at age twenty-six in Auschwitz. The Salomon’s biography and works became famous thanks to the novel by Foenkinos. The great merit of his book is to make the painter recognizable to a wide public. The interpretation of the text in which central figure is a painter should include a question about the generic status of the novel, thus the reflection about the Künstlerroman, and about the status of the image in the text, the narrative processes used to make the text more plastic, the ekphrasis, etc. The problem seems interesting because Charlotte does not correspond with the traditional definition of the Künstlerroman. The narrator refers the reader to the extradégétique reality in order to make a connection between the reader and Charlotte’s painting; therefore, he focuses his story on the conception of the image and not on the image itself.

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