Passeurs et passages sociocritiques: Pistes de lecture de Terre des hommes à « Speak white »

TY - JOUR

T1 - Passeurs et passages sociocritiques:

T2 - Pistes de lecture de Terre des hommes à « Speak white »

AU - Moyes, Craig

PY - 2023/5/14

Y1 - 2023/5/14

N2 - “A territory is defined by its borders; the borders of a text are not fixed.” As Claude Duchet understood, it matters little from which side one starts along the demarcations that conventionally separate the texte from the co- or hors-texte; it is often across the frontiers of the literary work that a sociocritical analysis proves the most incisive. In this defence of sociocritical “border crossers” like Claude Duchet and Henri Meschonnic, we follow some of the paths taken by one of those boundary markers—the title—within a particularly febrile social and literary context. Terre des hommes (Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars) was chosen to serve as the global theme of Expo 67, which the organisers intended to be a very different proposition from previous world’s fairs. It was a title, wrote Gabrielle Roy, that “like any poetic evocation […] is open to a thousand and one interpretations, all of them plausible.” Between the optimism of Saint-Exupéry’s humanism recast for the “global village” of the 1960s and the “vile mystification” (Luc Racine) that was Expo 67 for a large part of the nationalist left in Quebec, it would be thanks to the work of one of the most famous poets of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Michèle Lalonde, that the title would be poetically reinvested as she moved from an initial work also entitled Terre des hommes (written for the Expo opening gala in April 1967) to her soon-to-be mythologized poem “Speak White” (written a year later in support of the incarcerated “terrorists” of the FLQ).

AB - “A territory is defined by its borders; the borders of a text are not fixed.” As Claude Duchet understood, it matters little from which side one starts along the demarcations that conventionally separate the texte from the co- or hors-texte; it is often across the frontiers of the literary work that a sociocritical analysis proves the most incisive. In this defence of sociocritical “border crossers” like Claude Duchet and Henri Meschonnic, we follow some of the paths taken by one of those boundary markers—the title—within a particularly febrile social and literary context. Terre des hommes (Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars) was chosen to serve as the global theme of Expo 67, which the organisers intended to be a very different proposition from previous world’s fairs. It was a title, wrote Gabrielle Roy, that “like any poetic evocation […] is open to a thousand and one interpretations, all of them plausible.” Between the optimism of Saint-Exupéry’s humanism recast for the “global village” of the 1960s and the “vile mystification” (Luc Racine) that was Expo 67 for a large part of the nationalist left in Quebec, it would be thanks to the work of one of the most famous poets of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Michèle Lalonde, that the title would be poetically reinvested as she moved from an initial work also entitled Terre des hommes (written for the Expo opening gala in April 1967) to her soon-to-be mythologized poem “Speak White” (written a year later in support of the incarcerated “terrorists” of the FLQ).

KW - Sociocriticism

KW - Quebec

KW - Claude Duchet

KW - Henri Meschonnic

KW - Michèle Lalonde

U2 - 10.7202/1099180ar

DO - 10.7202/1099180ar

M3 - Article

SN - 0014-2085

VL - 58

SP - 117

EP - 140

JO - ETUDES FRANCAISES

JF - ETUDES FRANCAISES

IS - 3

ER -