The Orient of Languages in the 20th Century. Aragon, Ollier, Barthes, Macé.
Geuthner| N° d'inventaire | 21423 |
| Format | 15.5 x 24 |
| Détails | 538 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2011 |
| Etat | Occasion |
| ISBN | |
"Today there is no more elsewhere (except a freshly felled forest, or a book unearthed by chance), Marco Polo would not leave Venice, he would learn languages. , writes Gérard Macé in Leçon de chinois. The exhaustion of a long tradition that was built around an essentially geographical elsewhere giving rise to all travel literature is giving way to another type of journey whose destination is a foreign and distant language. Indeed, today, for many French writers, heirs of Segalen, Claudel and Michaux, oriental languages represent new islands to explore, in a real or imaginary way. If some French writers like Gérard Macé or Roland Barthes have chosen the ideograms of the Far East, others, like Claude Ollier or Louis Aragon have followed the caravan of the Arabic language and its different dialects. The result is impressive: it is no longer a question, as in the 19th century at best, of giving voice to the foreigner or of inventing words, but of opening up to a renewal of linguistic, poetic and narrative forms, to the explosion of genres, to the mixing of textual models. If this detour through the Orient of languages reveals for some a secret Orient drawing its sources from the most intimate memories, for others it translates into a reconquest of totality thanks to the recreation of a happy Babel, guilt-free and open to the world. This essentially poetic and textual fascination, disinterested so to speak, allows us to qualify the theses that Edward Said develops in Orientalism.
"Today there is no more elsewhere (except a freshly felled forest, or a book unearthed by chance), Marco Polo would not leave Venice, he would learn languages. , writes Gérard Macé in Leçon de chinois. The exhaustion of a long tradition that was built around an essentially geographical elsewhere giving rise to all travel literature is giving way to another type of journey whose destination is a foreign and distant language. Indeed, today, for many French writers, heirs of Segalen, Claudel and Michaux, oriental languages represent new islands to explore, in a real or imaginary way. If some French writers like Gérard Macé or Roland Barthes have chosen the ideograms of the Far East, others, like Claude Ollier or Louis Aragon have followed the caravan of the Arabic language and its different dialects. The result is impressive: it is no longer a question, as in the 19th century at best, of giving voice to the foreigner or of inventing words, but of opening up to a renewal of linguistic, poetic and narrative forms, to the explosion of genres, to the mixing of textual models. If this detour through the Orient of languages reveals for some a secret Orient drawing its sources from the most intimate memories, for others it translates into a reconquest of totality thanks to the recreation of a happy Babel, guilt-free and open to the world. This essentially poetic and textual fascination, disinterested so to speak, allows us to qualify the theses that Edward Said develops in Orientalism.