Le livre du rire et de l'oubli

Milan Kundera, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, 260 p. (première édition en français, traduction par François Kérel)

« Tout ce livre est un roman en forme de variations. Les différentes parties se suivent comme les différentes étapes d’un voyage qui conduit à l’intérieur d’un thème, à l’intérieur d’une pensée, à l’intérieur d’une seule et unique situation dont la compréhension se perd pour moi dans l’immensité.
C’est un roman sur Tamina et, à l’instant où Tamina sort de la scène, c’est un roman pour Tamina. Elle est le principal personnage et le principal auditeur et toutes les autres histoires sont une variation sur sa propre histoire et se rejoignent dans sa vie comme dans un miroir. C’est un roman sur le rire et sur l’oubli, sur l’oubli et sur Prague, sur Prague et sur les anges. »
(Quatrième de couverture)

MELIC, Katarina, « Quand la muse de l’histoire entre en scène. L’histoire ou les stratégies fictionnelles de Milan Kundera », thèse de doctorat, département de Français, Queen’s University, 1999, 261 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
Dissident writer since 1979, French citizen since 1981, Milan Kundera is often seen as a political writer. He has often raised his voice against this qualification although his novels represent the reality of the Czech history.
In this thesis, we would like to explore the place of History in Kundera’s novels and the differents angles he uses to represent History–its official writing and its deconstruction et fictional rewriting.
In the first chapter, we shall examine the status of History in the postmodern literature. We shall see how the place and the role of History is questioned within the fiction; and how History is deconstructed and relativised on the example of one historical postmodern novel– Un tombeau pour Boris Davidovitch written by Danilo Kis.
In the second chapter, we shall focus on Milan Kundera’s reflexions on the novel and on History.
In the third chapter, the representation of History and its different forms of rewriting in Milan Kundera’s novel, La plaisanterie, will be the subject of our analysis.
In the fourth chapter, our attention will be focused on the analysis of the representation of History as variations on different themes in Kundera’s book, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli.

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VIBERT, Bertrand, « L’Entre-deux de Risibles Amours et du Livre du rire et de l’oubli de Milan Kundera : recueils de nouvelles ou romans? », Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, vol. 114, n° 4 (2014), p. 911-932. +++ Article de revue

###Vibert, 2014, HTML ###

PENALTA CATALÁN, Rocío, « Las ciudades checas desde el exilio: Milan Kundera », dans Eugenia POPEANGA CHELAR, Angel CLEMENTE ESCOBAR et Edmundo GARRIDO ALARCÓN et Rocío PENALTA CATALÁN (dir.), Escrituras del exilio, Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011, p. 339-352. +++ Article de revue

### Porte aussi sur La plaisanterie. ###

BOISEN, Jørn, « ‘Une Fois ne compte pas …’: Le paradoxe de la répétition dans l’oeuvre de Milan Kundera », Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies, vol. 56, n° 3 (2001), p. 159-182. +++ Article de revue

### Résumé
Cette étude est une lecture du Livre du rire et de l’oubli de Milan Kundera. Ce roman très original est compris comme une exploration de deux modalités antinomiques de la répétition: la répétition platonicienne, à travers laquelle la stabilité et l’identité se trouvent renforcées, et la répétition nietzschéenne, qui révèle l’instabilité de l’identité. L’opposition entre ces deux formes de répétition investit de sa dialectique aussi bien la structure formelle que le contenu thématique du roman. À travers la forme en variation, chaque situation du roman se trouve ainsi dans une confrontation complexe et contradictoire avec des situations plus ou moins identiques, leur interdisant de s’imposer comme des énoncés univoques. Cette forme, qui fait ressortir les rapports ironiques à l’intérieur du roman, épouse les interrogations existentielles de l’oeuvre. En effet celle-ci met en scène des personnages marqués par un aspiration profonde vers les deux pôles de la répétition: le désir d’idylle dans un monde débarrassé des contingences de l’histoire, et le désir de changement. Or les différents récits du livre montrent que les deux formes de la répétition menacent également l’être humain. Par des voies opposées, elles conduisent aux mêmes résultats, l’oubli (par accélération ou par stagnation) et le rire (par nihilisme ou par acceptation béate) et nous font inexorablement glisser de l’être vers le néant.

Boisen, 2001, PDF ###

EAGLE, Herbert, « Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting », dans Peter PETRO (dir.), Critical Essays on Milan Kundera, New York, G. K. Hall, 1999, p. 151-183. +++ Chapitre de collectif

BABROW, Austin S., « Communication and Problematic Integration: Milan Kundera’s ‘Lost Letters’ in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting », Communication Monographs, vol. 62, n° 4 (décembre 1995), p. 284-300. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
This essay uses the theory of problematic integration to analyze Milan Kundera’s writing, particularly the central segment, entitled “Lost Letters,” in his first novel written as an emigre. The theory is concerned with the role of communication when desires and expectations diverge, or when we face ambiguity, ambivalence, or impossibility (i.e., when it is difficult to integrate evaluative and probabilistic orientations). Communication plays many significant roles in experiences with such difficulties. The essay reviews problematic integration theory and presents a case study of Kundera’s writing designed to illuminate both the theory and a work by one of the most significant of modern novelists. The essay concludes by discussing the relevance of problematic integration theory to other approaches to the study of communication and by identifying questions for future communication research. ###

NARRETT, Eugene, « Surviving History: Milan Kundera’s Quarrel with Modernism », Modern Language Studies, vol. 22, n° 4 (automne 1992), p. 4-24. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
Milan Kundera’s essays and fiction reflect on the intertwining of aesthetics and politics of personal and social issues in our era which he sees as increasingly dessicated by pressures to conform. To resist the ongoing devolution of history into a global State tenuously unified by generic symbols, slogans, and “ambulant everlasting war,” he has forged what he terms a “new art of novelistic counterpoint which can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music.” He champions and practices this form as a vehicle of inquiry which can expose and satirize the urge for certainty which increasingly mars personal and public life. Kundera’s cultural critique has involved a sustained meditation on Modernism which he sees as divided into “establishment” and “skeptical” branches. In establishment Modernism’s reductive historicizing and rage against the past, he discerns idealizations of childhood, revolt, and an urge to forget are rooted deeply in Judeo-Christian eschatology. His complex response to these tendencies is stated most fully in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and leads him to an aesthetics of resistance based not on revolutionary certainties but on recovery, multivalence, and fortuity.

Narett, 1992, PDF ###

CALDWELL, Ann Stewart, « The Intrusive Narrative Voice of Milan Kundera », The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 9, n° 2 (été 1989), p. 46-52. +++ Article de revue

### Porte également sur Zert [La plaisanterie].

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CARROLL, Michael, « The second infinity: Cyclic form and the reader’s response in Milan Kundera’s Laughable Loves and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting », thèse de doctorat, Temple University, 1990, 180 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
The story cycle is a genre whose essential formal characteristic is the presence of both self-sufficiency and inter-relatedness on the part of its constituent stories. There has been much critical discussion of works in this genre–Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio, for example. However, scant attention has been paid to the reader’s response to works in cyclic form. This is something of an oversight, for as this is not a traditional genre, the aesthetic totality of these works is one that is grasped only through the reader’s active participation.
This study, primarily through the use of reader-response methodology, provides a careful account of two cyclic texts by Kundera. The earlier work, Laughable Loves, is a loosely connected series of short stories; it is examined largely in terms of ironic inversion, the continuity of character types, and the formation of thematic gestalten during the reading process. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, on the other hand, may be termed a polygeneric cycle: as the theme of memory/forgetting is played out in autobiographical reflection, essayistic exploration, and fictive events, the reader is catapulted into recurrent states of deja vu, into an echo chamber of text, image, and concept.
Following these descriptions of the reading process, these works are then placed into two contexts. First, that of contemporary Czech politics and culture and, second, that of their generic identity. In this regard they are briefly brought into comparison with cycles by Joyce, Anderson, and Richard Wright. These cycles share not only a formal affinity, but a cultural one as well, for they are all portraits of what might be termed “anomized” or “paralyzed” societies as viewed by the self-exiled artist.
The conclusion presents a model of aesthetic experience and interpretation (drawn from both pragmatism and phenomenology) that provides a theoretical account of the combination of reader-response and generic methodologies employed in this study.

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STRAUS, Nina Pelikan, « Erasing History and Deconstructing the Text: Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting », Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 28, n° 2 (hiver 1987), p. 69-85. +++ Article de revue

ROVIELLO, Anne-Marie, « Milan Kundera et le rictus de l’être », dans Gilbert HOTTOIS et Jacques SOJCHER (dir.), Philosophie et littérature, Bruxelles, Université de Bruxelles, 1985, p. 129-138. +++ Chapitre de collectif

BESSIÈRE, Jean, « L’après-Histoire : Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli et L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’être de Milan Kundera », dans Jean BESSIÈRE (dir.), Passage du temps, ordre de la transition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1985, p. 37-53. +++ Chapitre de collectif

KLEBERG, Lars, « On the Border: Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting », Scando-Slavica, n° 30 (1984), p. 57-72. +++ Article de revue

EAGLE, Herbert, « Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting », dans Benjamin A. STOLZ et I. R. TITUNIK (dir.), Language and Literary Theory, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 251-284. +++ Chapitre de collectif

BEALL, Joshua Patrick, « The poetics of subversion: Irony and the central European novel », thèse de doctorat, State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2010, 315 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
The literatures of Central Europe’s small countries were seriously engaged in the national project during the nineteenth century, standardizing and exemplifying both the national language and national heroes. However, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 produced a new ironic consciousness in the literatures of the newly-independent Central European nations. Surprisingly, at a time when the peoples of Central Europe achieved national self-determination, their literatures began using irony to call nation and nationalism into question. Novels such as Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting criticize the national project, its cultural manifestations, and its effect on modern subjectivity.

The similarities between these novels are obscured by the multiple historical changes that swept through Central Europe throughout the twentieth century. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the independence of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918 was followed a generation later first by the Nazi invasion of these countries, and then the rise of Communism less than a decade later. Cold War geopolitics redrew the map of Europe, grouping Communist countries in “Eastern” Europe while Austria, now a small nation itself, remained in the West. The critical result of this temporally limited topography is a conspicuous absence of comparative scholarship engaging these authors. Despite this critical lacuna, the influence of the cultural development shared by German-speaking Austria and its Slavic neighbors on Central European poetics is undeniable. These novels are products not only of the modernist impulse as a whole but also of the twentieth-century Central European Zeitgeist. This dissertation develops a theory of irony in order to examine the structure of subversion common to all four of the novels in this study and then shows how irony structures the text’s interaction with the reader as a political subject and implicates the reader in a network of multivalent textual desire that subverts political hegemony, nationalism, and literary genre convention.

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BERLATSKY, Eric Lawrence, « Fact, fiction, and fabrication: History, narrative, and the postmodern real from Woolf to Rushdie », thèse de doctorat, University of Maryland, College Park, 2003, 487 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
While most accounts of Western attitudes towards history in the nineteenth century suggest that Victorians had a faith in its origin, teleology and meaning, twentieth-century assessments of history more often suggest the opposite. Both poststructural theory and postmodern historiography in the wake of Hayden White’s Metahistory present a relativist view of the possibility of either objectivity or material referentiality in historical discourse, particularly through the medium of narrative. From this perspective, historical narrative is defined as a discursive creation that obscures the material relations of its production and as an instrument of ideology and oppression.

“Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication” investigates what political and ethical repercussions this attitude towards and theorization of history has and how much contemporary fiction typically labeled “postmodern” both initially reflects and ultimately denies this model. This study argues that the assessment of contemporary postmodern fiction as reflecting poststructural models of endless textuality denies an important element of the novels studied: their commitment to the possibility of accessing material reality and the importance of such access both for the construction of an ethics and for political agency.By looking closely at contemporary novels that explicitly theorize history and historiography, it becomes clear that they instead insist on a sense of the “real” at least in part because of these political concerns. These novels, which I label “postmodernist historical fiction,” insist that although an inviolable origin, teleology, and even consistent referentiality cannot be obtained in historical reference, there can be a provisional referentiality and access to the real without a return to the classical history of foundationalism, immanence and teleology that contributes to hegemony. These texts are also tied together by their deployment of nonnarrative methods that counter the deformation of the real that takes place within narrative discourse according to White, among others. The primary texts considered are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Graham Swift’s Waterland , and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

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KEENAN, C., « Memory, history and the contemporary novel », thèse de doctorat, University of Oxford, 2002. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
This thesis aims to examine the models of memory proposed in five contemporary novels: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I will interweave my discussions of these novels’ ideas on memory with considerations of wider debates about repressed/false memories and memorialisation, and I will also discuss various concepts of memory found in the discourses of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, history, and literature. Although disparate in origin, I shall argue that the novels I will examine all tend towards a similar, narrative model of memory. Moreover, these works are also united by the fact that through memory they all explore history. Each of these novels focuses on a particular historical period, and the authors display a strong political commitment to examining that past and considering how it may relate to the individual and collective present. Through memory, these works also explore the nature of historical discourse: its role in mediating our access to the past, its function in the present, and its epistemological foundations. The aim of this thesis is therefore two-fold: it is firstly to analyse the particular models of memory these works invoke, but it is also to examine the consequences of this for these novels’ ideas on history. Many surveys of post-modern historical function have emphasised how it destabilises history, and specifically how it focuses on the problematics of referentiality. Conversely, this thesis argues firstly that these novels are actually wide in scope than this suggests, and secondly that these works are better understood as attempts positively to reconfigure historical discourse. Much of this hinges on how these novels conceive of memory, as they construct it as a phenomenon of the present that aims to impart meaning to that present by reference to the past. Narrative therefore emerges as an integral means of achieving this aim, and this thesis will conclude by examining how these novels contribute to a current re-assessment of narrative itself. ###

DUPONT, Éric, « L’oubli dans la création littéraire : l’exemple de Marguerite Duras, Christoph Hein, Milan Kundera et Christa Wolf », thèse de doctorat, University of Toronto, 2001, 235 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Résumé
Les quatre auteurs soumis à cette étude proposent, par le biais de leurs création littéraires, un discours commun de la représentation du passé. Dans L’Amant (M. Duras), L’Ami étranger (C. Hein), Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (M. Kundera) et Trame d’enfance (C. Wolf), le passé est abordé comme une masse toujours déjà problématique pour l’instance narrative en question. Cette étude souligne d’abord l’emploi de la photographie en tant qu’outil narratif dans les quatre récits afin d’insister sur le caractère artificiel de toute représentation du passé. Pour ce faire, la photographie est abordée comme moyen de subvertir la représentation du passé et non comme confirmation de l’événement. Ensuite, l’étude entreprend de délimiter la relation entre la mémoire collective et la mémoire personnelle. La mémoire et ses fondements sont abordés, à travers le vocabulaire freudien, comme des données malléables au discours. Il s’agit de mettre en cause l’existence même de la mémoire collective.

Finalement, cette étude présente les limites et la possibilités de la fiction quand elle tente de représenter le passé du groupe ou de l’individu. Fiction et écriture de l’histoire s’entrecroisent ici pour souligner que l’événement a été oublié malgré les efforts des instances narratives pour ancrer leurs récits à des référents d’ordre personnels, historiques, familiaux et ainsi de suite. Il sera possible de définir les motivations de l’oubli volontaire dans la création littéraire qui s’inscrit à l’opposé du devoir de mémoire. Aussi l’écriture de l’oubli reste tributaire des métaphores spatio-temporelles sur lesquelles elle repose. L’oubli et la mémoire s’inscrivent dans le temps et dans l’espace dans des perspectives variées de distances et de déplacements discursifs. En filigrane à cette étude, la réponse à la question: qu’est-ce que le l’écriture de l’oubli et de quels procédés littéraires relève-t-elle?

Dupont, 2001, PDF ###

VEIVO, Harri Matti, « The written space: Semiotic analysis of the representation of space and its rhetorical functions in literature », thèse de doctorat, Helsingin Yliopisto [Finlande], 2001, 233 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
The work examines the representation of space and its rhetoric uses in contemporary literature. Space has always been a pervasive theme in literature, but a difficult topic in literary theory where no satisfactory response exists to the question “where from does the sense of space come to the text?” A semiotic approach permits to overcome this problem. Two directions are exploited in the work: the semiotic notion of space that unites the existential, structural and cultural aspect of spatiality, and Peirce’s sign theory that emphasizes the mediative nature of semiosis and the interconnectedness of representation and rhetoric.

The first chapter analyzes the basic features in Peirce’s theory and integrates it into modern research in order to develop a framework for the analysis of spatial representation and its rhetoric uses. Representation, with emphasis on the notions of iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity, is examined in the second chapter. Peirce’s theory is compared to and developed with insights from cognitive science and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The reader’s creative imaginative work and textual determination emerge as central aspects for spatial representation.

Peirce’s views on rhetoric together with traditional and modern views on the art of speech are analyzed in the beginning of the third chapter. The interplay and interdependence of ambiguity and determinacy are foregrounded as essential. Specific issues of spatial rhetoric are then analyzed. The notion of locus is focused on in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, metaphor in John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, topographical description in Julien Gracq’s La Forme d’une ville, focalization in Joseph Brodsky’s “The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn” and micronarrative in Yves Bonnefoy’s L’Arrière-pays. The readings point to the creative and undetermined aspects in rhetoric and the critical value they have.

The concluding chapter proposes an overview on the results and arguments on the place and function the semiotic approach to literature may have in research. ###

DETELS, Polly Elizabeth, « When “the lie becomes truth”: Four historiographic novels of the twentieth century », thèse de doctorat, University of North Texas, 1999, 254 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
This dissertation is an exploration of relationships between fiction and history as illuminated by historiographic fiction in general and the historiographic novel in particular. Here the term historiography is employed particularly in several of its many meanings: as the study of the materials and techniques of history, the study of what it means to be a historian, and the study of the philosophy of history. All of these are comprehended in the larger definition of issues pertaining to the writing of history.

Four twentieth-century novels are presented and analyzed as historiographic novels. The common element in analysis of all the novels is the examination of historiographic material encoded in narrative, plot, characters, theme, structure or style. Each analysis focuses on one historiographic assumption or problem and brings in perspectives of historians or theorists of history as well as non-novelistic, critical perspectives of the authors themselves.

E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is analyzed as an imaginative exposé of causality in historical thinking. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) is presented as a gloss on Isaiah Berlin’s critique of Leo Tolstoy’s second epilogue to War and Peace. Several essays by philosopher Eric Voegelin provide the theoretical framework for a historiographic analysis of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). The historiographic reading of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) turns on the convergence of tensions between natural and human history with conflicting ideas of what constitutes revolution.

In the process of these analyses, the study establishes general properties of the historiographic novel, as opposed to related categories (historical novel, nonfiction novel, and historiographic metafiction, for example). The isolation, description, and examination of historiographic novels as a category of history is offered as a contribution to the debate about the relationships, respectively, between narrative and objectivity, and experience and representation.

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LEAKE, Katerine Jane, « A postmodernism of reconstruction: The treatment of history and the fantastic in contemporary fiction », thèse de doctorat, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1993, 313 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
This dissertation addresses the debate on postmodernism’s political function. Because theorists tend to conflate postmodernism with poststructuralist thinking, two extreme interpretations of postmodern politics emerge: either postmodernism offers a political critique because its anti-narrative stance subverts dominant ideology, or, conversely, postmodernism is politically impotent because it stresses only its own aesthetics and hence reinforces the status quo. Both positions need to be examined critically because both exaggerate the extent to which postmodern fiction rejects “traditional” concerns; rather, this fiction neither refuses all claims to representation nor returns to a strictly realist mode of representation.

Theorists of postmodern fantastic literature include under the rubric of the “fantastic” what they see as postmodernism’s tendency to eschew the category of “reality” itself. This tendency, which has been labeled a “generalized fantastic,” coincides with the way postmodernism and poststructuralism have been conflated. The project illustrates the difference between the “generalized fantastic” and an historically engaged use of fantastic devices by contrasting Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire with Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Since Pale Fire enacts poststructural concepts such as the deferral of meaning, Nabokov ultimately stresses textuality over “reality.” In contrast, Kundera uses fantastic devices to assert the primacy of social actuality.

The subsequent chapters examine how other postmodern novelists likewise use the fantastic to question a world-view which imposes closed narratives in a variety of cultural contexts. A discussion of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea focuses on the link between traditional narrative forms and patriarchal domination. The treatment of D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel extends this inquiry by exploring how Thomas’s fictionalized Freud, like Murdoch’s narrator, constructs a female character’s subjectivity through an interpretive narrative. Finally, the last chapter focuses on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and explores the postmodern treatment of history in an African-American context, arguing that multicultural authors whose background includes an oral tradition use self-conscious narrative strategies to preserve marginalized cultural traditions and restore devalued historical knowledge. Like the other authors, Morrison’s use of the fantastic undermines reductive narrative forms at the same time that it re-establishes postmodernism’s relation to social history.

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TANAKA, Shuko, « Franchissement des frontières et localisme chez Milan Kundera », Études de Langue et Littérature Françaises, n° 106 (mars 2015), p. 107-123. +++ Article de revue

LE GRAND, Eva, « Rire de mourir : le jeu du roman tchèque des années soixante-dix », Liberté, vol. 25, n° 5 [149] (1983), p. 102-117. +++ Article de revue

### Le Grand, 1983, PDF ###

PIFER, Ellen, « The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Kundera’s Narration against Narration », The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 22, n° 2 (printemps 1992), p. 84-96. +++ Article de revue

### Pifer, 1992, PDF ###

BERLATSKY, Eric, « Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus », Cultural Critique, n° 55 (automne 2003), p. 101-151. +++ Article de revue

### Berlatsky, 2003, PDF ###

OCHS, Elinor et Lisa CAPPS, « Narrating the Self », Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 25 (1996), p. 19-43. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life.

Ochs et Capps, 1996, PDF ###