La République réinventée: littératures transculturelles dans la France contemporaine

This dissertation theorizes the complex contemporary phenomenon of literature produced in French by writers of allophone origins, which is to say, writers born in non-Francophone countries. Vassilis Alexakis, Gao Xingjian, Andreï Makine, Nancy Huston, Dai Sijie, Brina Svit, Amin Maalouf, Shan Sa, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Ya Ding, François Cheng, Eduardo Manet, Hector Bianciotti, Jorge Semprun or Jonathan Littell, are frequently classified as "Francophone singularities," even though their number has now surpassed a few hundred. By closely looking at cultural and geo-political realities underpinning these writers' literature, La République réinventée reconceptualizes notions of "exile," "migrant," "diaspora," and even certain areas of "postcolonial" literary praxis as a transcultural model of literary production that is emblematic for our globalized society. Intended to reframe the debate around the transcultural literature, this study uses a sociological paradigm of methodological or reflexive cosmopolitanism (Ulrich Beck) in order to define transcultural ideologies and networks, reinforced by unlimited axes of reworked local, transnational, and global focalization.