Multilayered History: Intertextuality in 19th-Century French Historical Fiction
L’Histoire feuilletée, dispositifs intertextuels dans la fiction historique du XIXe siècle
All historical fiction constitutes a multilayered volume, an intrinsically intertextual structure. It enlists an abundant historiographic documentation, from which it derives its information. Like historiography itself, it might even call upon original documents, written and oral, on which it purports to elaborate. Consequently, the historical novel appears as a kind of palimpsest. Thanks to these borrowings, the writer benefits from the legitimacy of science, while exhibiting the specificity, originality, and elucidating value of the literary approach.
In addition, like all fiction, historical fiction summons a vast literary intertext. And it engages inter-discursive phenomena, which recycle a pervasive doxa, stereotypes, school clichés, and journalistic formulae.
In all these instances, we will examine how the intertext is integrated into the text. We will ask whether the author recognizes or denies his/her borrowings, how they affect the mimetic illusion, and the relationship with the reader. We will analyze examples of reinterpretation, pastiche, and parody, in a century which valorizes, yet often ridicules, erudition.
Intertextuality at work within historical fiction engages an aesthetic, epistemological, and ideological debate. It challenges the historiographical paradigms, and questions the capacity of historiography to make sense, as well as the production of meaning in fiction.
Organized by Prof. Claudie Bernard (New York University) and Prof. Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France)
Session I: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
9:00 a.m. Claudie Bernard, New York University
Introduction: “L’Histoire feuilletée”
9:30 a.m. Jean-Marie Roulin, Université Jean Moulin
“Les récits vendéens et Jean Sbogar de Nodier: repenser les modèles romanesques”
10:00 a.m. Rachel Corkle, Borough of Manhattan Community College
“The Many Voices of History: Polyphony in George Sand's Historical Novels”
11:00 a.m. Aileen Christensen, New York University
“Sand’s and Féval’s Layered Incipits”
11:30 a.m. Bettina Lerner, City College of New York
“Eugène Sue and the Fictions of Universal History”
Session II: 2:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
2:00 p.m. Vittorio Frigerio, Dalhousie University
“Le roman historique comme vecteur de l’actualité dans les feuilletons du journal Le Peuple, 1849-1850”
2:30 p.m. Pierre Glaudes, Sorbonne Université
“Dispositifs intertextuels dans L’Ensorcelée”
3:00 p.m. Julie Hugonny, Georgia Institute of Technology
“L’Orientale de Flaubert, un Sphinx sans secret”
4:00 p.m. Elizabeth Emery, Montclair University
“L’Usurpateur or La Sœur du soleil ? Women Making History in Judith Gautier’s Novel of Old Japan”
4:30 p.m. Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, Université Paul Valéry
“Sous la hache : l’Histoire-Moloch”
Conference in French and in English
Sponsored by NYU Provost’s Faculty Research Initiatives Program and Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture
This is the first part of an international colloquium, the second part of which will take place at Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier on November 12 and 13, 2020.