| In this dissertation, I analyze late twentieth-century French-language literature in which child-narrators are featured. Central to my study are the ways in which each narrator's condition as a child shapes the narrative, and the creation of a narrative voice that aims to evoke that of a "child," however that figure is defined within the pages of the texts in question. These texts, in their duplicitous renderings of a child's point of view through an adult writer, work to counteract the homogenizing tendencies of some forms of globalizing public discourse on the child. My corpus is varied, and seeks to draw from different literary categories, focusing on a narrative device common to all of the texts. These texts include novels by Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Didier Van Cauwelaert, Ferdinand Oyono, Ahmadou Kourouma and Amelie Nothomb, as well as Nathalie Sarraute's autobiography. The ages of the texts' narrators cover a wide span, from Nothomb's perspective of a newborn baby to Van Cauwelaert's nineteen-year-old protagonist on the verge of adult territory; this range works to compare these child-narrators at different stages of their relationships to adults and to language.;The two main features of child-narration that form the crux of this study are the narrators' evolutions in language, and the fictional child's position as a silent witness to adult social structures. Furthermore, I identify a number of features that intersect throughout the texts, including "ethnographic threads," alteration of narrative voice, "child-time" and "child-space," "zoomorphism," "secret" knowledge and child-based solidarity, fairytale structures, and family versus public authority. To my knowledge, this dissertation represents one of very few contemporary critical studies devoted to this topic, especially concerning French-language literature across various literary genres. While it is my view that, in contrast to the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman , many of these, texts point to coming of age in negative terms, as a loss, they also designate a culture of childhood, in its difference from adulthood, as a possible source of hope or renewal. |
