La postmodernité dans Cherokee de Jean Echenoz

• Main Authors: Pei-yu SYU, 徐珮瑜
• Other Authors: Chen-Sheng Weng
• Format: Others
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95230127563497508005

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 法國語文學系 === 101 === Jean Echenoz is one of the most important writers in contemporary French literature. He is considered by Les Éditions de Minuit as the one who inaugurates a new generation of literature after the nouveau roman of the 1950s and 1960s. He started his writing career in 1980s and remains active in literary circles. Until now, he has written more than ten novels. His works can be roughly divided into three categories: rewriting of sub-genre, story set in an exotic landscape and biographical fiction. In this study, we aim to explore the postmodernity in the works of Echenoz through the writing and the organization of story. We use Cherokee as the primary text and other works of Echenoz in the first two categories as supplementary texts. In the first chapter, we discuss the description of character from two aspects. One is to illustrate the postmodern writing of Echenoz by indicating the confrontation between tradition and innovation in the construction of characters. The other is to identify the forces which prompt the development of story from the particularities of the characters and their actions, and to show that this novel is largely determined by some postmodern conditions. In the second chapter, we focus on how the postmodern era is represented in the novel and how the postmodern aesthetics is manifested in the description of space, precisely the characters’ perceptions of space and time, in order to see if these perceptions facilitate the progression of the plot. In the third chapter, we compare Cherokee with detective novel and roman noir. With their similarities and differences in narrative and structure, we can see that the novelist manifests the postmodern aesthetics by using the generic conventions inherent in the sub-genre and destabilizing them. It is clear that Echenoz displays the postmodern writing in the description of character, of space and the narrative of Cherokee. He casts the characters of Cherokee in the postmodern world and activates the story by evoking people’s desire in the consumer society. Analyzing Cherokee from the perspective of postmodernism reveals the mixture of tradition and innovation in the writing of Echenoz and particularly his attachment to the contemporary society.