Livre culte, livre maudit : Histoire du Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem

Continents manuscrits

关键词: archives;    edition;    Ouologuem;    Africa;    Genetic criticism;    Mali;   

DOI  :  10.4000/coma.1189

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In September 1968, Le Devoir de violence (Bound to violence), the work of an as yet unknown Malian author, aged twenty-eight, Yambo Ouologuem, was published by the Editions du Seuil. On November 18 of that same year, the novel won the prize Renaudot. This was the first time ever that a major French literary prize was awarded to an African writer. Following the novel’s considerable success in France, it was soon to be translated into ten languages and crossed many a border from the United States to Japan. But on May 5, 1972, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) accused the author of plagiarizing the work of the British writer Graham Greene. A scandal breaks out and will hound Yambo Ouologuem until his death in 2017. Fifty years after the first publication of the Devoir de violence and just as the novel is republished by Le Seuil, which of the various rumours regarding the genesis and the editorial treatment of this cult-cum-cursed book are well-founded or ill-founded? In this essay, Jean-Pierre Orban traces the history of the Devoir de violence and its author, from 1963 (date of the first presentation of a manuscript to Le Seuil) to the end the 1970s (when he retired in Mali and of he confined himself to silence). This work—which endeavours risky extrapolations and hasty interpretations—relies on the only solid files to date, those of the archives of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition contemporaine (IMEC), publicly disclosed in the present production for the first time.

【 授权许可】

Unknown