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Somebody mentioned the word confusion. That is probably the word that describes my childhood most clearly. It was a confusion of languages, confusion between the inside of the house and the outside of the house, confusion between my father’s idealism and my mother’s memories. There’s always been confusion in my life. The only way I have of solving that confusion is by writing about it, by explaining it. I only became a writer very late in my life. That confusion existed up to the time I wrote The Speckled People. It was only by writing that book that I could almost step out of that confusion of my childhood. The only palce where the confusion doesn’t exist is actually in the book.

A myth is not human. A myth is a different kind of story. I think most of my novels have a mythical layer, a series of mythical images running under the natural ones, the real world ones. Some of my short stories are attached to the world of mythology and fairy tales. I’m not a religious creature but anyone looking at human beings sees that myths have been part of human life since the beginning. There’s a very great scientist, E.O. Wilson, who studies ants. He has a wonderful page where he has a series of thing that are in all human societies and things that are in all ants societies. I think he can’t possibly know whether ants have myths or not but he says all human societies have a myth. I’ve thought about this and myth has haunted all my writing and thinking since I was a very a very small child like the child in the book...

Ce dossier réunit des articles sur les oeuvres de Lewis Carroll, J.K.Rowling, Frances Hodgson Burnet, Yann Martel, Philip Pullman, Thomas Hughes et Beverley Naidoo.

Cette page reprend le texte publié au BO spécial du 30 septembre 2010 et met en relation les différentes thématiques du programme avec des mouvements littéraires, des auteurs et des oeuvres du monde anglophone. Il ne s'agit aucunement de recommandations officielles mais simplement d'exemples destinés à faciliter les choix des enseignants. Les liens contenus dans le texte renvoient à des extraits d'oeuvres mais aussi à des ressources de La Clé des langues susceptibles d'apporter un éclairage sur certaines notions du programme.