À consulter également

Travel books were very fashionable in the eighteenth century. Real travelers sometimes included elements of fiction in their accounts of their wanderings to make them sound more exotic and interesting. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift makes fun of this literary genre by introducing a fictitious traveler, Gulliver, who tells us about his encounters with strange creatures and countries. Gulliver's first person narrative is introduced by a fake publisher's note which is also written in the first person...

Critics and academics tend to draw a line between autobiography and fiction. However, it is sometimes difficult to make such a clear distinction between what is made up and what is not. Here are some short texts written by authors who reflect on their use of the first person.

Ce dossier sur le thème des auteurs écrivant à la première personne regroupe trois ressources accompagnées d'exercices de compréhension et de production orales et écrites, ainsi que d'analyse d'image.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech William Faulkner famously said that all real meaning in fiction comes from the human heart in conflict with itself. As a novelist I’m compelled by the internal conflicts inherent in the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and how those stories come to define us, how they allow us to justify our actions and possibly delude ourselves about who we are. Like any narrative, these stories help us shape otherwise disparate experiences into a comprehensible form. Over time we become so heavily invested in these narratives that when their veracity is challenged, the resulting conflict can be explosive.

Mick Short was invited by Manuel Jobert as part of the tenth edition of the Discourse Analysis Conferences, organised by the Société de Stylistique Anglaise and Lyon 3. After giving some precious advice to students in stylistics and explaining the "foregrounding theory", he analysed a number of texts including the front page of a British tabloid, a poem by Robert Frost and a passage from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

Nous passons une grande partie de notre vie à élaborer des fictions, à nous raconter des histoires et à en raconter aux autres. La narration est profondément enracinée dans l'esprit humain, à un niveau à la fois conscient et inconscient. Produire une narration est une façon de donner du sens à l'expérience factuelle. Mais les fictions créées par le cerveau humain et celles que les romanciers imaginent sont-elles de même nature ? L'écrivain américain Siri Hustvedt et le neurobiologiste français Lionel Naccache exprimeront leurs points de vue originaux, pénétrants et empathiques sur cette question. We all spend our time constructing fictions, telling stories to ourselves and to others. Narration is deeply rooted in the human mind, at a conscious and unconscious level. Producing a narrative is a way of giving meaning to factual experience. Are the fictions created by the human brain and those imagined by novelists of the same nature? American writer Siri Hustvedt and French neurobiologist Lionel Naccache express their original, incisive and empathetic views on these questions.

James Frey was one of the guests of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde in Lyon. He introduced his novel Bright Shiny Morning and told the audience about his perception of Los Angeles and his conception of storytelling.

Le roman de Yann Martel, typique de la post-modernité, dont l'intrigue "surfictionnelle" mêle théologie et zoologie, exploite de façon à la fois massive et désinvolte ses références intertextuelles, et en premier lieu le parallèle avec le Noé biblique, dans un hymne à la fiction et à la foi ne faisant qu'une, à la croyance et au déguisement métaphorique du réel comme enchantement de l'existence.

A critical bibliography, list of online resources, and Paul Auster's prose and fiction.

Après la grande époque de la poésie, la prose revient au goût du jour vers la fin du XVIIe siècle en Angleterre pour progressivement s'épanouir en une forme nouvelle au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Les "novels" qui apparaissent sous les plumes de Defoe, Richardson, Fielding et Sterne se démarquent des "romances" qui les avaient précédées et se caractérisent par une attention portée à la vraisemblance des faits narrés.