Place and treatment of oral literary tradition in Native American from Quebec books, published between 1980 and 2015

• Main Author: Thévenet, Laure-Anne
• Other Authors: Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Patrimoines en Lettres et Langues (CIRPALL), Université d'Angers (UA), Université d'Angers, Julien Kilanga, Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau
• Format: Thesis
• Language: French
• Published: HAL CCSD 2018
• Subjects: Literature; French-Speaking countries; Oral literary tradition; Native Americans; Québec; Littérature; Francophonie; Tradition littéraire orale; Amérindiens; litt; lang; First Nations; Premières Nations
• Online Access: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03193149/file/these_THEVENET.pdf; https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03193149

Until the 1970s, the First Nations of Quebec passed on their stories verbally. A Native American literature written and elaborated in French has emerged very recently. This last seems answer to several issues : preserving and transmitting a threatened culture, denouncing the colonization and its impacts, claiming a Native American identity and the values that it represents, while constituting a specific art. Quebec's Native American French-speaking literature has been the subject of very few studies : its youth and the reserves associated for a long time with the study of the First Nations has weighed on this field, so that the subject remains mainly unexplored. One of the main interest of Native American literature is that it's based on an extremely rich cosmogony. The aim of this thesis is to study the place and the treatment of the oral literary tradition in this contemporary literature, from its emergence, in the 80s, until 2015. The question is why and how First Nations writers reintroduce today the oral literary tradition in their books in French. In this context, this study follows the common thread woven by three major areas of reflection respectively centered on the background, the form and the purpose of contemporary Native French-written texts : the resumption of the content of oral traditional stories, the neo-orality of contemporary written forms and the updating of the commitment present in ancestral narratives. Jusque dans les années 1970, les Premières Nations du Québec se transmettaient oralement leurs différents récits. L’apparition d’une littérature amérindienne écrite et élaborée en français est très récente. Cette dernière semble répondre à plusieurs enjeux : préserver et transmettre une culture menacée, dénoncer la colonisation et ses impacts, revendiquer une identité amérindienne et les valeurs qu'elle comprend, tout en constituant une forme d'art propre.La littérature amérindienne francophone du Québec n’a fait l'objet que de très peu d’études : sa jeunesse ainsi que les réserves ...