Les inclassables de la francophonie. La critique face aux auteurs ”francographes” d’adoption

In 2006, the greater part of prestigious French literary prizes were awarded to writers outside France, an event which lead forty-four writers to publish a manifesto « Pour une littérature-monde en français », Le Monde 2007) heralding the advent of a new literary constellation where language might be « liberated from its exclusive pact with the nation ». As we start to reconceptualise the notion of literature as a product of a language-nation, we must also question the pact between the writer and his or her mother tongue. In such a context, it is interesting to observe that amongst the laureates of the literary prizes of 2006 (and, indeed, those of the last decade), one group is seemingly overrepresented: the group of authors who don’t come from countries traditionally considered as francophone, but who have adopted French as their preferred language of literary expression. Perhaps because they evade the traditional categories used to classify literature, these authors who have become francophone writers by adoption (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say “frangraph” writers by adoption) have long been neglected in French Studies. The time has come to reconsider the place of writers such us Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine in French language literature. Taking into consideration, on the one hand, recent studies which seek to situate these writers in the literary system and, on the other hand, studies which attempt to understand the specific characteristics of their work, this paper aspires to shed light on the place of these “francographs” in French language literature of the twenty-first century.