CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE

Amélie Nothomb

Author of 28 novels translated into forty languages, of an impressive number of unpublished manuscripts, short stories, and even lyrics of songs, Amélie Nothomb lives alla the paradoxes of celebrities, from the mistrust of the academic world towards an «écrivaine à succès» to the idolatry of the public, from the sporadic attempts to study her singular work and her recognizable style to the mediatic mythisation of her person. Since 1992, the publication date of her first work Hygiène de l’assassin (1992), crowned by the favours of critics and the public, the author continues, in fact, to publish, with disarming regularity, one novel a year, confessing to write three times more a and voluntarily undergo a daily ritual of writing that resembles a "sacrifice", hard to maintain, but strictly necessary.

During the course, we will start from this vital need to writing to face the analysis of a complex work that responds to the needs of entertainment and consumption, but also reveals a singular literary scope and already seems to have access to the "classic" status of contemporary production.
In other words, it will deal with a media phenomenon that poses the controversial question of a possible alliance between celebrity and actual talent and which leads us, moreover, to the examination of the link between the person and the work . Person and work associated, both, with a geographical "non-belonging" that allows critics to analyse the complex link between writing and the search for an identity, even physical, linked to a territory and to highlight the debt of the author with
• The Japanese childhood dream reinvented through writing
• The magical or fantastic "real" realism of contemporary Belgian culture

We will work on two distinct strands starting from the reading and detailed analysis of two of the author's most famous novels:

1. Hygiène de l'assassin, 1992, debut work and "manifesto" by the author.
For the morbid cruelty of the work and the link between this cruelty and the receptive phenomenon of Nothomb.

2. Stupeurs et tremblements, 1999 for the treatment of distinct autobiographical forms in the work of Amélie Nothomb.

Starting from the complete reading of the two texts we will deal with the following points:

Réalisme magique and link with inquiétante étrangeté - Macabre romanticism - Black humor - irony and sarcasm

Dramatic choice of mise en scène - huis-clos and references to philosophical dialogue as struggle and contrastive development of narration

False dichotomies: beauté / laideur - gras / maigre - etc

Topos eros thanatos - focus on death

mise en abyme of literary creation and the image of the writer

The autofiction

The self-descriptive forms of writing

We will conclude by attempting to define the contours of a work-world made up of multiple stories that can be read separately or linked to each other due to the presence of a series of recognizable myths and recurring stylistic choices