Abstract:
Dissertation Abstract Central to this dissertation is a reflection on the properties of deformability and variability that occur in the retelling of an oral tale. The tale is defined as a text with multiple origins whose articulations vary from one storyteller to another, such that variability becomes a defining feature of the story itself. Consequently, inasmuch as a literary tale has no stable form, it is crucial to take into account the intertextual relations that exist between an original text and all the others that extend it through various rewritings. To that end, an investigation is undertaken of the rewriting, by two outstanding figures of Francophone literature, of seven French traditional fairy tales taken from Les Contes by Charles Perrault. The work of the rewriters, the Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun and the Belgian Amélie Nothomb, refocuses the question of the transtextual and dialogical relationships that exist in such cases. Reflection and analysis concern the following questions: How to characterize the textual specificities that make every tale recast by Ben Jelloun and Nothmb a different story from Perrault’s. How to account for the manner in which the tales comprising the corpus fit into a discursive and narratological enterprise owing to the authors’ desire to suggest new ways of reading and understanding them. What is at stake, in terms of discourse and meaning-building, in a situation where the voice of the author seems to be absorbed by reading and listening to the tales?
