Cenografia e éthos em Antan d’enfance e Chemin-d’école de Patrick Chamoiseau

Scenography and ethos in Antan d'enfance and Chemin-d'école by Patrick Chamoiseau

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present part of the results of research carried out as part of a doctoral programme. It analyses two of the five characteristics that underpin Creole writing, according to the co-authors Bernabé, Confiant and Chamoiseau in their bilingual manifesto essay entitled Éloge de la Créolité: In Praise of Creoleness, published in 1989. These characteristics are the choice of one’s speech and the rootedness in orality. The corpus chosen for the analysis consists of two self-referential works by the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau entitled, Une enfance créole I, Antan d'enfance (1990) and Une enfance créole II, Chemin-d'école (1996), both published by Gallimard. Through the strategies used by the author to narrate his childhood, we sought to highlight the scenography he chose, as well as the discursive ethos of the works, i.e. the identity embodied by the enunciator. The analysis falls within the scope of literary discourse analysis according to Maingueneau (2011,2018). The results show that we are dealing with two works that we call Creole autobiographical tales.