Dialogisme et interprétation dans la fiction à récit-cadre romantique

Abstract

DIALOGISM AND INTERPRÉTATION IN RUSSIAN ROMANTIC FRAME NARRATIVES

Since the first conceptualizations of polyphony and dialogism by Mikhail Bakhtine, Romantic literature has usually been excluded from the field opened by the Russian critic: according to him, this literature exemplifies a monologic attitude towards the composition of the text, where the voice of the author is always in control and completely closed to any other source of language except the transcendant link stimulated by prophetic speech. But Romantic literature, and especially Russian Romantic literature, offers a rich corpus of fictions in dialogue, in which we can read an intuition of the polyphonic quality of every linguistic act. Though these texts are often read as non-dialogic, this paper attempts at taking a new look at them, through the question of interpretation and its connection to dialogism. I aim at showing that, far from being monologic structures disguised in a dialogic form, they display a dialogic conception of speech, where the focus is on the exchange between locutors around an essentially ambiguous and plural speech act, rather than on the fetichization of the author’s voice or the ideologic unity of the text presented.