French Literary Language Studies: Toward an Anthropology of the ‘French Language’

Abstract

French Studies can be thought of as a specific kind of linking and framing of elements issuing from French culture. They present two defining features : their site of production is not France, but the English-speaking world, especially the United States, and as a discursive production bearing this stamp of origin, they often free those engaged in them from an intensive practice of the French language. This is what leads us, as a possible follow-up to the work of Gilles Philippe, to propose French Literary Language Studies, which would have as their object the “literary language” of the French and Francophone world, and as their methodology a cross between Barthes-inspired semiology, thematic analysis and literary history.