“Je est un autre, mais pas n’importe qui”: Norm and Subversion in Vassilis Alexakis’ “Paris-Athènes”

Abstract

In the contemporary French cultural field, the translingual writers are continually pressed to motivate their choice of writing in a non-native language. Extraneous bodies inside the national literature, they are forced to unceasingly justify themselves, in order to be redeemed from an implicit crime: to have been born elsewhere. In between the necessity of finding a space of expressions and the ties set up by the publishing, journalistic, critical and political system of the host country, these writers occupy an ambiguous position, which affects their literary choices. If the reception field tends to impose its own entrance laws on the foreign authors, some of them tried to go round them by staging them into their novels. My main aim is to demonstrate it, through the analysis of Vassilis Alexakis' novel Paris-Athènes.