The Country of the Pointed Firs: état des lieux. Le dess(e)in contrarié ou « l'empaysement » de la forme
Caught between genres as both a novel and a collection of stories, hovering between a regionalist claim and a nationalist plot, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most local of local texts, has, oddly enough, long proven “out of place”, stubbornly resisting the categories in which criti...
Enregistré dans:
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Français |
| Publié: |
2004
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Caught between genres as both a novel and a collection of
stories, hovering between a regionalist claim and a nationalist plot,
The Country of the Pointed Firs, the
most local of local texts, has, oddly enough, long proven “out of place”,
stubbornly resisting the categories in which critics have placed it. Eschewing
such a compulsary categorization, this article focuses on the constant
dialogue, within the text, between two narrative postures: appropriation—the
temptation to impose, from the exterior, a traditional, linear plot upon the
country—and belonging, a desire to be one with the country which allows the
country’s design to emerge from within. However, this counter-plot is not so
much a transformation of the country of the pointed firs into a “region” (i.e.
into the very site of the critical, of counter-hegemony), as an attempt to
“regionalize” the very concept of nation, reversing the point of view from
which the nation is created by rooting it in the region itself. In its design
as well as in its intention, then, Jewett’s text subverts the very categories
upon which it rests—country, nation, region. |
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