You, of course, may take your reading of the novel in some other direction, reach your own conclusions.

It is as though Black labour existed wholly outside language altogether, or at least outside the French language.

The challenge is to try to stitch things up, paper over the cracks, create new attachments or conjunctions of people and objects in a bricolage that is no longer indebted to myths of organic harmony or natural inclination.

If colonization is not (yet) complete, then the outcome of this struggle is perhaps still to be determined.

The scars of conflict are everywhere evident, if seldom dwelt upon, in Laforet’s novel.

Agostino’s loss is inherent to language, whose powers to name always fall short.

It is about an ethics of writing, about how writing can be true to life, to “a life,” without necessarily laying claim to the truth of that life. It is about the hesitations, affirmations, and disruptive explosions that mark any text as it tries to describe and negotiate the world.

The power of fiction resides in the fact that it is not simply mimicry—or rather, that even mimicry is more than mere copy.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia.

00:00 Introduction01:52 The Powers of Fiction07:29 Questions08:47 Gender and Agency12:50 A View from the Margins17:33 Credits

For RMST 202. https://rmst202.arts.ubc.ca/

#rmst202 #romancestudies

Romance Studies emerges when tradition is infiltrated and overthrown by the demotic, by the everyday speech of a nameless multitude.

By Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia.00:00 Introduction01:12 In Search of the Commons05:50 Where in the World?06:15 Question10:50 A Bastard (Anti-)Discipline16:04 Credits#rmst202 #romancestudiesFor RMST 202. https://rmst202.arts.ubc.ca/

We are challenged to impose some sense on the disorder the book shows us, through either analysis or fiction, but also to postpone that sense-making, to live (however briefly) with the unexpected contingencies of modern life.