L5ANM518 - Fiction américaine – TConstantinesco, COudart

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) both investigate the relations between American literature and history. While the former intertwines Huck’s flight from ‘sivilization’ with Jim’s fugitivity from enslavement in the mid-nineteenth-century Southern United States as ways to recover the freedom inscribed in the promise of the American democracy, the latter is a fictional narrative depicting the aftermath of WWI on a circle of American expats set adrift between the U.S. and Europe and mostly gravitating around Richard and Nicole Diver, a magnetic couple with a dark past and a darker future. Both explore writing as a way to address the violence of history and its erasure, and both question the linearity of narrative, as well as of history itself, through an experimentation with polyphony, digression, and repetition.