La mise en texte de l’esclavage. une lecture de NOIR COTON de Corinne Albaut et de UNDERGROUND RAILROAD de Colson Whitehead

Abstract

The work carried out in his memoirs focuses on the texting of slavery. Its essence is the analysis of the linguistic and literary mechanisms and processes that the novelists Colson Whitehead and Albaut Corinne put in place to paint the social condition of slaves, on the one hand and on the other hand the cynical behavior and the dehumanization of slaves by the Masters. We must then study in these conditions the vision that emerges from the pathetic situation of the slaves. For this demonstration, its problematic seeks to determine the aesthetic processes which allow Albaut Corinne and Colson Whitehead to show the systematization of violence towards the slave. This romantic view of the slave through the text of slavery which is made deploys an ideological thought and positioning against slavery. To achieve this demonstrative objective, the poetics of the novel are summoned. The method practiced by Vincent Jouve and, before that, Philippe Hamon helps to dissect the aesthetic processes used in the novels Noir Coton and Underground Railroad to give a text of slavery in North America. The analysis using the named method carries out its approach in three stages. The first part analyzes the chronotopic structures of Underground Railroad and Black Cotton in two: the time and hour of slavery in America in the works studied and the spatial figures of the probable territories in Black Cotton and Underground Railroad. The second stage, entitled the actancial and narrative structures in Underground Railroad and Noir Coton, is also analyzed in two chapters which, for the first, studies the actancial structures in Underground Railroad and Noir Coton and for the second the analysis focuses on the narrative structures. The third part, which reveals the doctrinal vision of the authors, analyzes the ideological aspiration of Underground Railroad and Black Cotton: it observes the structure of the story of the two novels and makes a call for the re-humanization of the slave.