L5ANM518 - Fiction américaine - FSammarcelli - TConstantinesco

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) 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 US as ways to recover the freedom inscribed in the promise of the American democracy, the latter is a fictional narrative depicting the aftermath of 9/11 as the event radiates through the lives of a single New York family. 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.