The African autobiographical literature written by women: reading contracts

Abstract

This paper is based on the idea that the study of literary genres needs to take into consideration not only the formal features of the text but also the different contractual modalities which might appear in their reception. In other words, a text is only part of a specific writing genre when it is recognized as such by the addressee, operation which, although entailing certain theoretical knowledge, has a pragmatic character. It will be the reader who, individually and relying on all the data at his disposal, will decide the reading process which he finds more appropriate. In this paper we will try to show this process by analysing a corpus of autobiographical texts written by the first generation of African French-speaking female writers, a choice which aims to meet at the same time the criteria of cohesion (all the writers share the same social-historical context) and of representation, as we think that our conclusions are transferable to similar corpora, in particular to those which derive from the so called "emerging literatures".