Book Description:
Synergistic Configurations in the Francophone Novel explores the narrative processes giving form to the francophone novel. It contends that the latter is a field of experimentation where traditional, modern and postmodern ideologies simultaneously collide and bring to life hybrid synergies that may challenge generic boundaries that exist between fictional and non-fictional narratives, may question narrow conceptions of literary genres and may lead to a reexamination of linear and rigid epistemologies and worldviews. This work will primarily be focussed on Edouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century (1962), Ahmadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, the fula boy (1991) and Ahmadou Kourouma’s While Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (1998). It will not only expand the scholarship on these works, but will also highlight the impact of the intangible on creative and innovative practices.
Bio:
Adrien Pouille’s research focuses on French-speaking or Francophone artists’ relationships with narrative genres, especially novels and films. He studies their endeavors to express hybrid worldviews and paradigms through multivocal and multimodal texts. He has taken part in several collaborative research projects and publications among which African Cultural Production & the Rhetoric of Humanism (Lexington Books, 2020), and A Saafi-Saafi & English/French Dictionary (Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2016). His papers “Ambivalent Relation with the Divine in Wole Soyinka’s The Road” and “A Philosophical, Cultural and Literary Critique of Mental Illness in Birago Diop’s Sarzan” were respectively published by Ufahamu in 2016 and The African Journal of Religion, Philosophy and Culture in 2021. He is also the author of Human Journeys and the Quest for Knowledge in African Writing (Academica Press, 2021). Pouille graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and two Ph.D. certificates in African studies and global studies. Before joining DKU, Pouille taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as a French teaching assistant, Indiana University Bloomington as an associate instructor, and Wabash College as a visiting assistant professor of French.
