La narration en poésie : pièges et enjeux d'une terminologie difficile

Sammanfattning: In this analytical research paper, the notions of narrator and narration in poetry are discussed in order to identify why the terminology in this particular genre is considered as problematic by most theorists. In its theoretical section, this paper focuses on Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical and biographical pacts, and shows the limits of the two reading contracts in the poetical genre. Then, on the background of Brian McHale and Stefan Kjerkegaard’s works on segmentivity, this paper explains the narrative process that can be found in the visual form of poetry. Finally, discussing Brian McAllister and Marie-Laure Ryan’s works on narrativity, this study explains that a story is a mental image that the transposition to a media will transform in order to best represent according to its own limits. In its analytical part, and mirroring the theoretical part, this study focuses on identifying the narrator, the narrative process, as well as the degree of narrativity of four poems by David Diop, Charles Pennequin, Ilse Garnier and Pierre Garnier. Thoses poems, chosen on the ground that they are good representative examples of narrative poetry, lyric poetry and visual poetry, help test the theories in practice. The results show that in the narrative poem, although the identity of the narrator is hard to establish, the narrative process is clear and the degree of narrativity is high. In the lyric and visual poems on the other hand, even if the segmentivity theory helps ‘reconstruct’ the narration when linking words are missing, the difficulty to identify narrative events in the lyric poem and a story world in the case of the visual poetry makes the emergence of a story world, and in turn of a narrator, problematic.