Tag Archives: Bergounioux

The New Georgics. Rural and Regional Motifs in the Contemporary European Novel

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Liesbeth Korthals Altes & Manet van Montfrans (Eds.), The New Georgics: Rural and Regional Motifs in the Contemporary European Novel, European Studies, A Journal of Culture, History, and Politics no 18,  Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002.

Abstract:

The human condition in rural,  provincial locations is once again gaining status as a subject of European ‘high fiction’,  after several decades in which it was dismissed on aesthetic and ideological grounds.This volume is one of the first attemps to investigate perspectives on local cultures, values and languages both systematically and in a  European context. It does so by examining the works of a variety of authors, including Hugo Claus, Llamazares, Bergounioux and Millet, Buffalino and Consolo, and also several Soviet authors, who paint a grim picture of a collectivized – and thus ossified – rurality. How do these themes relate to the ongoing trend of globalization? How do these works which are often experimental, connect – in their form, topics, language and ideological subtext – to the traditional, rural and regional genres? Far from naively celebrating a lost Eden. most of these ‘new Georgics’ reflect critically on the tensions in contemporary, peripheral, rural or regional cultures, to the point iof parodying teh traditional topoiu and genres. This book is of interest to those wishing to reflect on the dynamics and conflicts in contemporary European rural culture.

Link:  http://www.brill.com/

Pierre Bergounioux: un Limousin entre Descartes et Bourdieu

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Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Manet van Montfrans, ‘Pierre Bergounioux: un Limousin entre Descartes et Bourdieu’. In Liesbeth Korthals Altes & Manet van Montfrans (Eds.), The New Georgics: Rural and Regional Motifs in the Contemporary European Novel, European Studies, A Journal of Culture, History, and Politics no 18 . Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 125-149.

Abstract:

This article discusses two texts by Pierre Bergounioux (b.1949) Miette (1995)
and Le Chevron (1996), which, like all his work, are set in his native region Le Limousin. In Miette a first person narratore describes the lives of three generations of a peasant family, Le Chevron is an autobiographical account of the relationship between the author and the landscape of his childhood. Bergounioux focuses on the fissure between two eras and two worlds. As one of the last eyewitnnesses he examines the norms of an age-old, rural society which will not survive. A convinced determinist, he describes how he remains anchored in his native land and how he, as a cultural oustsider from the despised provinces, struggles to gain  entry to mainstream literature. These tensions are expressed by means of an individual usage of traditional topoi, and by a style in which the vernacular is combined with sophisticated literary language).

‘La littérature périt si elle quitte le sol de la vie immédiate’.  (Pierre Bergounioux, Haute tension)

Lien: http://www.brill.com/