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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Dialogue, Small Stories, and Exile Identities in Mario Benedetti’s Historias de París

Résumé

The chapter proposes an approach of small stories in three short stories by the Uruguyan writer Mario Benedetti: “Geografías,” “Cinco años de vida” (translated into English as “Five Years of Life”), and “El hotelito de la rue Blomet,” gathered in the 2009 collection called Historias de París. All these stories deal with exile, whether economic or political, in the Paris of the 60s and 70s. The first section of the chapter evokes briefly the problems raised by the implementation of the small stories paradigm within the study of literary narratives and suggests a potential solution likely to be evaluated in the chosen corpus. The places where one can look for and find small stories comparable to those analyzed by Michael Bamberg and Alexandra Georgakopoulou are the passages of dialogue, where the characters perform communicative acts, including acts of narration, big or small. (On the other hand, there is nothing literally comparable in the narrative passages that embed these dialogues.) The second section shows that in Benedetti’s short stories equivalents do exist for the types of small stories identified by Georgakopoulou (“breaking news,” “projections,” “shared stories,” etc.). It then returns to the opposition between big stories and small stories as it is actualized in the corpus. The last sections propose an analysis of Benedetti’s short stories in the light of the small stories paradigm and try to emphasize the actual literary use made by the author of the ordinary, daily, natural form of the small stories. Some of them have a mimetic function and can be analyzed with the tools provided by small stories research, but most of them have a function that exceeded the natural or mimetic function and required other explanations, linked to the overall composition of the short stories. We can speak of a form used against type, when breaking news destroys a world (that of the hearers) instead of making it collectively, or when shared stories convey grave political content, or else when shared stories do not serve as argumentative devices in the course of telling a projection but compromise all possibility of projection. In “Five Years of Life,” the projection has a function of narrative generation, which can only be fulfilled in the context of a fictional narrative.
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Dates et versions

hal-04180589 , version 1 (12-08-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04180589 , version 1

Citer

Sylvie Patron. Dialogue, Small Stories, and Exile Identities in Mario Benedetti’s Historias de París. Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Korina Giaxoglou, and Sylvie Patron, eds,. Small Stories Research : Tales, Tellings, and Tellers Across Contexts, Routledge, pp.41-57, 2023, 9781032182445. ⟨hal-04180589⟩
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