‘Chamoiseau’s Palimpsests: On the odds and ends of the canon’ | Research seminar
Paper presented by Dr Joanne Brueton (University of London Institute in Paris),Thursday 19 March, 5pm, ORB1.24 and online.
Chamoiseau’s Palimpsests: On the odds and ends of the canon
In Patrick Chamoiseau’s latest manifesto, Que peut Littérature quand elle ne peut? (2025), literature is celebrated as a palimpsestic exercise. Writers are always readers first: texts built from intertextual practices of allusion, imitation, homage or counterdiscursive appropriation. Yet francophone authors who host hexagonal French voices are still perceived as indebted to a master canon, with its epistemic hierarchies of sovereignty, measure, and law. This paper explores how the palimpsest, as both a narrative device, and a textual strategy of reading, champions the reparative dimension of writing with canonical sources to overcome the ideological partitions of the field.
I focus on how Chamoiseau modulates grand narratives into a tapestry he calls the ‘toile sentimenthèque’. The neologism transforms the monumentalisation of knowledge in the library into an affective practice of reading, where models and countermodels, mesures and demesures, the odds and ends of literary canons gather in a dissonance that challenges the possibility of a monolithic worldview. Drawing on Genette, Lévi Strauss, and Vergès, I consider the ‘sentimenthèque’ as not only a form of hypertextual bricolage, which reckons with the histories of uneven cultural contact, but as a vital concept for an expanded perception of reality. I ask if Chamoiseau’s narrative assemblages decolonise the canon or if they manage to de-canonise literature once and for all.
Joanne Brueton is Senior Lecturer of French at the University of London Institute in Paris. She has published widely on Jean Genet, notably Geometry in Jean Genet: Shaping the subject (Legenda, 2022), and is co-author of Le Compas et la Lyre: regards croisés sur les mathématiques et la poésie (Calvage et Mounet, 2018). Her work on the poetics of measurement as a way to make and unmake national, colonial, and identitarian spaces inspires her latest book project, Palimpsestic F(r)iction. Building on recent publications on Moroccan decolonial thought, Third World Theatre, and the exclusionary politics of literary reception, the book traces kinships between French-francophone writers to frame writing as an act of transcultural belonging
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