Reactualization of history in Pascal Quignard’s novels

This thesis is the first attempt in literary studies to explore the strategies of reactualization of history in Pascal Quignard’s selected novels and essays. The purpose of the research is thus to identify and characterize the strategies of reactualization of history in those P. Quignard's novels of the 1980s-2000s which are set in the previous historical eras.
The relevance of the study is in tune with the profound interest of contemporary literary studies in the phenomenon of representation and modelling of history in literary works stemming from modernist and postmodernist discourses. In contemporary French literature, along with traditional historical novels, there are those novels which, dealing with history, that do not aim to faithfully reproduce history but to reactualize it in an attempt to explain both the specificity of the course of history and the place of man in it. By reactualization of history we mean its revisiting, using such strategies as narrativization and subjectivization, the endowment of history with personal meanings, its rereading and fictionalization. The reactualization of history is one of the key features of the fictional world of P. Quignard's novels, a prominent figure in contemporary French literature. The author’s oeuvre has received little attention from the scholarship in Ukraine. Therefore, the relevance of this study is determined by the need to both expand the literary reception of modern French literature and outline the specificity of representation as well as interpretation of history in contemporary French novel.
To achieve the objective set, we first outlined the peculiarities of the processing of history in the French philosophical discourse of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as specific characteristics of the representation and interpretation of history in the French novel of the 1980s-2000s, as they are described in the key scholarship on this issue. Based on the philosophical and literary conceptualization of history, we then determined the characteristic features of the model of reactualization of history implemented in the novels by P. Quignard. The writer’s essays, which constitute a significant component of his oeuvre, were also used to clarify the specificity of the author's rendering of typical themes and motives.

Савич О. В. Реактуалізація історії в романістиці Паскаля Кіньяра : дис. ... доктора філософії : 035 Філологія / наук. кер. Л.Я. Мірошниченко. Київ, 2022. 190 с.