Participation de Mylène Charon (chercheure associée) à la conférence 2022 de la Modern Language Association

MLA 2022 AAALS Multilingual and Multicultural Australia & Aotearoa/New Zealand

Mylène Charon
Fictionalizing the Wiradjuri dictionary:
Tara June Winch’s linguistic solution to literary domination in The Yield

Dimanche 9 janvier 2022 
19h45 (heure de Paris)

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In this paper, we will look at Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield, published in Australia in 2019 and only a year after in France (2020). This case study will use Pascale Casanova’s analyses on world literature as its theoretical framework. We will therefore reflect on literature as a field embedded in power relationships, contrary to the notion of the autonomy of literature spread by dominant areas. We will in particular interrogate the linguistic options of writers from peripheric areas, such as using a colonial language like English to gain visibility while also strategically including minorized languages to increase their literary capital. In an essay to situate the author of The Yield, who was born in Australia and is now based in France, and her production in the World Republic of Letters, we will first see how her choice of writing partly in the Indigenous Wiradjuri language can be described as a strategy of differentiation. We will then look closely at how she elaborates a family fiction around a bilingual Wiradjuri dictionary, thus building the literary capital of this language that has been subjected to a colonial tentative of erasure. Turning to the reception of the work, we will finally reflect on the effect of its translation into French: to what extent does the exportation of the book to the historic center of the World Republic of Letters challenge the idea of the autonomy of literature, a theory that Winch already criticized in her short story “It’s too difficult to explain”?

Bibliography
Casanova, Pascale. La République Mondiale Des Lettres. Seuil, Points, 1999 [English version: The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise, MA Harvard University Press, 2005].
Griffiths, Michael R. The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP Publishing, 2018.
Winch, Tara June. ‘It’s Too Difficult to Explain’. After the Carnage, University of Queensland Press, 2016, pp. 112–27.
---. The Yield. Penguin Random House Australia, 2019 [French version: La Récolte. Translated by Jessica Shapiro, Gaïa, 2020].

Mylène Charon is a doctor in Comparative Literature from CY Cergy Paris University. Her thesis explores the representation of power relationships in contemporary art and poetry by Australian First Nation women.