Rwanda. Ecritures de temoignage et eclatement de l'instance narrative

In this dissertation, I aim to demonstrate how testimonial texts utilize different narrative forms and how they expose a rupture that forces us to rethink the meaning of these texts and/or the criteria used in defining what constitute a testimonial narrative. These narratives are primarily characterized by, among other things, a first-person narrative "I" that recounts, through memory, what s/he saw, heard, felt or suffered as a victim. However, the textual "I" often changes position, from appearing to talk from the outside of the events to representing the perspective of the perpetrator or the narrator that represents "us," the collective voice. The "I" also comes between the survivor's narrative and that of the third-person, and between fiction and non-fiction. The question is, in light of multiple narrative voices, is it viable to talk of testimonial narrative as a "genre" in literary term? However classic the heterogeneous nature of some narratives, we are still confronted with the question about the meaning and criteria of how we define testimonial narratives.;My goal in this dissertation is to reevaluate the meaning of the testimony of genocide in both fictional and non-fictional narratives by both survivors and non-survivors. New approaches are needed, not simply toward the narrator but with respect to those voices s/he adopts in the narration itself. I argue that the concept of focalization or "point of view", more than the first-person narrative "I", remains present in eclectic writings. In addition or in the absence of the first-person narrative "I", the idea of "focalization" opens for the definition of new criteria for testimony, not only through a unique literary genre but also through a narrative model that builds up from multiple narrative voices, forms of texts and genres.