Sulla difficile costituzione di un corpus di «littérature de banlieue»: l’esempio dei criteri linguistici

Abstract

This article deals with a corpus of novels often described as “urban fiction” or “post-immigration fiction”, based on three types of criteria: biographic, thematic, and linguistic or stylistic. The paper shows briefly the problems of the two first types of criteria and then studies further the stylistic and linguistic approach. It follows the hypothesis that the stylistic and linguistic approaches of those fictions are often too focused on slang and lexical matters, neglecting significant syntactic forms. A stylistic description of “urban fictions” shows that the language is not a sufficient criterion to define a corpus. Even more it appears that the salient stylistic features of those texts (simple sentences, lexical innovation, spoken language forms) belong to wide tendency of the French contemporary prose.