Major Language, Minor Destiny? The Space of Francophone Liberty: The case of the writer Marius Daniel Popescu

Abstract

As a semiotic being, producing sense, man lives in a symbolic universe, where language plays an essential part. For a writer, the choice of a “major” language, like French, is problematic because it represents the beginning of a complex process, sometimes conflicting, involving two or several cultural traditions, history and life experience. But it is also a chance to define a francophone polyphonic “space”, beyond all geographical or institutional considerations, beyond physical space or concrete time, where a writer (like the Romanian-Swiss one, Marius Daniel Popescu) feels free to develop, throughout a language which is different in many ways from the classical French, a new literature, disregarding traditional genres and usual constraints.