Filiation protéiforme | 2026

253 Claudiu GHERASIM Abstract: This article reads Camille de Toledo’s Thésée, sa vie nouvelle (2020) through the figure of the son as “h-être,” (a term coined by the author, contraction of hantise / honte and être ) an heir to a past that resists transmission and to a mythic name emptied of its heroic power. Building on Derrida’s hauntology, alongside Abraham and Török’s notions of the “crypt” and the “phantom,” it explores how filiation falters on three intertwined levels: historical (a European memory fractured by wars, exiles, and collective fears), familial (suicides, silences, and encrypted transmissions), and intertextual (the reconfiguration of the myth of Theseus). Tracing the domino effect of History, the buried secrets of family lines, and the spectral shadow of myth, the novel unfolds as a haunted automythobiography: an intimate topography of ruins and mourning, where the son, heir to a spectral legacy, embodies a post-traumatic, post-heroic subjectivity grounded in an ethics of forgiveness and survival. Keywords: hauntology, filiation, son, myth, Theseus. Sandra MEFOUDE OBIONO Abstract: Fleeting appearances, secondary or reduced roles – this is how grandmothers are portrayed in Cri de l’oiseau rouge by Edwidge Danticat and Contours du jour qui vient by Léonora Miano. Despite their limited presence in both novels, they are omnipresent, fully occupying the spaces assigned to them, through silences and what remains unspoken. These discreet characters serve as essential keys to reading societies in crisis. While the main grandmother in Miano’s novel offers a window onto the misery of urban life and the breakdown of familial and social ties, the grandmother in Danticat’s work introduces the reader to rural Haiti, caught between harmful traditions imposed on girls and the abuses of the Duvalier regime. Paradoxical and surprising, these grandmothers offer renewed perspectives on their worlds, often challenging the clichéd image of the altruistic and protective matriarch. By examining the grandmothers’ emotional and intergenerational relationships with their granddaughters, this study seeks to uncover the meaning of their presence in the narratives and the spaces they inhabit. It also analyzes the actions through which they define themselves and the roles they play in terms of history, cohesion, and family memory, in order to better understand how these figures reflect their respective societies, cultures, and the treatment of women and children. Keywords: grandmothers, lineage, family memory, Danticat, Miano. Malgorzata KOBIALKA Abstract: This article explores, through the analysis of Antonio Tabucchi’s short story Le Cercle and Andrea Bajani’s novel Toutes les familles , the hypothesis that literature functions as a form of collective memory, where