Pour une poétique du nom de personnage

Abstract

Prolegomena to a poetics of the character’s name. We propose in this article a poetics of the character’s name. The character’s name can be studied from an autonomous point of view as well as from a structural point of view. From an autonomous point of view, at first, we show that the character’s name especially reflects a personal, a social, a physical, a generic, a geographical, an autobiographical or a referential characteristic of the character. We also focus on two particular cases, the case in which the name of the character is incomplete and the case in which the identity of the character is changing. The structural point of view, on the contrary, consists in studying the names of the characters of a same work by comparing them to each other. We focus in this way on the thematic role of the characters’ names, and on the case in which some phonetic features are recurrent in the names of several characters and must therefore be interpreted. We eventually mention the problem of the translation of the characters’ names, focusing on two situations: the situation in which the character’s name has no obvious meaning, and is not really translated, and the situation in which the character’s name has a real meaning, and is either translated literally or adapted.

Keywords

• poetics
• characters' names
• general literature
• translation