« The Voices Within » : éthique et autorité dans My Ear at His Heart de Hanif Kureishi

Abstract

Hanif Kureishi’s recent book, My Ear at His Heart (2004), a strongly autobiographical reading of one of his father’s unpublished novels, revisits by recontextualising it the legendary figure of the artist as « parasite ». The author’s self-positioning in constrained spaces, combined with his efforts to reformulate his father’s utterances, contest the principle of the autonomy of the narrator, while at the same time initiating an attitude to time that is both spectral and ethical. Mainly deconstructionist in spirit, but also drawing on Dominique Maingueneau’s enunciative theories, this paper is concerned with the way the values explicitly defended by the author in this portrait of the artist are articulated on a semiotic arrangement which radically challenges the discourse of religious fundamentalism.