The biography of writers in Vietnam in the first half of the 20th century
Author: Tram Nong, Thi Quynh
Sous la direction de : Phuong Ngoc Nguyen
Aix-Marseille University
Texte français
Keywords: Languages, Literatures and Civilizations, Vietnam, Biography, Writer’s biography, Vietnamese literature, 1900-1945.
Abstract
The French colonization of Vietnam which have started in 1862 have led to deep changes in the Vietnamese literature. This period has seen a flourishing development of different literary genres and particularly the biographies. Among more than one hundred biographies written during this period, we have investigated biographies devoted to Vietnamese writers. Our thesis, The Biography of Writers in Vietnam in the First Half of the 20th Century, is based on twenty-seven Vietnamese-language writers’ biographies, supplemented by biographies of other personalities published during the period of the French colonization. In this thesis, we have shown the cultural and societal conditions in the colonial era which favored the growth in the genre of biography at that time. By analyzing biographies of writers, we have highlighted the great evolution in the field of the biography of writers in Vietnam in the first half of the 20th century. This is expressed by new concepts coming from the Occident (the idea of the individual, the obligation to truth and the importance of information sources), new methods (the relation between the life and the literary work of the author, the discovery of the unconscious - psychoanalysis, and Marxism with the analysis of social classes), new forms (the critical biography or critical- essay form, the fictionalized biography and biographical interview), and literary art (the choice of biographical character, the choice of detail, the art of description, the narrative order).
