Pour l'écriture de création en French studies

This article is a plea for the inclusion of creative writing in French studies in the UK. It draws on an experiment carried out since 2017 at St Andrews, which began with the creation of the ‘Creative Writing in French’ module and the development of writing workshops in a second language. The collaborative approach adopted by the teaching team leading this project involves bringing into play different versions of complicity: complicity as connivance, as well as in the playful and transgressive connotations of the term – in relation both to the institutional framework that is the university, and to the uses and evolutions of the French language. While practising creative writing in a second language opens up a space of reconfiguration both of teaching and of what is conceived as literature, the notion of ‘horizontal pedagogy’, understood in relation to what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the method of equality’, makes it possible to transform a number of representations of the language into new resources for invention and interpretation. Running the risk of dissonance and divergence, and even embracing this risk, has enabled us to shed light on the poetic possibilities that are brought about by incorrections, mistakes, neologisms, clumsinesses, false friends or else false meanings. The teaching of literature and language as well as current debates about the future of the French language all stand to benefit from these possibilities.