Contemporary biographical fictions in France: between narrative and visual – This paper discusses an evolution of point of view on biographical fictions from 90’ to the present, due to the important increase of literary practices exploring images and their role in the constitution of the biographical discourse. The relation between fiction and reality presented from the point of view of Paul Ricoeur’s ‘narrative identity’ in first approaches of biographical fictions is now substituted by the reflection about the relation between narrative and visual which discloses, particularly in the case of biographical portraits of writers, the commemorative aspects of a literary text.

The goal of this article is to show the interdependence of the reception of Don Quixote and the concept of identity. The argument is founded on the rejection of Don Quixote perceived as an invented character from the world of fiction and treating him instead as a Cartesian subject, in possession of the cogito faculty and defined by the truth. The Cartesian project, though, comes under pressure when the cogito constitutes itself by telling a story about itself. Cartesianism, a philosophy of consciousness, contains an embryo of a new reflection about subjectivity. With the new approach comes a positive reappraisal of the figure of Don Quixote and an acknowledgement of the key role of fiction in the process of becoming human. The liberation of identity from the tyranny of substantialism and the foundation of the subject on action has paved the way for treating the goals of action as originals produced by the subject rather than copies or reproductions.

Tomasz Zan was one of the leaders of the Philomatic Association, a secret student organization that existed from 1817 to 1823 at the Imperial University of Wilno (Vilnius). This article deals with his autobiographical novel made up of letters he wrote between 1815 and 1823. As the assembled letters do not follow the author’s life in chronological order, the text has be read outside the formal categories of an autobiographical record, with due attention to the poetics of the fragment. Moreover, the textual narrator is not always a representative of the author. The occasional use of a persona suggests that the letters are not underpinned by a consistent and well-defined narrative “I”. It seems that in so far as Zan’s identity inscribed in the text appears fuzzy or disparate, its accurate reconstruction would not be possible without an analysis of the tropological system of his letters.