La parole au miroir de la littérature : étude de trois extraits de Chant d’Artsakh de Michel Petrossian

As an eminently relevant literary resource for the teaching of French as a foreign language in a European context, Song of Artsakh offers learners the opportunity to navigate a plurilingual and pluricultural textual space that invites open reflection on languages and language itself. Indeed, Michel Petrossian’s polyglossia, his knowledge of ancient languages, and his profession as a musician partly explain the particular sensitivity to the phenomenon of language expressed in the text. Furthermore, Song of Artsakh fully belongs to what Lise Gauvin (2023) coins the “literatures of unrest”. While Michel Petrossian seeks to convey the suffering of a people fearing for their survival – thus endowing his text with a quasi-memorial dimension – he crystallizes this visceral anxiety around the question of language, thereby demonstrating the linguistic hyperawareness characteristic of authors who do not write in their mother tongue, according to Gauvin. Guided by the teacher, the learner can follow this reflective path through the study of three excerpts: an inner debate on the value of speech, an apologue on the virtue of silence, and a didactic text on the Armenian musicologist Komitas and the importance of speech as sound.