Abstract EN:

Felix Modock is a story teller from Martinique whose repertory, embedded in the Martinican section of Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English has been suffering from a certain invincibility until nowadays, by the very fact of its inserting in the bulky anthology which Elsie Clews Parsons, the American folklorist, dedicated to the oral literature of the Caribbean Islands. So it is advisable to “restore” it, in the pictorial sense of the word, so as to give it its proper place back in the West Indian literary field. A new arranging of its thirty-nine tales, accompanied by their translation into French is imperative and so is an historical and ideological contextual explanation. In that way, by studying its formal and figurative components, it is possible to consider the consistency and the homogeneity of a repertory, a form which is distinct from corpuses, collections or index of tales and which fits precise standards and a particular aim. The remarkable status of its reporter, an autologographer story teller, makes of it an original work in Creole literature, which brings evidence the passage from oral to written literature.