Trasgredire e offendere nella pagina letteraria: osservazioni a partire da Entre les murs di François Bégaudeau e En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule di Édouard Louis

The concept of linguistic discourtesy refers to a field of substantially verbal (conversational) interaction mostly related to orality, and is often used in didactics and in the contact between different languages and cultures, as can be seen from the recent on this point. This reveals that the conditio sine qua non for the analysis of the dynamics of linguistic (im)politeness is the authenticity of the exchanges examined. It would seem, therefore, that there is no room for the fictional dimension, perceived as inauthentic and, therefore, irrelevant for research; on the contrary, there is a prejudice, in this field of study, that condemns the literary to the realm of inauthenticity, lies and lack of truthfulness. This paper, instead, takes issue with this view and examines a deliberately literary corpus, made up of two novels of contemporary French literature that highlight, in significantly different ways, the dynamics of linguistic unkindness. Entre les murs by François Bégaudeau, published by Verticales in 2006 (and which formed the basis of Laurent Cantet's feature film of the same name of 2008), and En finir avec Eddy Belleguele, a debut novel by the young French writer Édouard Louis, published by Gallimard in 2016. The aim of this research is first to reflect on the implications that this paradigm shift (from the authentic to the fictional) has on the representation of linguistic (im)politeness, and second, to question the narrative function of the latter. To do this, we will necessarily have to take as our starting point the concept of literary mimesis