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ABSTRACTS Stanley F. Levine (University of South Carolina at Aiken) Imagined Communities: The Representation of “Occitanophobia” in Occitan Prose Fiction Robert Lafont and Jean Boudou wrote during the second half of the twentieth century, a time when the social use of Occitan was in rapid decline. The range of functions of Occitan shrank throughout this period. Occitan was replaced by French in official use, in the workplace, on the street, and, for many, even in the home. The levels of society in which Occitan was the language of choice were also shrinking, as was the geographical range. Yet fiction assumes a speech community. This undoubtedly poses a problem for novelists writing in most menaced languages, but rarely is it as acute and as seemingly unsolvable as for the Occitan writer. How does an Occitan writer represent a police interrogation, Lafont asks in his preface to "Tua Culpa," when no real policeman would address suspects (or anyone else) in that language? He might also ask how one represents a mob scene, when there are no Occitan-speaking mobs? or a board room meeting or a street scene or a classroom or a rock concert or a hospital drama... without seeming absurd and/or artificial, and without forfeiting the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief." Boudou's pessimism led him to adopt one solution to this problem, whereas Lafont's dynamism led to another -- he sought to break out of the self-imposed limits of Boudou's mimetic prose, experimenting with a variety of innovative solutions which would allow Lafont to let his vast creative imagination range freely. Based on works written in the same period (from the end of World War Two to Boudou's death), I will discuss the way each of these authors represents the social, cultural and linguistic reality of Southern France, how the ever-shrinking limits of the Occitan speech community are, or are not, reflected in this fiction, and how each author compensates for the limits (if not absence) of a normally functioning speech community ("la situation diglossique") within the imagined speech community created in the text.

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