Through the use of text linguistics tools, this work aims to analyse the post 1989 autobiographies of young East Germans, which are often considered to be unclassifiable in the autobiographic genre. It starts with a description of the interdisciplinary position adopted in this text linguistics work. While focussing on a corpus of literary discourse texts it invests notions of discourse analysis which fall within the tradition of Michel Foucault. It continues with the analysis of the enunciative, pragmatic, thematic and stylistic specificities of these post 1989 autobiographies, which reveal, through a counter-discursive text type, the apprehension of their young East German authors. This text type refers to an autobiographic subvariant produced by author-narrators who have been marginalised from the social-historic reality, with a discursive purpose in reaction to the dominant discourse of which they are the objects and which they refute. La! stly, this work offers a detailed analysis of nominal compound lexemes having Ost- or West- as their determiner and their inclusion in the text of these post 1989 autobiographies of young East Germans. Among these denominations referring to East and West realities, certain nominal compounds can be qualified by phraseological compounds: as key linguistic elements in the diffusion of East discourse stereotypes they give rise, in the corpus texts, to numerous lexical [de]constructions which allow a criticism of the dominant discourse, thereby illustrating the defensive dimension of the East German counter-discourse autobiographies.
The post 1989 autobiographies of young East Germans : counter-discursive autobiographies. Definition of a text type and linguistic analysis of its stakes