Abstract :
[en] The perception of a culture about itself and the way it chooses to frame and script its own values appears in the way it transmits them to present and future generations. A strong cross-culturally attested tool for building and transmitting cultural memory is the use of the narrative (Barthes 1975; Assmann 2010; Di Biase-Dyson 2019). Highly instructive for socio-cultural studies, narratives highlight chosen salient elements in a specific contextual frame. In the narrative category, stories and myths have a strong didactic potential: they shape the information and ease the assimilation of information such as moral values, behavioural norms, social interactions dynamics, socio-political context and/or its (discrete) criticism, etc. Stories and myths are found throughout cultures and epochs because they teach through examples, through concrete situations, through strong images. And they are only the better known and most commonly cited example. Indeed, narrative elements appear also in other genres, such as royal reports and propaganda, miscellanies, etc. Taking ancient Egyptian literature as case study, I propose to introduce the concept of “situational panel”, a didactic-oriented model of situation composed of salient elements that the author wants to convey and that can be mentally visualized and/or memorized easily as a whole. They can be described as “learning capsules”, as composite entities that may contain elements from several language registers and have as purpose to teach definite notions through contextualized learning (e.g. loanwords, diplomacy, geography, etc). They constitute the molecules of the didactic-oriented narrative, the information to remember through the story (e.g. diplomacy elements that the reader will remember after reading Wenamun). These situational panels are often finely linguistically crafted and bear information on multiple layers: grammatical (Uljas 2013), lexical (Kilani 2016), stylistic, intertextual (Garcia & Morales 2021), pragmatico-contextual (e.g. use of irony [Winand 2004, Chantrain 2021]), politico-cultural (de Spens 1998, Chantrain 2022) and also visual, through the use for example of specific classifiers (e.g. D55 as metaphor marker, Chantrain & Di Biase 2017). Situational panels can also be found across genres, to a certain extent, which invites us to reflect on the notion of “didactic” texts and what it encompasses in the ancient Egyptian literature. Indeed, this molecular construction in situational panels displays a rich dialectic between general cultural frame and pragmatic anchorage and appears to be a shared key component of texts having a didactic/ formative purpose (in the broad sense); their use goes beyond the frame of the narrative strictly speaking. It is thus found in stories, teachings and dialogues, miscellanies, royal reports, ideological propaganda.
