Les lignées génétiques littéraires : Le récit de voyage orientaliste du dix-neuvième siècle et ses héritiers postcoloniaux
[Thesis]
McSpadden, Jennifer Elaine
Simon, Julia
University of California, Davis
2019
180 p.
Ph.D.
University of California, Davis
2019
This dissertation interrogates the literary and theoretical genealogy of two texts that exemplify the nineteenth-century Orientalist récit de voyage - Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte by Constantin-François Chassebœuf de la Giraudais, comte Volney and the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem by François-René de Chateaubriand - and how the postcolonial francophone writers Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar inherit, critique, and appropriate these and other Orientalist texts. Close readings of the works of Chateaubriand and Volney demonstrate how the eighteenth and nineteenth-century récit de voyage contributed to the manufacture of (1) the travel text as a distinct literary genre and (2) the western imaginary and dominant myth of the Maghreb as a savage, sensuous, and visceral land in need of the civilizing gestures of French colonialism. I examine the lines of resistance and complicity of both Orientalist and postcolonial discourse in the face of French conceptualizations of the Maghreb using the ShuHaRi paradigm that originates in Japanese martial arts. Shu is characterized by learning, protecting, and obeying the techniques of an established tradition such as the gesture of traveling to the Middle East, writing of these experiences through an orientalist lens, and in the case of Postcolonial Francophone writers, writing semi-autobiographical novels in the language of the colonizer. Ha signifies digression and distanciation from the techniques of an established tradition through new approaches and methods. I demonstrate that Chateaubriand distances himself from the sociological travel text by focusing on his personal lived experiences, while Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar distance themselves from the tradition of French novel-writing through the inheritance of the Orientalist travel text and a focus on autobiographical writing and Algerian national struggles. Ri signifies the appropriation, modification, and transcendence of an established tradition. I argue that Chateaubriand ultimately modifies the travel text as a Romantic genre. Finally, I propose that Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Kateb Yacine's Nedjma exemplify a prodigious interrogation of the French colonial project, its textual and aesthetic justifications, and its violent effects while also evoking problems of authorial position, community membership and individual identity, literature, and cultural memory.