Cardiff University | Prifysgol Caerdydd ORCA
Online Research @ Cardiff 
WelshClear Cookie - decide language by browser settings

Travelling Images, Images of Travel in Nicolas Bouvier's "L'Usage du monde"

Topping, Margaret Eileen 2010. Travelling Images, Images of Travel in Nicolas Bouvier's "L'Usage du monde". French Studies 64 (3) , pp. 302-316. 10.1093/fs/knq035

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Sketches and photographs are a familiar tool of the traveller-writer, who commonly draws on them when transforming experience into a textual narrative. The verbal thus displaces the visual — the latter retained, if at all, as mere illustration — in ways that echo James Heffernan's definition of ekphrasis as the ‘verbal description of visual representation’. Yet Nicolas Bouvier's 1963 travel narrative L'Usage du monde challenges conventional conceptions of ekphrasis. Juxtaposing the stark ink drawings of Thierry Vernet — Bouvier's travelling companion — with Bouvier's textual narrative, L'Usage du monde shifts representation away from a hierarchical relationship between verbal and visual; it offers instead an account of other cultures that is grounded in polyphony and exchange. This article applies Bouvier's own image of travel as a mosaic to the dual narrative form (or ‘iconotext’, to use Michael Nerlich's term) in order to consider a range of fluid relationships between Bouvier's text and Vernet's drawings. In examining these relationships of amplification, reduction, and absence, the article argues that the plurality of the narrative prompts a rethinking of conventional, binary paradigms of intercultural contact. Ultimately, the iconotextual nature of L'Usage du monde can be interpreted as a metaphor for the processes of cultural translation and transculturation that are central to Bouvier's travelling ethos.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Modern Languages
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISSN: 0016-1128
Last Modified: 19 Mar 2016 23:17
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/45993

Citation Data

Cited 1 time in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item Edit Item