The present study elaborates a poetics of cross-cultural writing. Its primary theoretical reference is the ‘cross-cultural poetics’ (poétique de la relation) of Edouard Glissant: a set of poetic tropes and narrative structural strategies that he identifies in the mixed cultural setting of the Caribbean, in Le Discours antillais. My thesis argues that if these poetic strategies are indeed a response to specific social, cultural and political situations, then if analogous situations were considered elsewhere, we might expect an analogous poetics to arise. Taking North Africa as an example context, and specifically the novels of the Algerians Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih, I argue that these writers’ complex poetic strategies engage with – indeed, help to articulate – analogous socio-political concerns arising in their homelands. The formal poetical analysis of these authors is based on several key thematic tropes and structural strategies that Glissant advocates in his cross-cultural poetics. My five chapters consider roots and origins, living landscapes, silence and screams, literary opacity, and structural polyphony. They also develop a new critical vocabulary to describe how Glissant’s poetical strategies might take form at a close textual level; my analysis reveals a complex, and reciprocal, relationship between poetic expression and socio-political context. Glissant’s work is therefore shown to be more broadly relevant, but the founding tenets of his theory are also interrogated and questioned; the comparison with a North African setting entails a (re)assessment of the underlying conceptions of Glissant’s poetics – of the implicit logic by which he connects poetic form to social, cultural and political factors. These factors, for Glissant, also display a clear overlap with the (post)colonial; in studying cross-culturality, the postcolonial, and the poetics engendered by their overlapping, my thesis presents a specific critical focus for the postcolonial literary field.

L’hypothèse d’une théorie littéraire du sujet transcendant le territoire et le soi vers un Ouvert postule que l’on peut éclairer certaines problématiques de l’existence humaine à la lumière de la réception des romans écrits par des écrivains français d’origine chinoise dans un monde en constant mouvement. A partir de quatre écrivains chinois exilés en France, nous opérons dans la première partie une relecture de leurs œuvres, en lien avec leur vie et leur déplacement. Notre projet invite une démarche de la compréhension de la création à partir d’un cheminement personnel. En retour, leur création s’éclaire grâce à une conception propre de l’espace-temps dans le roman, sans rupture avec les traditions chinoises et occidentales. Leur poétique transculturelle force à envisager autrement la littérarité dans la littérature produite par cette diaspora chinoise. La deuxième partie est consacrée à une comparaison de la réception de leurs romans en France et en Chine populaire visant à faire apparaître la complexité et la transversalité des enjeux culturels, sociaux et les différentes perceptions du monde. La prégnance de cette manifestation artistique renforce l’hypothèse selon laquelle la quête circulaire et la transcendance au moyen du dialogue tant scripturaire qu’imaginaire, peuvent fonctionner comme une différente voix/voie de compréhension du sujet humain en permettant aux auteurs de devenir des résonateurs d’un monde caractérisé par l’incertitude et l’instabilité. / The hypothesis of a literary theory of the subject beyond the territory and the self towards Open postulates that we can clarify certain issues of human existence in the light of the reception of the novels written by Chinese Francophone writers in the world in perpetual motion. From four Chinese writers exiled in France, in the first part we reread their works, relating to their life and displacement. Our project invites a approach of the comprehension of the creation from a personal path. In return, their creation is illuminated owing to the concept of space-time in the novel, without the disruption with the Chinese and Western traditions. Their transcultural poetic forces to consider differently the literariness in the literature produced by the Chinese diaspora. The second part is devoted to a comparison of the reception of their novels in France and in mainland China to show the complexity and the transversality of the cultural, social stakes and the different perceptions of the world. The significance of this artistic manifestation reinforces the hypothesis that the circular quest and transcendence through the scriptural and imaginary dialogue, can function as a different voice /way of understanding the human subject by allowing authors to become resonators of the world characterized by uncertainty and instability.