Diss.--Berlin, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 229-236.

Th.--Litt. fr.--Paris 4, 1987.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Littérature française et comparée--Paris 4, 2005. N°: 05PA040083. Titre de soutenance : "Peintures" de Segalen et "Cent phrases pour éventails" de Claudel : dialogue à travers la peinture extrême-orientale. / Bibliogr. p. 431-454. Index.

China inspired and fascinated the Western early-20th-century author. Some, like Pearl S. Buck, writing about a China where she grew up and lived for many years, offered careful, portraits of the Chinese people she loved. Others, such as Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer, depicted China as an evil empire and the Chinese as cruel and dangerous criminal masterminds. French author Victor Segalen saw China as the last crumbling frontier of an elusive exotic world that existed in stark contrast to the suffocating modernity and alienation of Europe. This thesis project examines three specific examples of Western literature about China from the early twentieth century: British author Sax Rohmer, whose depictions of exaggeratedly evil Oriental vilains reinforced Western fears of the Chinese Other; French writer Victor Segalen whose mystical portraits of a magnificent Chinese Empire served as the basis for his artistic manifesto on exoticism, and Pearl S. Buck, whose portrayals of sympathetic Chinese peasants helped shift American popular opinion and foreign policy. These three authors, though their styles, approaches and motives varied greatly, all feature the intersecting themes of exoticism, modernity and imperialism. The tensions between these three elements play out in different ways in each chapter of this thesis, and yet all three are examples of exotic writing about China at a time when exoticism was a lost cause, or as Chris Bongie describes it, “an idea with no future” (15). In these examples, imperialism still coloured perceptions of a racially distinct other, and modernity’s inevitability made imagining the exotic a depressing, frightening or naïvely hopeful exercise. In all three examples, this results in an exoticism that seeks to extend the boundaries of what had become a shrinking frontier. Some of the authors succeed in balancing the tensions between exoticism, imperialism and modernity, but in general most do not, and the texts remain deeply conflicted. / Graduate / 0295 / 0332

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Ce travail s’interroge d’une part sur la pratique de l’écriture du voyage chez les écrivains voyageurs francophones qui ont visité ou séjourné en Chine entre 1840 et 1939,et d’autre part sur la manière dont leur écriture traite des notions d’exotisme et d’altérité.Le paradigme du voyage romantique constitue un point de repère important, même si les siècles antérieurs ne sont pas à négliger. La réflexion prend en compte des complexités géographique, historique, politique, culturelle et philosophique qui ont marqué l’Occident et l’Extrême-Orient pendant cette période de cent ans. À ces enjeux « collectifs » s’en ajoutent d’autres plus personnels qui ont leur importance : la dimension individuelle du voyage, les données biographiques, les convictions spirituelles, les lectures et la conception même de l’écriture et de la littérature.La première partie de la thèse envisage les traits fondateurs du récit de voyage et aborde les récits du corpus d’un point de vue historique. La deuxième partie explore les interactions qui régissent le voyage et son écriture afin de mettre en évidence un art de composition qui transforme le vécu et le souvenir en écrit. La troisième partie appréhende l’écriture du voyage sur le plan de l’imaginaire, à travers la notion d’exotisme dans une vision qui se veut synthétique, et la question de représentation de l’altérité par le truchement de deux thèmes fédérateurs : le blanc de la carte et la langue chinoise. / This study concerns itself with two aspects of the techniques of French-speaking travel writers who visited China between 1840 and 1939 and of those who lived thereduring this period: on the one hand their writing practices and on the other the manner inwhich their texts deal with the notions of exoticism and the Other. The archetype of the romantic voyage constitutes an important reference, but the preceding centuries are takeninto account, too. The study integrates the geographical, historical, political, cultural andphilosophical complexities which characterised the West and the Far East during this particular hundred-year period. These « collective » factors are complemented by other similarly important but specifically personal elements : the individual character of thejourney, biographical details, spiritual convictions, reading preferences and the writers’particular conceptions of literature and writing.The first part of the dissertation examines the founding characteristics of the travelwriting and approaches the corpus from an historical perspective. The second part exploresthe interactions between the journey itself and the way it is described in order to highlightan art of composition which transforms experience and memories into writing. The thirdpart considers the travel writing as the work of the imaginary through a synthesizing analysis of exoticism, and the problem of the representation of the Other by means of twounifying themes: the blank areas on the map and the Chinese language.