Małgorzata Sokołowicz

The present paper focuses on the novel Our Riches [Nos Richesses] published in 2017 by a young Algerian writer, Kaouther Adimi. The book is set in 20th century Algeria and narrates the history of Les Vraies Richesses, a publishing house and library founded in Alger by Edmond Charlot, which is to be closed in 2017 by Ryad, a young Algerian living in Paris, who has come to Alger to do his internship. The aim of the paper is to analyse the French-Algerian relationships depicted in the book and to study whether the novel may be inscribed in the concept of “francophonie”. It is divided into three parts. The first one investigates the structure of the book, its language and historical events described by the writer. The second examines the character development and the roles of the main protagonists and the last one focuses on the use of pronouns “you” and “we”.

The present paper analyses Carnets du voyage en Égypte by a French painter and writer, Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876), using the concept of autobiogeography. The concept allows to examine how the author of a geographical description may be seen throughout this description and how s/he is influenced by the space. The paper argues that the personality of Fromentin emerges from his travel notes even though they are focused mainly on the description of the Egyptian space and the forms “I” or “we” appear there rarely. Three aspects of Fromentin’s personality may be seen through the analyses of his geographical descriptions of Egypt: the Orientalist painter enthusiastic towards the space; the traveler marked by his previous travels to Algeria who in Egyptian spaces sees Algerian ones; and the man who feels old and tired, refuses to discover the Egyptian space and who just wants to come back home.

The present paper focuses on the diary of the French painter Félix Ziem (1821-1911) and inquires the destiny of the painter emerging from his writings. Basing on the theories of diary writing (B. Didier, A. Girard, J. Lis), it shows how the artist represents his profession. The analyses convey that three elements are necessary for Félix Ziem to fulfill the destiny of the painter: hard work, dreamy contemplation of nature and travels. Those elements are described in detail in the three consecutive parts of the paper. The conclusions display a self-confident artist, influenced by Romantic aesthetics, who consciously constructs in his diary a testimony of his life as an example of painter’s destiny.

The aim of the paper is to analyze Enfants du lichen, a book of poems by Maya Cousineau Mollen, an Innu poet born in 1975, in order to see if the labyrinth can be considered as a figure of the postcolonial Native American experience. Although the word « labyrinth » does not make its explicit emergence in the poems, their lexical field evokes a whole imagination which makes it emerge implicitly and allows us to believe that the figure of the labyrinth corresponds to the situation of the former colonized. Our contribution is divided into three parts. The first characterizes the postcolonial Native American experience, as described in the poems, and explains why it may be seen as a labyrinth. The second shows the exploration of the paths of possible escape and the last focuses on the exit, the « passage from darkness to light », which can be read as a new era in the life of Canadian Native Americans.

The aim of the present paper is to answer the question whether the Oriental travelogue by Gustave Flaubert, notorious for the bawdy descriptions of various sexual experience the author gains during his trip, represents a revolution or an evolution in the literary approach toward the Middle East. The paper is divided into three parts. The first describes briefly the history of the Oriental dream and the 19th‐century predilection for the voluptuous odalisques. The second discusses a few Oriental travelogues and the meeting of the dream with the reality while the last one analyses the sexualisation of the Oriental experience becoming increasingly important during the 19th century.