This article demonstrates the importance of the Sea in the life and the works of Henri Michaux. The representation of the Sea is subject to the “dictatorship of the Imagination”. According to his will, Michaux changes seascapes, personifies fishes and oisters, allows the soul to swim. The sea also inspires a lot of metaphors, particularly developed in the mescalinian texts. Drug becomes Ocean; the poet becomes a castaway, a drowned, then resurrected man sailing on a purified water.

Artaud’s work includes a large volume of correspondence, which should be given a special status. Neither a work of art, nor an appendix to the work, the letter becomes an object and a body that makes it possible to read Artaud’s corpus, insofar as it provides us with interpretative keys and forces the reader to go back and forth between letters and other writings. It is a sign of the author’s real presence, and demonstrate the idea of a suffering, dispersed and fragmented body. Paradoxically, it symbolizes the very project of the author: collecting the traces of oneself, inscribing oneself in the pure duration, and supplanting the pain of the spatial environment. The letter is the very movement of writing, conceived then as sheer speed.

According to Paul Ricœur, « The text is the medium through which one understands oneself ». Claude Vigée (1921-2020), as a Jewish writer, tries to receive, embrace and perpetuate the identity conveyed by the Holy Scriptures into his own writing, while also relating it to his life. Asserting oneself as part of a vaster destiny or History; developing a better self-knowledge in the light of a shared relation to the world; finding one’s reflection in Biblical figures, but also relinquishing one’s Self for a better understanding of one’s belonging: these are the paths taken by Vigée for this identity quest which implies the pursuit of the father – or, rather, of the Biblical Fathers – in a fully assumed filiation.

The reader attentive to the novels of Malika Mokeddem cannot fail to spot the impressive link between humans and nature. The author’s fiction creates its own laws and invents a universe where language is no longer used as a means of description but as a tool to symbolically say a fusion between its different elements. The space of the dune amply brushed in the novels has captured our attention since it metamorphoses and changes status: sometimes affective/ maternal, sometimes seductive. As for the symbolically painted sea, has an emotional dimension since it has often been synonymous with substitute for the absent mother.

We will try, in this article, to highlight a writing in metamorphosis and to understand its different manifestations through the analysis of the explicit and implicit words of the author in her stories. The use of Bachelard’s work will therefore be of great support to explore the proposed avenues.

Basing mainly on concepts introduced by Gérard Genette and Richard Saint-Gelais, the article offers a hypertextual and transfictional lecture of the character of Pauliska that appears in Michel Dieudonné’s play La Comtesse polonaise. The author focuses on the relations between this text and his hypotextual model, namely the novel Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni Saint-Cyr. He tries to show how Michel Dieudonné exploits the generic scheme of gothic novel in a theatrical text, introducing also in his play a more historical perspective and a utopian one. He analyses both similarities and dissimilarities between the two versions of Pauliska, the latter being generated mostly by the mechanisms of intermodal transmodalization. The author sees Michel Dieudonné’s Pauliska as a postmodern, metatextual and critical version of the character imagined by Révéroni Saint-Cyr.

The term “circulation of worlds” was used by Achille Mbembe in her essay Sortir de la grande nuit (2013) to expose her Afropolitan thought. Evoking on the one hand the phenomenon of “dispersion”, that is to say the dissemination of Africans and Africa in the world illustrated in Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents (2018) by Wilfried N'Sondé, Tels des astres éteints (2008) and Crépuscule du tourment, I. Melancholy (2016) by Léonora Miano. And on the other hand the phenomenon of “immersion”, namely the migration of the world in Africa represented in Blues pour Élise (2010) by Léonora Miano, L’Africain (2004) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Mathématiques congolaises (2008) by In Koli Jean Bofane, Une Blanche dans le Noir (2001) by Jean-Roger Essomba and Ténèbres à midi (2010) by Theo Ananissoh ; among other things, he raises the limits of ancestral “African citizenship” based on the African = Black equation.