More than thirty years apart, two major figures of the Quebec theater scene – Marcel Dubé and Wajdi Mouawad – take up the mythical story of The King of Thebes, who killed his father and slept with his mother,  and propose its "Quebec versions". The two plays, Au retour des oies blanches (1969) and Incendies (2003), are well anchored in the contemporary reality of their respective authors: the Quiet Revolution for Dubé and the civil war in Lebanon for Mouawad. Both returns to the myth of Oedipus depict young people who, like the mythical character, pursue a quest for their roots and reach the end of their respective investigations. This article aims to take up the key elements of the myth and to study their dramaturgical functioning in modern texts.

In this paper, we study the topic of the return as a creative source of paratopic writing in the Disparition de la langue française by Assia Djebar. In this novel, the author creates many universes by swinging from one universe to another. She shifts from « je » to « il », from analepses to prolepses, from masculine to feminine, from space to time, from memory to history and vice versa in a continuous movement. These in‐between worlds are generated by the topic of the return. They enable us to shed light on the writer’s paratopic writing.

The play The Return Home by Matéi Visniec commemorates the First World War, but thanks to its universality it may refer to any war. The characters – the Dead of the Homeland – are all presented as alive and they claim their right to a dignified return to the Homeland. But how to return home with dignity in the state of decomposition in which they are? As it happens every day in a community life, ambitions take over. The Commission of Reconciliation solves the problem by proposing to return them “in cake”: all the soldiers pass through a food mill to become a smooth paste with which then a giant cake is made. This return to the past, presented through grotesque images, serves the  author to  denounce how people are manipulated by big ideas. He also poses questions about the meaning of war.

In his last novel, Un homme de passage (2011), Serge Doubrovsky evokes the main points of his life in seven parts which lead him from New York to Paris. Meditation on the many eras and areas crossed by a declining man, the novel is built on two antithetical modes of return. The first, literal and spatial, is triggered by his retirement which forces him to go back to his Parisian home. The second, temporal, is a resurgence of his past throughout reminiscences that thwart the linearity of his trip. This double movement creates a dialectic between fiction and history. While his journey back to his native land is staged like an Odyssey, it also constitutes a tragic backwards path for the narrator who associates the fatal issue of his final trip to the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust, from which he had barely escaped.

The idea of return in its multiple forms and manifestations is central to Tanguy Viel’s oeuvre. His novels explore this phenomenon in terms of literary aesthetics as well as thematic, narrative and discursive concerns by forging peculiar analogies between form and content. Drawing on selected aesthetic, philosophical and stylistic theories of return, the present paper seeks to discuss its forms in Viel’s texts and analyses how he uses them to create a literary reflection on the sense of returns in human life.

This article intends to examine the question of return in literature by using the tools of stylistics. It also seeks to question the relevance of those tools for this very object, in which individual and collective issues overlap. We chose to look at two 'past‐styled authors', Richard Millet and Baudouin de Bodinat. Their writtngs allow us to grasp the connection between style and ideology, but also to compare different stylistic methods (mainly a rhetorical approach or a figurative conception of style) pointing to different conclusions.

The novel of Joëlle Wintrebert talks about a society where cloning is used to build champions. The father of the modern cloning, Bior Malard, is struck by a drama: the death of his woman. But he takes cells and clones her. A child born: Maël. She is a baby, and Bior brings up her. A question appears: who is Maël? His wife? His daughter?
This paper deals with some issues like identity, ownership of the body and abilities of the body in a complicated and entangled paradox of the time.  If a character comes from the past, or if a part of their own body comes from the past, can he build the future, or even be a part of it?

The aim of the article is to show that some motifs and concepts which can be found in the expressionist dramas – emerged in the early part of the XXth century – have already been explored by Gérard de Nerval (1808‐1855) during the last years of his life. The paper analyses in particular the last – and unfinished – Nerval’s récit entitled Aurélia in which analogies with some techniques used by expressionist authors such as the exploration of the universe of dreams and soul or the research of the true identity of man are more than surprising.