«Ceci n’est pas un livre» – "Les Immémoriaux" de Victor Segalen aux confins des genres
«This is not a book» – "A Lapse of Memory" ["Les Immémoriaux"] of Victor Segalen at the edge of genres

Author(s): Agnieszka Kukuryk
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, French Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: A Lapse of Memory; Victor Segalen; exoticism; Maori culture;Other (the Excluded);
Summary/Abstract: The first novel by Breton writer Victor Segalen, published in 1907, "Les Immémoriaux" (translated into English as "A Lapse of Memory") is a political, philosophical, ethnographic and poetic text. To the denunciation of the misdeeds of colonization is added a reflection on the Other and our way of looking at it, exposed in an unfinished essay entitled "Notes on the exotic", of which "Les Immémoriaux" appears to be the perfect counterpart to the ethnographic novel. Inspired by the pictorial and literary work of Paul Gauguin, Segalen envisages the possibility of describing foreign cultures «from inside to outside», that is to say in their radical difference, through what he called an «aesthetic of the diverse». Thanks to this, more than a book, the author creates a portrait of the Maori people by addressing the question of «otherness» which has become crucial for the philosophy, anthropology and social sciences of the 20th century.

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