Errance
et cohérence : Essai sur la littérature transfrontalière à la
Renaissance. (Paris: Classiques Garnier,
expected 2010)
Beginning with a reading
a sixteenth-century map of France, which suggests that politically based national
boundaries were only loosely defined at this moment, this book explores how,
in lieu of such solid limits, literary texts constructed cross-frontier connections
between different places, at once forging boundaries and showing their
fragility. The emphasis is thus not on border construction per se, but on border
crossing and on how borders emerge and disappear from the very act of crossing.
From these chapters, a portrait of the Early Modern globe emerges in which
individual trajectories, as recounted by authors, constantly interlock with
wider systems of knowledge. The first part of the study focuses on authors who
create geographical palimpsests: Greffin Affagart is shown to write the Holy Lands
by seeing them through Rome; Jacques Cartier and François Rabelais, writing
Canada and a New World that closely resembles Canada, similarly describe a
far-off place by relating it to the familiar. The second part focuses rather on
what is here called ‘topographical enunciation,’ whereby authors allow foreign
spaces to ‘speak themselves’: Henri Castela and Gabriel Giraudet thus employ
emblems, prosopopoia, and frontispieces in order to allow the Holy Lands to
affirm their specificity while Jean de Léry is shown to develop a form of textual
mapping of Brazil in which Tupi words function as
toponyms.
Map by Pedro Reinel
(1505)*
*Showing the islands off Canada (left) and
Europe/Africa (right). Discussed in chapter 2 in relation to Jacques Cartier and
François Rabelais. [Non copyright image from Henrich Winter, « The
Pseudo-Labrador and the Oblique Meridian » in Imago Mundi, no II, 1937, p.
61-74.]