The Department of Modern Languages is delighted to announce that Mathilde Poizat-Amar has been awarded a PhD under the supervision of Dr Tom Baldwin and Professor Peter Read at Kent, and Professor Myriam Boucharenc at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, with a thesis entitled ‘L’Eclat du voyage: Blaise Cendrars, Victor Segalen, Albert Londres’ [‘Cracks in the Text: Blaise Cendrars, Victor Segalen, Albert Londres’].
Her thesis examines the interactions between travel and literary writing in the works of three early 20th-century French travel writers: Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), Victor Segalen (1878-1919), and Albert Londres (1884-1932). It shows how those texts question contemporary myths about travel itself (often seen as a means to discover new worlds and allow different cultures to blend together), about the other, and the otherworldliness – some of which are still relevant today.
Rather than insisting on the importance of newly-acquired knowledge or proximity in travel, the texts examined place an emphasis on the presence of cracks in the landscapes discovered, on an inflexible distance between the self and the other, and on a deeply fragmented representation of reality. Moreover, these phenomena are noticeable on diegetic, metadiegetic, and stylistic levels; in other words it seems that travel affects not only what these authors write about, but also the way they write.
In exploring the presence and the significance of those cracks in the texts, the thesis shows how those authors foresaw important shifts in the physical, sociological, philosophical, and literary representations of self and space in the 20th century, and helped inform our current understanding of travel and travel writing.
Our congratulations to Dr Poizat-Amar.
For more details of research programmes in French see: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/modern-languages/postgraduate/index.html