Ethics of the other: Literature and ethnography from Levi -Strauss to Montaigne

My dissertation focuses on an age-old, "originary" complicity between literature and ethnography as revealed by travel literature from early to late modernity. More specifically, it explores the poetic and aesthetic "solutions" that four proto-ethnographic and ethnographic "texts" offer to the epistemological and ethical quandary of visually and verbally representing the (colonized) other. It pays close attention to the specific analogical and metaphorical rapport that writing in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, De Bry's Grands voyages, Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, and Leiris's Afrique fantome tries to weave or unweave between self and other.;My first chapter shows that by resorting to a "voyage in resemblance," that is so characteristic of Renaissance travel literature (and of Montaigne's Essais), Tristes Tropiques is able to "almost" fulfill its own epistemological dream (tentation) of bridging the gap between two epistemes, i.e., between its own aesthetic (and scientific) sensibility and that of the Renaissance.;My second chapter explores the tension (brought by a European presence in the image) within the Collection of the Grands voyages as an ensemble and within the image as a unit between constative and performative functions. It also shows that the Collection and the image achieve autonomy from their Historical and textual origins and interaction with an ever-'present' observer by imposing that very European presence.;My third chapter suggests that the Supplement subtly complicates Diderot's known anthropological and philosophical stance about a nature/culture "contradiction" by using a "rhetoric of hypervisibility" (i.e., the use of hyperbolic language) that questions the idea of the "originary point," usually attributed to nature, the sensitive and the self in relation to culture, the idea, the other, and the self.;My fourth chapter claims that Leiris's Afrique fantome uses ethnography and actual encounters with the other as a way to experience and enact that very position that is (for Leiris) the poet's privilege, i.e., being at the very center of the "drama" or tragedy between subjectivity and objectivity. I see the phantasmagoric atmosphere of the first part of the journal as turning into an actual poetic Act (through participation in possession rituals) in the second part.