« Étonnants voyageurs » – trois exemples de récit de voyage, en tant que déplacement dans l’espace et en tant que quête spirituelle

Abstract

“Astonishing voyagers… tell us what you have seen”, writes Baudelaire in his famous poem. By referring to this invitation, the text evokes the Étonnants Voyageurs festival created by Michel le Bris in 1990. Since then, the festival has attracted the biggest names in travel-literature, attempting to rediscover the “world”. With the help of three novels, recently defined by French-speaking authors as belonging to world-literature, we try to illustrate how they achieve to renew aesthetic solutions and also, how they proceed to a sort of spiritual quest.