Abstract

My thesis is on Michel Tournier, one of the most important contemporary French writers. I'm specifically interested in the philosophic problems that Tournier poses in his writing, particularly questions of self-definition in relation to the others, as well as the specific literary implications of these questions. Focusing on Tournier's rewriting of myth, this thesis investigates his literary texts from a Nietzschean perspective. Reading Tournier's novels from both literary and philosophical angle, I examine how his narrative is informed by rethinking rationalism, colonialism, nationalism and conventional value systems, and how his notion of an author-reader cocreation invites us to envision the possibility of passing beyond human antagonism. Conceiving writing and reading as joyful creation rather than an obsessive search for meaning, my reading of Tournier proposes as the highest ideal, an intellectual and spiritual nomadism where differences become the true condition of critical thinking. My thesis suggests a correlation between Nietzsche's ideal of "la Grande Sante" and transcendent motifs in Tournier's narratives