Michel Tournier, member of the Acadimie Goncourt and one of the most influential French writers of the post-Nouveau roman period, stresses the crucial interrelationship that exists between myth and literature. It is the writer's duty, he states, to keep myths alive by continually renewing and transforming them, re-releasing them in an ever changing social context. Written in French, this study considers the Tournier novel as the story of a voyage in a literal and figurative sense. Jonathan Krell uses the term "elementary" to characterize this voyage through the universe of Tournier's imagination, which is dominated by the four primordial elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Building on a foundation of Western culture's rudimentary myths, such as the ogre, twinship, and the Biblical stories of creation and the magi, Tournier performs a radical and disturbing transformation. Professor Krell shows how the transformation is made.
Jonathan F. Krell est professeur de français a l’University of Georgia. Ses publications portent sur la linguistique française et sur la littérature française du dix-neuvième et vingtième siècles.
Jonathan F. Krell is a professor of French at University of Georgia. He has published on French linguistics and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature.
". . . a valuable addition to Tournier scholarship, combining as it does a French view of the work with American standards of scholarship." —Susan Petit
"Krell's notion of the 'voyage élémentaire' . . . Is seductive and useful." —L’Esprit Créateur