Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras, and Barthes

Examines the ambiguous constructions of the Orient in the works of four major twentieth-century French writers.

The four authors treated here-Victor Segalen, André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Roland Barthes-each experienced at one point in his or her life a deep dissatisfaction with modern European values, followed by a turn toward the East. However, due to different class, gender, and personal backgrounds, they each entertained diverse and complex relationships to (post)colonial ideology, which they both served and subverted at the same time. By engaging in an "off-center" reading of these authors' Eastern texts, and by examining their ambiguous constructions of the Orient, Figuring the East challenges the facile dichotomy that postcolonial critics frequently draw between the Western colonial Self and the Eastern exotic Other.