Archives


 Vol.13 

Time and Space Travel Writing in Patrick Deville


Author
Wei-Chun Lin
Synopsis

French novelist Patrick Deville creates a modern biographical novel titled "the Plague and Cholera" by telling the story of a 19^(th) century doctor and bacteriologist called Yersin. Instead of putting the protagonist's name in the novel's title, the author named his novel "the Plague and Cholera" in an attempt to show a variety of visions: He doesn't want to reproduce Yersin's life details, nor to recall the protagonist's era and people, and he seldom arranges dialogue scenes between the characters. With the perspective of the twenty-first century, Deville connects Yersin's life to various dimensions, such as science, history, geography, modern time and space, and presents a trans-travel novel through time and space. This research attempts to study how the novel travels through past, present and future. Meanwhile, we try to analyze author's writing style, as his imagination world is built upon on literary works which reveal his wide philosophical and literary knowledge. In addition, from the reader's view, we try to verify how different levels of inter-textuality phenomenon affect reading, and how to guide readers to interpret "the Plague and Cholera".