Małgorzata Sokołowicz

Małgorzata SOKOŁOWICZ, professor at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of Warsaw and HDR lecturer at the Frédéric-Chopin University of Music, associate member of the CERCLE laboratory at the University of Lorraine, is the author of the books La Catégorie du héros romantique dans la poésie française et polonaise au XIXe siècle (2014) and Orientalisme, colonialisme, interculturalité. The work of Aline Réveillaud de Lens (2020).Her research focuses on the relationship between literature and art, Orientalism and travel writing (18th-20th centuries), and colonial and post-colonial writing.

The project

Title: Le roman colonial à l'épreuve de l'auto/alter-biogéographie (construction du corpus et affinement de l'approche méthodologique)

The aim of our project was to verify whether autobiogeography and its variant, alter-biogeography, are fruitful tools for the analysis of the French colonial novel (circa 1890-1950) written in the Maghreb or speaking about the Maghreb. During our stay in France we were especially keen to build our corpus and – after examining the types of relationships between protagonists and geography/space – refine our methodological approach.

The notion of autobiogeography, conceived independently in the United States and France at the beginning of the 21st century, allows us to reread literary texts, examining how the speaker defines himself or herself through descriptions of geographical space and how this space acts in return on him or her. Our research on autobiogeography (devoted until now to travel literature) has encouraged us to think about its variant, alter-biogeography, where the text does not tell the autobiographical or autofictional story, but just fictional.

Host institution : unité mixte de recherche THALIM

Selective Bibliography

• Orientalisme, colonialisme, interculturalité. L’œuvre d’Aline Réveillaud de Lens, Varsovie, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2020, 378 p.

• La Catégorie du héros romantique dans la poésie française et polonaise au XIXe siècle, Publications de l’Institut d’études romanes, Varsovie, 2014, 549 p.

• Mondes humains, mondes non humains. Formes et coexistences (XXe-XXIe siècles), dir. Wiesław Kroker, Małgorzata Sokołowicz, Judyta Zbierska-Mościcka, Warszawa, WUW, 2022, 217 p.

• Chroniqueur, philosophe, artiste. Figures du voyageur dans la littérature française aux XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, dir. Małgorzata Sokołowicz i Izabella Zatorska, Varsovie, WUW, 2021, 203 p.

• «"Je m’attache tristement, amèrement aux lieux que je vais quitter”. L’écriture autobiogéographique dans les Carnets du voyage en Égypte d’Eugène Fromentin », Cahiers ERTA, no 32, 2022, p. 10-28