La description du sultan du Maroc. Répétition et reformulation

Abstract

The embassy travel narrative in Morocco is essentially stereotyped. By selecting in these stories the description of the Sultan of Morocco Hassan I in the late nineteenth century, at a high point of the royal audience, among some contemporary European travelers, the French Pierre Loti and Gabriel Charmes, the Italian Edmondo De Amicis, the Belgian Edmond Picard, we will try to examine how each author took over the topos of the Sultan. We will consider the texts from the semantic and contextual point of view to study the functioning and the role of the iterative description of the Sultan. By playing on the repetition of the same modulated features of the portrait as well as the narrative and discursive strategies, does the narrator seek to create a textual dynamic or to elicit recognition from the reader? To answer this question, it is advisable to make a stylistic study of the textual fragments selected to highlight the strategies put into play by each author to represent the same: how can the traveler affirm his originality while being forced to repetition or reformulation?