Éric Chevillard au Mali

This study, devoted to Oreille rouge, explores Éric Chevillard’s complex relationship with different literary genres. Oreille rouge is in fact a false-true journal of a journey to Mali which rewrites the clichés linked both to Africa and the travel narrative. This formal game reveals the ridiculousness of a Western man taken with a project to write an epic poem in a fundamentally ghostly Africa. Éric Chevillard’s playful novel enables us to question the authenticity of literature which tries to be ethnology.