"Writing the desert from Burton to Ondaatje" in 19th and 20th C. travels books (R.F.Burton, C.Doughty, G.Bell, T.E.Lawrence et W. Thesiger) and fiction (Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Ondaatje,The English Patient, Coetze, Waiting for the Barbarians) focuses on geographical and textual space. The analysis of intertextual, ideological and linguistic traces shows how the orientalist gaze and fantasy are deconstructed by fragmentatory, postmodern novels, and the representation of elusive, nomadic space which resists appropriation and reveals the powerlessness and illusions of the western world.
