Science and racism in literary portraits of Jules Verne

Abstract

It consists in discussing the interdiscursive relationship between literature and science, that is, between the discourses of Lavater and Gall and Jules Verne, taking as a corpus the character portraits of Five weeks in a balloon (1863), Children of Captain Grant (1867) and The Chancellor (1875). Operating in a context of aninter-semiotic parallelism, we use the concept of interdiscourse synthesized by Dominique Maingueneau and Patrick Charaudeau (2002). The interdiscursive relationship presented here is linked to the use and naturalization of scientific speeches intended to apply cultural and historical images of Verne’s characters, which is how the author of Voyages extraordinaire’ legitimized his speech, perpetuating a dominant ethnocentric habitus.