Du Yoknapatawpha au "Mare Nostrum": itinéraire d'un américaniste

This paper retraces the various stages of research that have led a specialist in American literature from the study of the South, its literature and that elusive quality called "Southernhood" to the exploration of the original South, or Ur-South as it were, i.e. Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean. This change of course motivated by the awareness of the numerous Mediterranean epiphanies punctuating American literature at large enabled one to posit the existence not only of an imaginary and mythical Mediterranean but also of an American Mediterranean, and to vindicate a meridional mode of thinking based on the epistemology of the sea and opposed to what has been called "the fundamentalism of the earth" (F. Cassano).