| Summary: | This article examines how the referential dimension of travel literature embarrasses certain forms of theoretical thinking. It suggests that there are three possible ways of dealing with this dimension: a candid one that does not problematize it, but fully experiences its effects; a formalist perspective that analyzes the text only as a discursive construction, even if it means questioning or ignoring its relation to the real world; and finally an approach that would keep the best of the two previous ones, and reflect on what passes from the world to the reader through the forms. This approach should reintegrate the principle of reference and associate with it two principles freely inspired from the Geneva School of Criticism: vibration and encounter.
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