Chateaubriand’s Time Travel in Tunis and Carthage: An Archaeology of Mappings

In the last part of his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem—the section on Tunis—Chateaubriand is primarily concerned with the quest for the great city of Carthage that is lost under its modern ruins. Chateaubriand thus marks a neat distinction between two entities existing within the same space, modern Tunis and historical Carthage, while granting preference to the latter. In this paper I propose to deal with Chateaubriand's concern with the representation of this Mediterranean space, in particular, as a carefully dichotomized double locus that is exemplified in modern Tunis versus past Carthage. A close textual study of this part will shed light on the dynamics of representation accomplished via an archaeology of mappings, mainly based on the author's time travel through written history.