Debunking the Pedagogical Novel : Slavery and Colonisation in two Rewritings of Télémaque

Taking as its starting point the criticisms levelled at Enlightenment fictions from a post-colonial perspective, this article examines the representation of the “other” in two rewritings of the Adventures of Telemachus: Séthos by Terrasson (1731) and Télèphe by Péchméja (1784). The treatment that these two educational novels give to the dual problem of slavery and colonisation highlights a difficulty in the political philosophy of the Enlightenment: the thinking together of an heterogeneous and of an egalitarian world. By approaching these works through the genre of the political novel, we can see that the fresh rewriting of canonical episodes is a means of successively re-elaborating the very terms of the political problems. The classic figure of the “other” as a “critical third party” should be understood less as a commonplace of the Enlightenment than as an unstable and problematic laboratory for research.