“The unlikeliest twins”: the role of intertextual foregrounding and defamiliarisation in creating empathy in Meursault, contre-enquête

Abstract

Abstract Kamel Daoud’s debut novel Meursault, contre-enquête is a recasting of Camus’ seminal novel, L’Étranger. Daoud creates an overt and deliberate set of intertextual references to Camus’ text by describing the same events from the point of view of the brother of the nameless ‘Arab’ murdered by Meursault in L’Étranger. Thus the differences in character and event presentation are defamiliarised and foregrounded. This article argues that such intertextual foregrounding and defamiliarisation has implications for reader identification with the characters and related empathetic responses. Using a corpus-assisted stylistic analysis of the original French texts, the article illustrates these implications by analysing the ways the language of Daoud’s novel may contribute to alternation between readers’ empathy and antipathy towards its characters.