L’album de jeunesse Les larmes du désert d’Amin Zaoui : un voyage initiatique vers une conscience écologique

Awakening ecological consciouness through the children's album les larmes du Désert by Amin Zaoui

Abstract

The novelist, essayist, and columnist Amin Zaoui published a children's book in French in 2023 with illustrations by Sébastien Chebret. We propose a pragmatic reading that aims to shed light on the author's purpose behind the practice of a genre that is so rarely present in the Algerian literary landscape. Indeed, it is known through the works stemming from pragmatic approaches that literary discourse  oriented toward action. Our contribution aims precisely to be an interpretative response to what appears
to us as the establishment of an ecological ethic within the receiver of this literary text, whether they are a child or even an adult. Our reading could also resemble to an ecopoetic reading, attentive to the form of the text in the service of an ecological cause, but also an ecosemiotic one, insofar as the text is also accompanied by illustrations. The various systems of signs coexist within this children's book in a subtle manner serving the awakening of an ecological consciousness.