Abstract: Bertrand Westphal is the founding and pioneering theorist of the contemporary Western geocriticism. In his La Cage des méridiens, a winner of Paris-Liège Literature Prize, he uses a lot of metaphors to guide readers through a multi-dimensional reexamination of the interaction between the literary space and the real space within the global context. Among them, two important metaphors are worth noting in particular: shibboleth and archipelago. Westphal uses the former to delineate the irrational boundary between the West and the rest of the world, whereas he metaphorizes the latter into a reflection on the binary opposition of center and margin, thereby relying on transgressivity as a connection between the implicit threads of the two metaphors. In Westphal's view, as an important feature of the era of globalization, transgressivity blurs the boundaries of national literatures and the identities of writers, and undermines the authority of literary canons. In a word, Westphal's theory of geocriticism is highly compatible with the concept of “littérature-monde” in French.

Key words: geocriticism, Westphal, La Cage des méridiens, transgressivity, world literature