La linguistique de corpus connaît un intérêt croissant dans le domaine des sciences humaines. Elle est de plus en plus utilisée dans des domaines aussi variés que l'histoire, la sociologie, la psychologie, la linguistique ou la didactique. L'objet corpus est dans cette discipline entendu comme une collection informatisée et de grande taille de textes. Selon l'objectif poursuivi, le corpus utilisé ne sera pas conçu de la même façon. Sa structuration et les textes sélectionnés différeront en fonction des buts de recherche. Pour étudier l'émergence et la construction d'une identité européenne, l'utilisation d'un corpus de presse française semble pertinente Après avoir expliqué le cadre théorique dans lequel elle se situe, l'étude exploite un corpus de presse française à l'aide des logiciels d'extraction de texte et de concordances Xaira et WordSmith. L'analyse du corpus se veut à la fois quantitative et qualitative. A travers l'extraction de collocations pour différents mots-clefs en rapport avec la thématique étudiée (Europe, Italie, Pologne), des prototypes sémantiques sont construits, puis leur activation dans les médias en 2007 et 2009 est analysée et comparée. Une fois cette analyse menée, il devient possible d'avoir un aperçu de la façon dont les médias français relaient la construction et la coexistence de différentes identités au sein de l'ensemble européen.

<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.