Dans la première moitié du Xe siècle, Abū al-Faraǧ al-Iṣfahānī (m. 967) écrit son Kitāb al-Aġānī, le Livre des Chants. Des divers sujets que traite l’ouvrage, nous avons étudié la représentation d’une classe située en bas de l’échelle sociale : celle des chanteurs. Al-Iṣfahānī présente des hommes situés sur les marges de la société autant sur le plan physique que moral. Et leur origine de mawlā ne fait qu’aggraver leur situation. Quant à leurs consoeurs les qiyān, elles usent de leur statut d’esclaves - chanteuse pour transgresser les normes sociales et religieuses et, par leur beauté et leur formation d’excellence, parviennent à soumettre les hommes les fréquentant. De la marge, les chanteurs d’al-Aġānī purent ainsi occuper le centre de la vie de plaisir dans les grandes métropoles musulmans. Toutes ces représentations qu’elles soient vraies ou fausses, réelles ou fantasmatiques, sont transmises sous forme de ḫabar avec de longue chaînes de transmission qu’al-Iṣfahānī tient particulièrement à évoquer suivant l’unique méthode d’authentification des récits reconnue à son époque. / Alī Ibn Al-Ḥusayn, Abū Al-Faraǧ Al-Iṣfahānī (c.967) wrote his masterpieces, Kitāb al-Aġānī : The Book of Songs, in the first half of the tenth century. The various subjects about which the book concerns represent a social class at the bottom of the social ladder : the singers. Al-Iṣfahānī pictures these men physically, socially and morally marginalized. Moreover, their mawlā origin aggravates their situation. On the contrary, Qiyan, their female counterparts, who took advantage of their slave - singer status, their beauty and their excellent training to transgress the social and religious norms, were able to bring the visiting men to their knees. The marginalized singers of Al-Aġānī ironically occupy the center of the life of pleasure in big cities of the Muslim empire. All these representations ; either true or false, real or fantastic, were recorded in the form of Habar through long chains of transmission that al-Iṣfahānī is particularly keen to evoke and repeat one after the other using the unique method of authentication of the celebrated tales of his time.

Beginning with Plato's expulsion of the poets in the Republic, this dissertation looks at the often hostile, yet also symbiotic, relationship between poetry and philosophy. Aristotle's 'response' to Plato is regarded as a significant origin of literary theory. Nietzsche's critique of Western philosophy as being an attempt to suppress its own metaphoricity, leads to a revaluation of truth and consequently of the privileging of philosophy over poetry. Post-structuralism sometimes overemphasizes this constitutive force of metaphoricity, at the expense of conceptual modes. However, Derrida's notion of philosophy as play retains a balance between concept and metaphor: there is no attempt to transcendentally ground philosophy, but neither is it reduced to a merely metaphorical discourse. Finally, Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as determined by use can help us distinguish pragmatically between poetry and philosophy by looking at the contexts in which they function. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Cette étude se concentre sur l’Ecole de New York en poésie (« The New York Poets ») de la première génération (surtout John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, et Barbara Guest) et de la second génération (surtout Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, et Joe Brainard) – à travers la production de ces poètes (poèmes, pièces de théâtre, romans, essais, peinture-poèmes, collages, etc.). Les parallèles entre la peinture et la poésie de l’époque sont probants. Pour le poème, la peinture est à la fois un élément significatif du contexte et un facteur important d’inspiration. L’optique en examinant les textes est triple : d’abord, l’influence de l’évolution de l’art et particulièrement des stratégies des plasticiens d’avant-garde ; puis, l’influence du milieu social et du contexte des quartiers bohêmes de New York des années 1950 et 1960 ; et enfin, tout ce qui peut traduire un positionnement chez les poètes vis-à-vis de la politique et la société et le désir d’une progressivité. Ces trois facteurs s’additionnent pour s’inscrire avec une grande complexité dans les textes. / This study focusses on the poets of the New York School (« The New York Poets ») of the first generation (especially John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, et Barbara Guest) and the second (especially Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, et Joe Brainard) – taking into account the textual production of the poets (including poems, plays, novels, essays, poem-paintings, collages, etc.), and making a parallel study of the painting of the period, to help evoke the precise context and show relevant strands of inspiration. Works are discussed through three lenses : an idea of the evolution of art leading up to the present and particularly avant-garde artistic strategies, the influence of the social sphere including the relevance of the New York bohemia in the 1950s and 1960s, and all that conveys a sense political positioning with the desire for progress. Those three factors combine to create complexity in the texts.

Cette thèse examine la manière dont les poètes iraniens du XXe siècle ont reçu la littérature française et le rôle que celle-ci a joué, d'une part dans le processus de modernisation de la poésie persane et d'autre part dans l'émergence d'une nouvelle poétique. À cet égard, elle cherche à analyser et à comprendre les rapports que les auteurs iraniens ont entretenus avec les œuvres littéraires françaises et comment ils ont tenté d'imprégner leurs propres productions de cette influence issue de l'Occident. Ce travail de recherche relate l'histoire d'une littérature, en quête de renouvellement, qui conduit finalement, par le biais du poète Nima, à l'avènement d'une Poésie Nouvelle (Še’r-e now). La thèse propose une lecture de cette poésie, à la lumière des œuvres françaises qui l'ont influencée, et donne des clés de compréhension de la poétique nimaïenne et de ses concepts. / This thesis examines the way Iranian poets of XXth century welcomed French literature and the role it played, first in the modernisation process of Persian poetry and secondly, in the emergence of a new poetics. In this regard, this thesis seeks to analyse and to understand the relationships that Iranian authors developed with French literary works and how its western influence pervaded their own productions. This research relates the story of a literature in search of renewal, which finally leads, through the poet Nima, to the rise of a New Poetry (Še’r-e now). This thesis offers a lecture of this poetry, in the light of the French works that influenced it, and gives keys to comprehend Nimaian poetics and its concepts.

This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.