This thesis argues that tasting appears as an act of creative empathy and of knowledge acquisition in Virginia Woolf's writing. First contextualising my discussion within Woolf's own reading of the aesthetic and literary history of ‘taste', I then use Cixous' essay ‘Extreme Fidelity' (renamed ‘The Author in Truth') as a theoretical entryway to passages from The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando which centralise the role of gustatory pleasure in creativity and epistemology. Cixous elaborates an oral, ‘poetic' and feminine ontology rooted in a receptivity to sensual pleasure, a concept that assists my reading of Woolf in several aspects. I suggest that in Woolf, both literal and figurative experiences of taste contribute to physical and psychic repletion, consequently eliciting empathy with the other (Cixous' term). This empathy which originates in the body constitutes an epistemological source distinct from intellectual or emotional intelligences, but one equally integral to the creative process. I assert that empathy features in Woolf as an extension or enlargement of the imagination through which a subject incorporates knowledge of alterity, but without consuming the other - as in the act of tasting. This ideation differs from notions of empathy as an analogical mapping or projection of self onto other. I discuss the ways in which a ‘gustatory epistemology' informs Woolf's approach to her craft, shapes the interrelationships of her characters, and materialises stylistically in her development of a ‘poetic' prose language.

Le Mouvement de libération des femmes en France ne fut pas seulement un mouvement politique et social, ce fut également l’une des dernières, si ce n’est la dernière, avant-garde littéraire que la France a connue. Du point de vue international, l’activité des littératrices au sein du Mouvement constitue un des principes distinctifs de la lutte des femmes en France. Les manifestantes qui déposent publiquement une gerbe de fleurs à la femme plus inconnue encore que le soldat inconnu sous l’Arc de Triomphe le 26 août 1970, sont déjà pour certaines – appelées à le devenir pour d’autres – des écrivaines. Dix ans plus tard, le MLF, depuis peu marque déposée à l’Institut national de la propriété industrielle, appartient à une éditrice, Antoinette Fouque, promotrice d’une écriture dite féminine. Dans l’espace circonscrit par ces deux points fixes, paraît un ensemble de textes qui s’inscrivent au sein de deux tendances majoritaires – mais antagonistes – du Mouvement, le féminisme d’une part et la néo-féminité, ou éloge de la différence, d’autre part. En miroir, un double rhizome éditorial se développe, partageant maisons d’édition et revues en deux factions militantes et littéraires bien distinctes. Pendant dix ans, la littérature se met tout autant au service du Mouvement des femmes que le Mouvement irradie la littérature, chacun-e influençant et informant la pratique et la pensée de l’autre. C’est de cette coïncidence entre littérature et Mouvement de libération des femmes que le présent écrit se propose de rendre compte, afin de retracer un mouvement politique qui fut et se fit littéraire, et, dans le même élan, une littérature qui fut et se fit politique. Par là même, la thèse redouble la question posée par tout un mouvement de femmes à la littérature elle-même, contestant ses définitions premières et repoussant les limites qui lui ont été assignées. / The Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) was not only a political and social movement, but one of the last, if not the very last, literary avant-garde that France has experienced. From an international perspective, the activity of the literary women within the movement represents one of the fundamental principles of the fight for women’s rights in France. The demonstrators, who publicly placed a bouquet of flowers for the unknown wife of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on August 26th 1970, are for some, and are soon to become for others, women writers. Ten years later, the MLF, a recently registered trademark with the National Institute for Intellectual Property Rights, belongs to the editor, Antoinette Fouque, promotor of female writing. Within the space determined by these two fixed points, there exists a collection of texts that adhere to two major trends – although antagonistic – of the movement, Feminism on one hand and Neofeminity, or the praise for “difference”, on the other hand. Mirroring each other, a dual editorial form develops, sharing publishers and scholarly journals, into two distinct literary and militant factions. For ten years, literature served the purpose of the Women’s Liberation Movement as much as the latter promoted literature, each influencing and informing the other by practice and thought. It is precisely this coexistence between literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement that the present dissertation proposes to examine, in order to trace the political movement that was and made itself literary, and, by the same token, a literature that was and made itself political. At the same time, the dissertation continues the question asked of literature by an entire women’s movement, challenging its assigned definitions and pushing back its boundaries.