La présente étude vise à écouter la voix des femmes s’exprimant à travers leurs œuvres, à comprendre leurs motivations, leurs buts et leur place dans le discours littéraire et social ; on cherchera aussi à analyser la réception par les étudiants de la littérature française féminine contemporaine, considérée comme une proposition de lecture digne d’attention en raison de son caractère socialement engagé. Le fait de se demander de quelle façon la littérature française créée par les femmes observe les problèmes auxquels est confrontée la société contemporaine et de quelle manière elle entreprend un dialogue sur ces sujets, montrant par là un intérêt pour l’ordre social et politique, semble élargir avec profit non seulement les perspectives de l’analyse littéraire, mais également l’horizon de la didactique de la littérature. En se penchant sur la création littéraire contemporaine des femmes, on cherche à proposer un tour d’horizon des formes d’engagement et du degré d’intensité avec lequel sont traitées les questions de société dont la problématique influence la situation de l’individu et les communautés qu’il forme, à commencer par la plus petite d’entre elles : la famille. À travers l’œuvre de Claire Castillon, qui puise dans les modèles créés par les femmes écrivains des générations précédentes, nous pouvons observer la façon dont celles-ci entreprennent une réflexion critique sur leur place et leur rôle dans le tissu social, mais aussi sur l’état général de la société dans laquelle elles évoluent. De même, nous voyons quels problèmes de société apparaissent comme les plus sensibles de leur point de vue. Afin de suivre l’évolution de l’écriture féminine et de mieux comprendre sa place actuelle, il est essentiel d’analyser les motifs pour lesquels les femmes ont saisi la plume, notamment depuis la Révolution française, lorsque ces questions de société ont pris une importance particulière dans le discours public, également dans le champ littéraire. / This study aims to listen to the voices of women expressed through their works, to understand their motivations, their goals and their place in the literary and social discourse ; we also seek to analyze the reception by students of contemporary French women's writing considered a reading proposal worthy of attention because of its socially committed character. The fact wonder how French literature created by women observe the issues facing modern society and how she develop a dialogue on these subjects, thereby showing an interest in social and political order which seems to expand profitably not only the prospects of literary analysis, but also the horizon of didactics of literature. By focusing on the contemporary literature of women, it seeks to provide an overview of the forms of commitment and degree of intensity with which are treated the issues of society whose problems affect the situation of the individual and communities that it forms, starting with the smallest one: the family. Through the work of Claire Castillon, which draws from models created by women writers of previous generations, we can observe how women writers undertake critical reflection on the role od women in society, but also the general state of society in which they operate. Similarly, we see which social issus are most essential to their views. To follow the evolution of women's writing and understand its current position, it is important to analyze the reasons why women have seized the pen, especially since the French Revolution, when the social issues have taken a particular importance in the public discourse, also in the literary field.

This thesis examines representations of the intimate as experienced by female protagonists, through expressions related to the heart, the soul and the body, in a comparative study of novels by French women writers from the 19th century and the present day. The corpus consists of seven novels : Ourika by Claire de Duras (1822), Lélia by George Sand (1833 & 1839), Monsieur Vénus. Roman matérialiste by Rachilde (1884), Femme nue, femme noire by Calixthe Beyala (2003), Vous parler d’elle by Claire Castillon (2004), Le Cœur cousu by Carole Martinez (2007), and Mon cœur à l’étroit by Marie NDiaye (2007). As a starting point, the thesis provides an extensive literature survey of existing research on the intimate as well as an introduction of the feminist and psychanalytic approaches underpinning the subsequent analyses, which are conducted in two parts, according to the personal and relational dimensions of the intimate. The theories of Beauvoir, Kristeva and Lacan offer perspectives on the intimate experience of women characters which is conveyed in literary imagery as the desire of the Other, and which is oppressed in a patriarchal symbolic order, although an aesthetic with specific narrative techniques related to women’s experience of the intimate is identified in most of the novels. These features include blurring and fragmentation of spatiotemporality, a marked intricacy of narrative voice, proximate first-person narrators, and the development of themes such as the writing of the body, sensed as a container. A discrepancy is noticed between the dominating androcentric posture of the heroines which is found in underlying discourse, and the sensorial dimension of their experience. This leads to a sublimation of body and sexuality in the romantic novels, a masochistic exaltation of the body and pain in the decadent novel and a psychotic and paranoid state in the novels from present day literature. The themes of female sacrifice and of death and denial of the body are very strong throughout the corpus. Relationships within the family are explored, including the mother-daughter relationships that are emphasised in the recent novels but not in those from the 19th century. Family structure, Christian culture and patriarchal, hierarchical social organisation are analysed as grounds for women’s alienation in the novels. The issue of perversion, which is striking in the novels on several different levels, is described as a transgression which involves the reader.