In this thesis I suggest that the work of the four contemporary poets studied manifests the vital role perceptual experience plays in the creation of literary texts. I engage primarily in the analysis of particular texts in order to argue for a shift in critical focus away from the explicit manipulation or exteriorization of the physical aspects of poetry (for example versification and explicit visual presentation) in order to concentrate on the role sensory aspects of thought play within it. Emphasis is therefore put on the way these poets draw from sensory experience, and the effect this has on the way their poetry functions. A shift away from traditional critical vocabulary is considered necessary in part due to the fact that discussions of the physical aspects of poetry often carry with them a variety of preconceptions concerning the nature of language, thought and the thinking subject. The tendency to pose dividing lines between mind and body, word and image, the physical and non-physical aspects of language has characterized the history of Western thought, and neither literature nor literary criticism have been exempt from the conceptual presuppositions inherent in such binary systems. Here, I consider how the work of Pierre Alferi, Valère Novarina, Anne Portugal and Christophe Tarkos transcends such dualisms, using the analysis of specific works to develop a critical approach that reflects their exploration of the ambiguity of the boundaries that separate different sorts of experience and means of expression. The thesis is therefore structured around the development of three concepts, ‘pensée-vue’, ‘pensée-voix’ and ‘pensée-toucher’, inspired directly by the texts studied, that are intended to indicate the vital role different forms of perception play in both the creation and experience of poetic texts. It is hoped that the development of an approach that emphasizes the connection between thought, perception and creativity will suggest the fertility of a shift in critical focus in domains beyond that of contemporary French poetry.

Cette étude consiste à mettre en lumière la double dimension du temps chez François Cheng. Partant du principe qu’il est un homme de dialogue, on ne peut que remarquer sa situation particulière dans son époque. En effet, il est à la fois contemporain des grandes remises en cause révolutionnaires de l’humanisme littéraire et des voix comme celles d’Yves Bonnefoy ou de Philippe Jaccottet C’est ainsi que nous nous proposons, dans notre première partie, de mettre en parallèle l’œuvre poétique de François Cheng avec les diverses voix de la poésie française de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Pour mieux cerner la place qu’il occupe dans cette époque et montrer le rapprochement avec ses contemporains, nous tâchons de retracer les mutations principales en ce qui concerne la méfiance envers les images, une redéfinition du sujet et un renouveau de la notion d’humanisme. La deuxième partie est centrée sur des analyses détaillées de l’écriture poétique chengienne dont le but est de mieux comprendre une poésie de l’élémentaire qui a souci de renouer le lien avec l’univers vivant. La troisième partie tâche d’éclairer le temps lui-même, qui est fondé sur le Vide et le Change. Habité par cette conviction, le poète conçoit sa création comme une Œuvre inachevable. A travers les analyses des thèmes traditionnels de la poésie occidentale comme la nuit ou l’amour, et de certains de ses usages (celui la sonorité et du rythme notamment), notre étude se propose d’interpréter la vitalité d’une démarche d’écriture qui rompt avec les conventions et ouvre la parole à un dynamisme certain. / This study consists in showing François Cheng’s double dimension of time. Assuming that he is a man of dialogue, we can only remark his particular situation in his time. Indeed, he is a both contemporary of the revolutionary cause of humanism and the literary and of voices like Yves Bonnefoy or Philippe Jaccottet. Thus we propose in the first part a parallel study between the poetic work of François Cheng and the diverse voices of the French poetry of the second half of twentieth century. To better understand Cheng’s place in that time and show the comparison with his contemporaries, we try to trace the major changes regarding distrust of images, a redefinition of the subject and a revival of the concept of humanism. The second part focuses on the detailed analysis in Cheng’s poetry work to better understand a poetry of elemental who desire to renew the relationship with the world. The third part of our research seek to clarify his own time based on the Empty and the Change. With this conviction, the poet sees his creation as an unachievable Work. Through the analysis of traditional themes in Western poetry such as night, love, the sound and rhythm, our study is to interpret the vitality of a writing process who breaks with conventional and opens the speech to the dynamism.

Cette thèse tient le pari de retracer la persistance dans l’Histoire de la poésie française d’une notion forgée par Stéphane Mallarmé : dans la "Bibliographie" des Divagations, l’écrivain affirme publiquement avoir recueilli ses "poèmes critiques". Après avoir exploré quelles formes nouvelles ce terme recouvre, quelles "transpositions mentales" du poète ces textes déploient, le travail s’affronte immédiatement à la difficulté d’utiliser le même concept pour désigner toute écriture critique inspirée, ce qu’on lit chez Leger félicitant Jacques Rivière. L’influence de ce dernier sur la critique professionnelle enjoint de réserver alors le poème critique aux poètes : l’examen des inventions d’Aragon, Ponge et Du Bouchet permet de poser les questions de la valeur de ces textes marginaux, de leur reprise possible, et de la voix du poète dans le champ théorique. Ensuite, un troisième moment a pour ambition de penser conjointement des procédures qui affrontent la définition impossible du poème, pour préférer lui tourner autour, le déborder, le doubler, le réduire. On observe la génération qui gravite autour de Claude Royet-Journoud pour élaborer une poétique de ce genre indéterminé, inséparable d’une réflexion sur la relation : ce méridien tient compte de la "matière de l’interlocuteur". Dans un dernier temps, la thèse propose la lecture d’un poète contemporain, Philippe Beck. Il déduit des œuvres, en particulier de Mallarmé, de quoi continuer l’inscription de l’Histoire de la poésie dans un "poème critique neuf". / This thesis takes up the challenge of recording the recurrent occurrences in the History of French Poetry of an expression, coined by Stéphane Mallarmé : in the "Bibliography", which he adds to his Divagations, he publicly asserts that he has collected his "critical poems". After having explored the new shapes this word encompasses, and the "mental transpositions" those texts result in, the development tackles right away the issue of using the same expression in order to designate any inspired critical review, which can be found in a letter from Alexis Leger congratulating Jacques Rivière. His influence on professional literary Criticism seems to suggest the critical poem should be left only to poets: analyzing Aragon’s, Ponge’s and Du Bouchet’s inventions, one can lead an inquiry into the value of these marginal texts, their rewriting and the presence of the poet’s voice in the theoretical field. Then, the ambition of a third part is to think together texts that confront the impossible definition of the poem, and finally choose periphrasis, extension, duplication or digestion. One examines the generation revolving around Claude Royet- Journoud so as to work out a poetics of this undetermined genre, which must comprise a reflexion on the relation : this meridian takes into account the "matter of the interlocutor". At last, the thesis focuses on a contemporary poet, Philippe Beck. He gives reinterpretations of literary works, especially Mallarmé’s ones, in order to carry on writing the History of Poetry in a "brand new critical poem".

(in English) The diploma thesis "Who are we for the contemporary French poetry?" Searching for identity in poetry collection La Chute des temps by Bernard Noël aims to explore the contemporary - in this case primarily French - poetry. The first part is asking about the causes of poetry decline in sense of readership and popularity of such genre and seeks for an answer to the question what contribution does the poetry reading bring for a contemporary reader. Based on analysis of texts by literary critics, theoreticians and poets, the paper comes to conclusions, which are applied in the second part on the analysis of particular text by French poet Bernard Noël - La Chute des temps. The paper analyses the search for an identity "I" of the author and the reader, the musicality in verses as subconscious signature of the author, the relationship between the body of the poet, the reader and the poem itself and, last but not least, the metaphor of skin as the boundary between the inside and the outside. Key words: contemporary French poetry, literality, new lyric, Bernard Noël, identity of a subject, poetic space, musicality, flesh

Cette thèse prend pour objet le nouage entre l’autoréflexivité et la mise en forme esthétique dans la poésie de Christophe Tarkos, produite dans les années 1990. Elle met en lumière les rapports entre l’élaboration d’une théorie du langage au sein de cette œuvre poétique et ses visées esthétiques totalisantes. Il s’agit d’identifier les principes générateurs de la théorie et de fournir une analyse de ses fondements qui s’ancrent dans la crise de la représentation moderne commençant dans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle. Les motifs de la crise revisités par Tarkos inscrivent sa poésie dans une historicité, et notre thèse tente d’interpréter cette actualisation dans une œuvre qui donne forme au monde et à la mémoire individuelle. L’hypothèse qui chapeaute notre étude est que la théorie du langage favorise l’intelligibilité de l’œuvre totalisante en lui offrant un support réflexif. Notre thèse, qui privilégie une méthode fondée sur l’analyse des textes, se divise en trois parties. La première propose une recension de la réception critique de l’œuvre, dont nous retraçons les grandes lignes d’interprétation, de Christian Prigent à Jean-Michel Espitallier. Tout en plaçant Tarkos dans le champ poétique français, cette étape nous permet de positionner notre recherche par rapport à certains lieux communs de la critique. La deuxième partie vise à étudier la théorie du langage de Tarkos à partir de ses manifestes principaux (Le Signe =, Manifeste chou, Ma langue est poétique et La poésie est une intelligence) qui révèlent plusieurs principes, pouvoirs et limites de la langue et de la poésie. Afin de montrer la spécificité du concept de la « pâte-mot » de Tarkos, nous l’étudions dans un dialogue avec la figure de la « pâte » langagière chez la poète française Danielle Collobert. La troisième partie propose une étude de la volonté et de l’esthétique totalisantes dans l’œuvre de Tarkos, qui cherche à donner forme au réel. En effet, la poésie répond à l’excès du réel par diverses stratégies. Tout en voulant représenter son caractère débordant par une énonciation logorrhéique ou en usant de procédés comme celui de la répétition, elle cherche à le maîtriser dans des formes textuelles stables comme des fragments de prose « carrés » (Carrés, Caisses), dans des listes énumératives (Anachronisme) ou dans des réseaux d’images. La volonté totalisante chez Tarkos semble également prendre origine dans un sentiment d’urgence qui concerne, en dernière instance, une bataille contre la finitude. / This dissertation takes as its object the tie between self-reflexivity and aesthetic form in the poetry of Christophe Tarkos, produced in the 1990s. It highlights the relationship between the development of a theory of language within his poetic oeuvre and aims to illustrate its “totalizing” aesthetics. “Theory” is understood as the combination of reflections, meditations and concepts about language and poetry. This thesis endeavors to identify the generating principles in his poetic oeuvre, which are inscribed within the crisis of representation often seen as originating in the mid- nineteenth century. By revisiting this crisis of representation, Tarkos’s poetry can been seen as being located in a historicity. My thesis attempts to interpret this revisiting process through an analysis of a poetic form that gives shape to the world and to individual memory. My assumption is that the theory of language facilitates the intelligibility of his poetry because it provides a reflexive medium. My thesis, which favors a method based on textual analysis, is divided into three parts. The first provides a review of the critical reception of the work, in which I track major lines of interpretation, ranging from Christian Prigent to Jean-Michel Espitallier. Placing Tarkos within the French poetic field allows me to position my research within the commonplace of criticism. The second part investigates the theory of language in his manifestos (Le Signe =, Manifeste chou, Ma langue est poétique et La poésie est une intelligence) that reveal several principles, powers and limits of language and poetry. In order to demonstrate the specificity of the concept of « pâte- mot » (a dough of words) developed by Tarkos, I compare it to the poet Danielle Collobert’s figurative representation of « dough », as « paste ». The third part offers a study of the will and “totalizing” aesthetic present in the work of Tarkos, which seeks to shape the real. Indeed, poetry answers to the excess of the real by various strategies. While wanting to represent his brimming nature through a language akin to logorrhea or by using methods such as repetition, it also seeks to control it in stable textual forms such as « squared » fragments of prose (Carrés, Caisses), in enumerative lists (Anachronisme) or in networks of figures. Tarkos’s willingness to “totalize” also seems to be rooted in a sense of urgency concerning, ultimately, a battle against finitude.

This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.