The work of Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), the poet, while extremely diverse, presents nonetheless a coherence and a unity of tone which transmit his artistic vision and at the same time reveal his creative process. / Three works in particular, Opium--Journal d'une desintoxication, La difficulte d'etre et le Journal d'un inconnu, permit us to retrace his poetic course. / Cocteau's art rests on the notion he has of poetry. With the help of the example set by Erik Satie, Raymond Radiguet and Pablo Picasso, he understood at an early age that poetry resided within him and that only by exploring himself and by following a set of morals--in this instance, morals signifies behaviour which conforms to the demands of poetry--would he attain a level of pure poetry. / All of this is evident as much in the ideas the poet conveys as in his style. The personality of the poet, his "ligne" to use Cocteau's words, becomes apparent the more the idea is accurate and the word chosen significant. As a result of this "ligne", of its presence in the work, the poet approaches immortality. / According to Cocteau, the work of a poet cannot flourish within human limits. The poet must transcend such limits to embody universal activity. It is for this reason that the poet must redefine religion and create for himself a personal mythology, that he must reconstruct the world starting from a play of spatial and temporal perspectives. His role thus proves essential to human survival. In effect, the poet fills the cosmic void in which man is evolving.

The presence or absence of food in the novels of Bernanos lie within a highly meaningful system of values and images. From a list of references to food, we will define the nature and role of food in Bernanos' novels. Then we shall try to bring out the symbolic system which organizes the various elements of this theme in one coherent whole. Thus we will see that food, scarce in this work, is always associated with evil, or tends to disappear in a system of images related to sin. As for food acceptable in the eyes of Bernanos, it also eventually loses its material quality by becoming metaphors of the spiritual world.

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Many of the stories found in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer are adapted from other sources, a common practice amongst Medieval authors. But Chaucer often draws attention to his derivations by explicitly naming a source for the stories he uses. This strategy is employed in different ways. In Troilus and Criseyde, a false source is cited, but in the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer names the actual source of the story. In this thesis, identification and close examination of Chaucer's source materials reveal his changes to the derived texts, and an analysis of the role of the narrator in each case demonstrates the different narrative strategies he employs. Although Chaucer is clearly using different strategies in the two works, both raise questions about final authority over a text. These questions are the central issues explored in this thesis.

In this thesis, I analyze literary histories published between 1845 and 1914 to demonstrate a pattern of reception regarding the works of Bettine von Arnim. I will ask how this writer was able to express her radical social-political attitude in writing--relatively unscathed by the repressions of restoration. It will be apparent that a female political author, considered less of a risk to society, faced fewer dangers of censorship than her male counterparts. At the same time, 19th century definitions of Bourgeois women's behavior also served to marginalize her work. She was called a "child" not to be taken seriously, placed in the shadow of men (Goethe, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim), and her life was generally considered before her work. This placement of the woman outside the realm of the important, her construction as other, caused her exclusion from the canon.

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This Master's Thesis offers a study of the works of Swiss travel narratives' writer Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998). Bouvier develops a poetics that defines the practical rules of his travels as well as the aesthetic rules of his writing. / These rules form a whole that can be named poetics of transparency and divided into two complementary poles, each linked to themes and images of disappearance or apparition. Both are oriented towards one single goal: to make the world visible for the reader. Seemingly contradictory, the two movements of Bouvier's project are connected by a polyphonic worldview, mirrored in narratives by the interweaving of multiple voices. / Bouvier's work is a model of the travel narrative's evolution in the XXth century. Compared to travel writings of the classical and romantic periods, it appears as a reversed interpretation of the genre's codes, leading it to explore the possibilities of grasping a world poetic rather than objective.