Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps as well as Claude Simon's La Bataille de Pharsale are all New Novels in which Greek and Latin "mythemes" play various roles in the reception of the text by its reader. These roles represent our object of study. As a result of the possibilities and, more specifically, the many difficulties involved in reconstructing the original mythological plot, the reader realizes that the mythemes form a sort of "secondary plot" which both reflects the "first plot" (the novel's narrative) and determines its complexity. In this way, the mythemes guarantee a certain balance in the reader's level of understanding. However, they still bring out important problems: for example, they contribute to the redefining of certain familiar classical concepts and to the production of manifold interpretative choices. It follows that the mythemes are instrumental in making the reader the privileged spectator of the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations.

The histories of the Theater and of the Novel have rarely been linked to one another. Nevertheless, studying the evolution of the two arts as of the seventeenth century, allows us to pinpoint and define the sources of contamination. It is more precisely in the nineteenth century that the history of both the Theater and the Novel became envenomed, going from fresh influences to disloyal relations during which time the Theater faded by admitting romanesque realism to take the stage. By denying its capacity to reveal the "real", the Theater failed its possibilities and let its art be disinterested from the theatricality showing all that should have been evoked. Men of theater participated at recapturing the theatrical art so to regain confidence on stage and near 1950, an avant-garde movement flourished to favor a renewal of vitality for the theater with a new language which utilizes all of what the scene could provoke. This "New Theater" is soon followed by a similar romanesque enterprise, the "New Novel", a group of novelists also wishing to acknowledge the right to explore a new style of writing.

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Towards the end of the 1960s in France we witness the awakening of the memory of the Holocaust and the Occupation which coincides with the publication of Patrick Modiano’s first novel, La place de l’étoile. It is from this time that Jewish memory of the Holocaust begins to surface and we see the emergence of a literature of the post-Holocaust generation. Modiano belongs to this generation that, being deprived of a personal memory of the Holocaust, turns to this period in a quest for roots and identity. Like his Jewish colleagues, Modiano struggles to come to terms with a past that he has not experienced and an absence of memory. This dissertation analyses Modiano’s use of the period of the Holocaust as signifier of Jewish identity in four of his novels in order to highlight the role of the issue of Jewish identity in the construction of a textual identity / Vers la fin des années 60 on voit en France le réveil de la mémoire de la Shoah et de l’Occupation qui coïncide avec la publication du premier roman de Patrick Modiano, La place de l’étoile. C’est à partir de cette époque que la mémoire juive de la Shoah va pouvoir se faire entendre et qu’on constate l’émergence d’une littérature de la génération d’après la Shoah. Modiano appartient à cette génération qui, étant dépourvue d’une mémoire personnelle de la Shoah, se tourne vers cette période dans une quête de racines et d’identité. Comme ses confrères juifs, Modiano a du mal à se réconcilier avec un passé qu’il n’a pas vécu et une absence de mémoire. Cette étude examine de près le recours de Modiano aux années de la Shoah en tant que signifiant de l’identité juive dans quatre ouvrages afin de mettre en exergue le rôle de la problématique de l’identité juive dans la construction d’une identité textuelle chez cet écrivain / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M. A. (French)