This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction. / A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper. / The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.

Inspired by the work of the Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller (For Your Own Good, 1983) on the negative effects of traditional childrearing practices in Germany, this thesis posits the existence in France of a similar tradition of "poisonous pedagogy," also founded on a set of moral principles and pedagogical techniques designed to desensitize, demoralize, and blame the child while protecting the parent/teacher. Working under the banner of Cultural Studies, I study examples of pedagogical discourse taken from a variety of cultural productions, ranging from moral treatises (lay and religious) and books on infant care (puericulture) to children's stories, primary school readers, and civics texts. Drawing on Michel Foucault's paradigms of power/knowledge and the "archeology" of knowledge, this study focusses on the various constructions of the child in nineteenth-century France. Beginning with an analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential Emile ou de l’education (1762), this study traces the legacy of poisonous pedagogy in France during the July Monarchy, the Second Empire and the Third Republic. During the nineteenth century the discourse on children was in constant mutation, and opposing perspectives clashed throughout the century, although criticism of poisonous pedagogy became strong only in the last quarter of the century during the Third Republic. Child advocates at this time can be found in many different spheres-education, politics, medicine-but the contribution of literary writers to the discourse on children is perhaps the most dramatic of any group. The harshest criticisms of poisonous pedagogy and its concomitant construction of the child came at the end of the century in the form of two literary works: Jules Valles's L'Enfant (1879), and Jules Renard's Poil de Carotte (1894). By skillfully weaving powerful attacks on the techniques and principles of poisonous pedagogy into their texts, these two writers prefigure the pedagogical discourse of modern-day psychologists and child specialists. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

This dissertation explores the numerous literary representations of the femme de lettres during the first half of the nineteenth century in order to illustrate the complexities of women’s entrance into the male-dominated domain of literature and also to suggest the impact these fictional characters might have had on the reception of actual women writers as well as their omission from the century’s literary canon. The works that will be included in this analysis include: Mme de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, Honoré de Balzac’s Béatrix, La Muse du département and Illusions perdues, Delphine de Girardin’s La Canne de M. de Balzac, Napoline and La joie fait peur and George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, Lettres d’un voyageur and Un Hiver à Majorque. In compiling such diverse works of literature, it becomes clear that both male and female authors from the early nineteenth century were unable to envision a publicly embraced female genius. Although almost all of the fictional femmes de lettres in this study faced a destiny of professional silence, the reasons given for their failures are split between the male and female authors. For the male authors, the woman as a successful intellectual, artist or author was ultimately impossible because of her inability to combine her female body and psyche with the “masculine” pursuit of knowledge. Conversely, the female authors wrote characters whose inability to fully embrace a public literary or artistic career stemmed from society’s unwillingness to tolerate her exceptionality rather than from an inherent disconnect between genius and the female sex. / text