The goal of this thesis is to shed light upon a particular style of writing, namely the rhetoric of the extreme, which characterizes the oeuvre of Anne Hebert. Many facets of this rhetoric are reflected in her work: the use of words referring explicitly to the notion of the extreme ("toujours", "jamais", etc.); formation of isotopies (extreme wealth or extreme poverty); dualistic themes; ethical polarisation; the elaboration of strongly contrasting characters (Bernard and Heloise in the novel Heloise); and the use of the trope which unifies two extremes: the oxymoron. / Rhetoric, in the modern sense of the word (following the work of the Groupe Mu, Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes) enables, on the one hand, a lexical analysis of the vocabulary of the extreme (such as "toujours", "rien", "pas un", etc.), and on the other, through the character analysis of Elisabeth Rolland, heroine of Kamouraska, renders the repeated use of the oxymoron meaningful. / Finally, the adoption of a holistic viewpoint highlights an evolution in her style. Given the possible juxtapositions inherent in a Manichean universe (opposition in her earliest and latest works, union in her three novels from the 1970s), two different worldviews are revealed which correspond, for the author, to two stylistic modes.

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