Loin d’être un terme dépassé, « l’engagement » reste, au prix de certains élargissements, une notion opératoire pour l’analyse littéraire, tant en Occident que dans d’autres régions du monde. Repenser l’engagement littéraire comme la « dénonciation d’un inacceptable » permet de mettre au jour et de confronter les stratégies rhétorico-poétiques caractérisant la production littéraire d’auteurs contemporains aussi divers que Waris Dirie, Peter Handke, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Toni Morrison, Taslima Nasreen, Ben Okri, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie et Luis Sepúlveda. Nous cherchons ainsi à mettre en évidence l’intégration par les textes étudiés d’éléments idéaux-typiques de l’engagement littéraire, de l’investissement auctorial à la confrontation au politique. Ces éléments, liés à des discours théoriques dont certains ont parcouru tout le vingtième siècle, sont examinés selon leurs différentes élaborations dans les textes. En effet, c’est en faisant évoluer certains de ses traits idéaux-typiques que les auteurs étudiés renouvellent l’engagement littéraire. On peut dès lors présenter celui-ci comme la dénonciation, pas systématiquement polémique, d’un inacceptable. Cette notion d’« inacceptable », qui suppose entre autres la construction textuelle d’un jugement moral, permet ainsi d’entreprendre non seulement une analyse transhistorique, qui déborde la conceptualisation sartrienne, mais également une approche transculturelle de l’engagement littéraire. / Far from being an outdated notion, "commitment" remains, with some enlargements, a valid concept for literary analysis, in the West as much as in other regions of the world. Rethinking literary commitment as the "denunciation of an unacceptable" allows us to unfold and compare the various rhetorical and poetic strategies characterizing the literary production of contemporary authors as diverse as Waris Dirie, Peter Handke, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Toni Morrison, Taslima Nasreen, Ben Okri, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and Luis Sepúlveda. We seek to highlight the ideal-typical elements of literary commitment in these texts, such as the authorial presence or the advocacy of certain political programmes. These elements are related to various theoretical discourses, some of which have traveled through the twentieth century. We examine their different patterns in the texts, showing that our authors renew literary commitment through the reorganization and alteration of its usual features. Thus, we define literary commitment as the denunciation of an unacceptable that is not necessarily polemical. The notion of "unacceptable", which implies the textual construction of a moral judgment, allows us not only to undertake a transhistorical analysis, which goes beyond the Sartrean conceptualization, but also to engage in a cross-cultural study of literary commitment.

The rise of the middle class to power and influence in European culture and politics in the nineteenth century created the conditions of modern life which to many European intellectuals were distasteful and ominous. They viewed urbanization, commercialization, industrialization and the qualities of life that they engendered, such as anxiety, limitation of freedom, and pervasive mediocrity in cultural expression, as being inimical to the traditional and more reliable values of European civilization or, in some instances, as being incapable of providing the bases for a free and humane existence. This study focuses on the attack on bourgeois society in Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an attempt to expand the definition of “cultural despair,” a term to which it is related. Although others have discussed this general topic, cultural despair, the present study takes for its starting point the limited outlines offered in Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair. This is undertaken for the dual purpose of exposing to historical scrutiny a background theme of European intellectual activity of the former and present centuries, and to help construct a historiographical tool with which the historian can seek to understand more readily the impact of the rise of the middle class and its consequences on the mind of Europe. To reinforce the understanding of the topic of cultural despair, the essay offers four illustrations of cultural despair from traditions of the European intellectual milieu. These are the revolutionary, represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the critique of bourgeois economics; the literary, represented by T. S. Eliot and the critique of modern culture; the Catholic, represented by Emmanuel Mounier and his critique of bourgeois life; and the existentialist, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and the redefinition of freedom in modern life. Finally, this effort concludes with an attempt to synthesize the attitudes of these four men in their relation to the general subject.