This dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems. / text

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Cette thèse est consacrée à l’œuvre abondante et originale de l’écrivain contemporain Éric Chevillard. Son objet est de cerner l’isotopie du cliché dans l’écriture chevillardienne où le rapport à la littérature passe essentiellement par la manipulation des stéréotypes, des topoï et des idées reçues. Ainsi, la contestation de la banalité apparaît comme une des constantes majeures de ses textes. Pour en signaler les caractéristiques et les modalités principales, le travail s’organise autour de trois axes : le rôle du cliché verbal dans l’organisation stylistique du récit, puis l’observation de sa dimension intertextuelle à travers le cliché citationnel qui dénonce la banalisation de la référence littéraire, et, enfin, la remise en question de la doxa qui régit la société moderne. Cette triple manipulation du cliché définit la posture singulière d’Éric Chevillard au sein du champ littéraire contemporain fondée sur les notions de l’écart, de la distance ironique et du rejet du réalisme prosaïque en littérature. Le dernier mouvement de l’étude vise à démontrer qu’au delà de sa propre fiction, le cliché est mobilisé par le Chevillard critique comme un des critères essentiels de la qualité littéraire que ce soit sur son blog, L’Autofictif, ou dans sa chronique hebdomadaire dans Le Monde des livres. C’est là que le cliché acquiert véritablement la valeur isotopique dans la mesure où sa contestation assure la cohésion de l’œuvre entière. / This PhD thesis is devoted to the prolific and original work of the contemporary writer Éric Chevillard. Its subject is to define the isotopy of cliché in Chevillard's writing, in which the relationship to literature mostly goes through the manipulation of stereotypes, topoi and accepted ideas. Thus, questioning the banality appears like one of the major constants of his texts. In order to indicate the characteristics and main modalities, the work is organized around three axis: the role of verbal cliché in the narrative stylistic organization, then the observation of its intertextual dimension through the cliché of quotation which denounces the trivialization of literary reference, and, finally, the questioning of the doxa ruling modern society. This triple manipulation of cliché defines Éric Chevillard singular position in a contemporary literary field based on notions of gap, ironical distance, and rejection of prosaic realism in literature. The last movement of the study aims at demonstrate that, beyond its own fiction, the cliché is being called on by Chevillard-critique as one of the essential criteria of literary quality, both on his blog, L’Autofictif, or in his weekly column in Le Monde des livres. This is where the cliché truly acquires the isotopic value insofar as its contestation provides the entire work cohesion.