This Master's thesis is based on Nathalie Sarraute's book Enfance, published in 1983. One would be tempted to classify this work among other autobiographies ... if the author were not opposed to this idea. Nevertheless, we will attempt to discover what category this book belongs to in our study. / In the introduction we give conventional and classical definitions of both the autobiography and the novel. In the first chapter we analyse Enfance as an autobiography, according to the criteria of certain theoreticians such as Jean Starobinski, Elisabeth Bruss and Philippe Lejeune. We shall also compare it with similar genres, such as memoirs, the fictional autobiography and the selfportrait. In the second chapter we will read this work as a novel, comparing it to other novels by Sarraute as well as to an autobiographical novel. / After having examined the different readings of this work, we conclude that Enfance does not belong to any of the proposed categories in its entirety. The author, therefore, has given us a new genre which finds itself somewhere between an autobiography and a novel.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.