This thesis explores the limits of fictional language by studying the work of Jewish American writer-critics, novelists who significantly engaged with literary criticism, and critics who experimented with the novel or short fiction. These writer-critics all believed in Literature: they believed that literature could effect social change and educate the masses; or they believed in literature as an art-form, one that exposed the myths underlying American society, or that revealed something fundamental about the human condition. Yet it is because they believed so stridently in the concept of Literature that they turned to non-fiction. Writing fiction exposed problems that Literature could not resolve. They describe being haunted by “preoccupations” that they could not exhaust in fiction alone. They apologetically refer to their critical texts as “by-products” of their creative writing. Writer-critics were forced to decide what the limits of fiction were, and they adopted other types of writing to supplement these unexpected gaps in fiction's power. This dissertation contains four chapters and an introduction. The introduction establishes the methodological difficulties in writing about author-critics, and introduces a set of principles to guide the study. Chapter 1 approaches Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). I argue that many of the novel's difficulties result from Cahan's desire to present the way that ideology shades our understanding of reality while minimizing direct narratorial intrusions. Chapter 2 studies how politics affected the work of Mike Gold, Moishe Nadir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In all three writers, literature emerges as a kind of ersatz-politics, a space for the dispossessed to imagine the political. In the end, the political novel only reinforces the fictionality. Chapter 3 is a study of Leslie Fiedler's problematic novel, The Second Stone. While critics have seen the novel as a kind of game, I propose reading the novel as an earnest expression of Fiedler's vision of literature as a conversation. Chapter 4 turns to Cynthia Ozick and Susan Sontag. A cumulative reading of their fiction and criticism shows the deep twinning of their fiction and critical thought. For both writers true knowledge comes only through the imagination. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Ce travail arpente le domaine de ce qu’Albert Thibaudet nommait « la critique des artistes » pour montrer que, au cours de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, ce genre de critique a constitué un véritable laboratoire permettant de sortir des impasses auxquelles avait conduit la vision autotélique de l’œuvre proposée par la critique formaliste et par la néo-avant-garde. Dans la première partie de l’étude on s’interroge sur l’évolution de la critique formaliste, en envisageant le tournant linguistique des années 1960 comme l’aboutissement naturel d’une révolution culturelle qui a eu lieu à la fin du XIXe siècle. En menant une analyse comparée entre la France et l’Italie, on observe les deux critiques formalistes en-dehors de leur rapport de filiation, et on brosse un modèle transnational qui montre qu’elles partagent la même conception de la littérature postulée par la néo-avant-garde. La deuxième partie du travail est consacrée à l’analyse d’une tendance relevable dans la critique des écrivains à partir de l’après-guerre, où une étude purement intrinsèque de l’œuvre d’art est mise en discussion. On propose une analyse comparée de la critique littéraire de Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Philippe Muray, Tommaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini et Pier Vittorio Tondelli, afin de souligner que leur pratique critique ne s’est pas limitée à une déclaration personnelle de poétique, mais elle a ouvert une voie alternative à l’exaspération des positions théoriques formalistes, en anticipant ou en prônant le dépassement d’une vision autoréférentielle de l’œuvre qui a caractérisé la littérature de la fin du XXe siècle aussi bien en France qu’en Italie. / My dissertation covers the field of what Albert Thibaudet called “the critique of artists” in order to show that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this form of criticism has given readers a different perspective on literature in comparison to that of the formalists and the neo-avant-garde. In the first part of my study, I examine the evolution of formalist criticism in the twentieth century, considering the linguistic turn of the 1960s as the natural outcome of a cultural revolution which took place at the end of the nineteenth century. By conducting a comparative study between France and Italy, I attempt to outline a transnational model which shows that the two formalist critiques share the same understanding of the literature postulated by the neo-avant-garde. The second part of my thesis is devoted to the study of one of the main tendencies in the critique of the writers since the Second World War, a tendency that called into question a purely intrinsic study of the work of art. Here, I propose a comparative study of the literary critique of Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Philippe Muray, Tommaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pier Vittorio Tondelli, in order to underline that their critical practice has not limited itself to a personal declaration of their poetic views, but it has truly opened up an alternative approach to formalist theoretical positions. They refused to speak of literature as a secluded world, and by doing so they anticipated one of the most important features of the literature of the end of the twentieth century, both in France and in Italy.