Rock’n’roll has specific aesthetic — a set of invisible rules that each young rock musician accepts as a given. If one examines the history of rock’n’roll starting from 1950s, one will notice that there was a clear division in rock that separates the rock’n’roll of 1950s from rock of the second half of the 1960s and beyond—the rock that we know today. This thesis investigates how the visual aesthetic of rock’n’roll evolved from its origins in the 1950s blues tradition, how it was formed in the second half of the 1960s, and how it was modified in the first half of the 1970s. In particular, it focuses on the role played by the British band Rolling Stones as mediators between the 1950s early rock aesthetics rooted in the blues tradition and the Beats’ ideology and the subsequent generations of American rockers who emerged in the 1970s, such as the band New York Dolls. The final section of the thesis investigates how the New York Dolls adopted and transmitted the aesthetics of authenticity pioneered by the Stones to the new wave of punk and grunge bands. Although the thesis considers the music produced within this milieu, its primary focus is on the visual presentation and promotion of the new aesthetic through stage performances, publicity and the medium of television.

La présente thèse se propose de répertorier et d’analyser les références au classicisme français et le rôle qu’il a joué dans la critique littéraire roumaine, depuis la Révolution de Tudor Vladimirescu (1821) jusqu’à la chute du régime communiste (1989). Après avoir replacé la réception du modèle dans le cadre de l’histoire de la Roumanie et de ses relations politiques et intellectuelles avec la France (notamment par une étude de la traduction des classiques français en langue roumaine) et après une analyse généalogique et esthétique du concept de « classicisme français », on s’est efforcé de restituer, dans le contexte de chaque grande époque de la modernité roumaine, puis, pour chacune de ces périodes, à travers l’étude plus spécifique de quelques écrivains et critiques choisis comme les plus représentatifs en cette matière, la persistance et le renouvellement de l’image du classicisme français, lui-même fréquemment perçu et analysé comme l’expression nationale d’un classicisme « universel ». Ce cheminement chronologique a permis de dégager les trois usages majeurs que la critique roumaine a faits de la référence à cette notion : celui de modèle pour une création littéraire qui se cherchait, celui de critère pour son évaluation et celui d’enjeu dans le cadre des débats suscités par les courants nouveaux qui auront animé la vie littéraire roumaine depuis son émergence jusqu’à la presque fin du XXe siècle. / The present thesis proposes to catalogue and analyze references to French classicism and the role it has played in the Romanian literary criticism, from the Wallachian Uprising of 1821, led by Tudor Vladimirescu, to the fall of the communist regime (1989). After placing the reception of the model in the context of the history of Romania and its political and intellectual relations with France (including a study of the translation of French classics in Romanian) and after a genealogical and aesthetic analysis of the "French classicism" concept, we tried to reconstruct, in the context of each period of Romanian modernity, and, for each of these periods, through the more specific study of certain writers and critics considered the most representative in this matter, the persistence and renewal of the image of French classicism, itself frequently perceived and analyzed as the national expression of a "universal" classicism. This chronological process made it possible to identify the three manners in which the Romanian criticism used the reference to this notion: that of a model for a literary creation that sought itself, that of criterion for its evaluation and that of subject within the framework of debates aroused by the new currents that have animated the Romanian literary life since its emergence until the end of the twentieth century.