The present literary production in France indicates the return of the subject, which has been proclaimed dead since the New Novel. With the proliferation of autobiographical texts in the nineteen-eighties, a generalized movement towards an aesthetic genre valuing this particularity was noticed. This proliferation renders the scope of this literary form immense. It covers a range from strictly historical texts, including autobiographies, memoirs and intimate journals to semi-referential texts, qualified as autobiographical fictions, "autofictions" or again "factual fictions". Midway between the autobiography and the novel, autofiction, this little studied literary practice, inaugurates a new writing form which we believe constitutes one of the boldest modern incarnations of the writing of the self. This thesis considers the possibility of a correlation existing in the problematics of autofiction and those of Jewishness in writing. Already off-centered, the Jewish writer, can be seen as the emblematic figure of the writer himself. Drawing on a corpus of four writers (Serge Doubrovsky, Marcel Benabou, Regine Robin and Patrick Modiano), we examine the structure, as well as its functionning rules, woven through texts sharing Jewish authorship. These writers pose, each from his own specific perspective, the problem of Jewishness in writing. This correlation brings to light the exemplary nature of these texts with regards to the more generalized and thus far unprecedented strategy that is autofiction. The intersection of these historically marked problems, autofiction and Jewishness in writing, leads us inevitably to further reflection upon the tragedy of modernity, the Shoah and its omnipresent shadow in the works of our corpus.

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This thesis examines awkwardness between characters in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. It offers the first full-length study of awkwardness in literary fiction, and provides a new prism through which to analyse many major characters in Proust's novel, and, crucially, their interactions. While the word "awkwardness" poses translation challenges, the thesis identifies a rich lexicon of French terms used by Proust to denote various aspects of the phenomenon: through close analysis of passages containing these terms, a coherent vision of awkwardness and its importance in the novel emerges. Awkwardness occurs in very different types of relationship - family, social, friendship and love - because, Proust stresses, human interaction is rarely easy. This latter point is not a new argument, but by focusing directly on the feelings of awkwardness which arise, original insights can be made about the specific challenges of communication, cohesion and desire in the Recherche. The thesis explores the degrees of togetherness and separation Proust depicts, and compares well-known scenes and neglected moments to their mutual illumination. We find that awkwardness is essential to the novel's depiction of society in a state of rapid flux - the consequence of accelerated social change is escalated awkwardness - and that uncomfortable encounters with other people develop the protagonist's relation with his own mind.

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In the context of a renascent interest in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, this thesis proposes a close examination of one of his less studied texts, the study of Gustave Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille (1971-72). The analysis focuses on theoretical developments that emerge from Sartre's biographical enquiry, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach combining a consideration of literary theory and literary history with the perspective of Sartre's philosophy of subjectivity. L'Idiot is situated amongst a wide variety of texts by Sartre, from Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1948) to the Critique de la raison dialectique (1960), identifying theoretical innovations within Sartre's understanding of the subject (ch. 1), his social theory (ch. 2), his theory of the imaginary (ch. 3), of literary production (ch. 4) and of reading (ch. 5). Additionally, hitherto largely unexplored passages highlight Sartre's reflections on the situation of the late 1960s. Previous analyses of the philosophical innovations presented in L'Idiot have often focused on the strictly theoretical passages in the biography. The present thesis also concentrates on the 'imagined' scenes presented throughout the text. Read as an integral part of Sartre's method, it is suggested that the dramatization facilitated by the biographical format is an integral part of the theoretical enquiry. Despite the lack of explicit referencing provided by Sartre, the biography is explored in its open character, identifying a series of resonances and similarities with a diverse range of authors. The different chapters consider thinkers whose relationship with Sartre has received little or no attention (such as Pierre Bourdieu and Walter Benjamin), or whose work resonates with Sartre in ways that have so far gone unnoticed (Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Blanchot).

Since Elaine Showalter's proposal of "gynocriticism", a considerable amount of work has been done in English-speaking countries to establish the existence o f a "female tradition" in literature. In France, where feminist critics have focussed on new ways "to write the feminine", there has been relatively little interest in reexamining the production of lesser-known women writers. The canon of French literature remains comparatively unchallenged, and few people are aware o f the many women who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. This dissertation is a contribution to the rereading of three of such authors, looking at the representation of femininity in relation to feminism. Three novels, one by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, one by Marcelle Tinayre and one by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. The careers of these "femmes de lettres", all established before World War I, were comparable, yet two o f them have been forgotten. These novelists remained ambivalent in relation to feminist efforts at that time to achieve the emancipation o f women. Despite their own relative freedom and lack of conformity in their lives, and the criticism o f established norms embedded in their narratives, all three kept their distance from feminism as a movement. The three texts compared here all have conservative endings, in spite of other elements that challenge the status quo. A t the core of their ambiguity is the tension between two concepts which remain in conflict today: on one hand the feminist agenda aimed at greater freedom and autonomy for women is based on the idea that gender roles are constructed, whereas on the other hand the concept of femininity is inseparable from the idea of an "essential" woman, represented, in the early 1900's in France by a particular nationalist concept of the French Woman. A close look at critical texts published in the first part o f the twentieth century shows the weight of that concept in the evaluation o f women's writing of that period. The growth in the number and reputation o f women writers ("femmes de lettres") was accompanied by a declaration o f the need to maintain French femininity ("l'etre femme"), and individual women authors like Colette, Delarue-Mardrus and Tinayre were caught in a dilemma. They all proclaimed their allegiance to the French ideal of femininity, while contributing to its denial and renewal by their own performance as successful women writers. Their representation of femininity as performed in their novels (as it was in their lives) shows the various ways in which it was possible to negociate a compromise between being feminine and challenging that concept through writing. These texts also demonstrate that women's literary production of that period in France is far more diversified than standard anthologies of French literature would lead us to believe. Colette appeals to reader's senses and aims to seduce, Tinayre appeals to reason and aims to convince, while Delarue-Mardrus appeals to the emotions and aims to move. All three, combine the "feminine" and the "feminist" in different ways, constructing literary models that represent a range of responses to a similar problem: how to remain a woman while contesting the notion of "woman".

This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction. / A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper. / The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.