This thesis aims at defining the argumentative terms and strategies of the rhetoric of praise in printed collected eulogies of women of the first half of the XVIth Century, both in collections of famous women (which celebrate exceptional feminine figures) and apologies of the female sex (which defend womankind through praise). The inquiry starts with the first French printed translation of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, entitled De la louenge et vertu des nobles et cleres dames (1493), and ends with the Fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe foeminin (1555) by Francois de Billon, who provides the first historic panorama of the encomiastic tradition. Its specificity lies in the combination of two types of collective eulogy, which up to now have been separately analyzed but which in fact deserve to be taken up in a single interpretative gesture. Our approach, that of rhetoric, is founded in composition manuals and treatises on ancient eloquence, as well as recent theory on argumentation. Unlike other studies which take the rhetorical approach, this thesis deals with a relatively short time span, about fifty years, which allows a reading of the texts in their historical and literary contexts. Through the vantage points of inventio and dispositio, this thesis shows how a discourse praising women collectively was built, at a time when women formed the crux of contradicting discourses and the centre of a topics that crystallized those tensions. Beyond this uncertain discursive situation, this thesis also claims to bring to light a neglected aspect of eulogy: its function as definition of object praised. It offers, therefore, a reflection on epideictic rhetoric from a perspective of the poetics of literary genre. This is seen as a space that is propitious to the exploration of ethical stakes, such as the valorization of individual feminine figures, the fashioning of the author's persona or the introduction of secondary objectives which bear new values.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115600 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Breitenstein, Renée-Claude. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003132408, proquestno: AAINR66285, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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