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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.102151 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Pinson, Guillaume, 1973- |
| 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 | © Guillaume Pinson, 2005 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002334413, proquestno: AAINR25229, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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