This study participates in a tendency of Rabelaisian criticism to consider the Pantagruelian text as a weaving of borrowed forms which rcho surrounding discourses. On thrse grounds, we argue that epideictic rloquence, which comprises praise and blame, forms up a network of recognisable passages. This corpus, which, frora the Gargantua to the Quart Livre, brings together pieces eclectic as much in claim as in structure, is tackled from a generic perspective and analysed in light of their common rhetorical components: dispositio, elocutio and inventio. In accordance with the aesthetic of imitation, which informs the making of texts in the Renaissance, Rabelais recasts models available from his predecessors. However, these textual reshufflings, whether it be a matter of early XVIth Century literary compositions or rehabilitated classical works, is effected through parody. But while the re-evaluation through laughter, in the cases of the Gargantua and the Pantagruel, concerns the occasional poetry of the rhetoriqueurs, parody is brought about within the genre itself in the Tiers and Quart Livres, which comprise paradoxical encomia only. Our interest here is in the modes of parody and the conditions for the provoking of laughter in which can be seen the will to reinvigorate a genre, which had by then become strictly codified. From the first two books to the last a certain way of thinking is being established. With conceptual space allowing such great breadth, the paradoxical encomium introduces into epideictic rhetoric contradiction and equivocation, thereby freeing that genre from its formal constraints. This propensity to paradox is significant for the rhetoric of praise and the textual representation of man. And yet, it is through the parody of the epideictic genre and the often grotesque figures it engenders, that Rabelais participates in the oratory genre, - an anthropology indeed, and, as such, a tool to conceive of man - which conveys the highest conception of the human.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.19675 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| 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 | Master of Arts (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: 002022700, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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