This thesis is dedicated to a in depth study of the notion of pleasure such as it appears in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Focusing upon a very restraint core of poems, the analysis unfurls according to the methodic tools provided by Michael Riffaterre, literary theorician and critic, in his Semiotics of poetry. Basing myself on a shrewd selection of texts, number of which were almost completely left out by baudelairean studies, my goal was to highlight the semiotical span owned by the different illustrations of pleasure in our poet's work. Weaving significant threads, first between signs and then between the text and its intertextuality, I achieved a detailed and global canvas of pleasure's descriptive system as it underlies Les Fleurs du Mal. The analysis defines pleasure's expression as a dichotomic construction. First opposing itself to reality, then to illusion and then to danger and others, it eventually builds itself against the notion of grief through bipolarization, caught into an insolvable cycle overhung by its evanescence. Interpretation allows us to draw interesting perspectives concerning the poet's epistemological choices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.32901 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Cabello-Chauveau, Inti Jean-Christophe. |
| Contributors | Lane-Mercier, Gillian (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| 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: 001846119, proquestno: MQ75219, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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