Figures de l'instabilité dans l'oeuvre de W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863). Étude stylistique. - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
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Figures of Instability in the Works of W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863). A Stylistic Study

Figures de l'instabilité dans l'oeuvre de W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863). Étude stylistique.

Résumé

The profuse work of William Makepeace Thackeray is almost forgotten today. Such is the injustice that this book aims to repair by highlighting a singular style, marked by instability. Through the fluctuations of various ethos created by an ironic and satirical moralist, the Thackerayan narrative is disrupted by variations, turbulences and discordances. Language is troubled by bits of foreign discourse, neologisms, and unpredictable, incongruous tone breaks. Parodical detours, caricatural magnifications, crises of social protocols and playful, sometimes cynical denudations question the realist project and above all celebrate literary deception. This study undertakes to analyse stylistic instabilities through a large, diversified corpus, made up of thousands of pages that Thackeray published over some forty years – articles, chronicles, novels or essays. Of course, in an effort of contextualisation, it does justice to the Victorian social, historical and economic context, of which the Thackerayan text is to a large extent a reflection, or at least a refraction, but also a product, in terms of realistic aesthetics, reception and relation to an audience, or discourse constrained by censorship. However, priority is given to close reading through a cross-over stylistic approach, and accordingly hinges on a flexible methodology that attests to the plasticity of stylistics. It resists sealing institutional borders and borrows its objects or tools from multiple fields of literary analysis but also human and social sciences. Such eclectic and organic approach is able to follow the meanders of a discursive singularity, the Thackerayan mode of writing, thanks to the most varied resources: the categories of classical rhetoric, the taxonomy of figures, the analysis of literary genres (studies on the novel by Ian Watt or Marthe Robert), narratology from a structuralist perspective (Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette), the modelling of humour and irony (John Morreal, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson), reception theory (Hans Jauss, Wolfgang Iser), or pragmatics and philosophy of language (John Austin, John Searle, Herbert Paul Grice, George Lakoff, Jean-Jacques Lecercle), not forgetting linguistics, the basis of textual micro-analysis, as underlined by Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short. Depending on the textual trait identified, this polymorphous perspective is complemented with more specific outlooks, based, for example, on a stylistic approach to effects, whether "structural" for Michael Riffaterre or "semiotic" for George Molinié, without neglecting the subjectivist perspective of Leo Spitzer. This exploration of Thackerayan texts also relies on theories that were not specifically, or solely, developed with the aim of enlightening literature, and as such the writing of the present work has made possible a fertile, albeit punctual, encounter with the thought of Gilles Deleuze.
L’oeuvre profuse de William Makepeace Thackeray, écrivain britannique contemporain de Charles Dickens, est aujourd’hui quasi oubliée. Cet ouvrage vise à réparer une telle injustice en faisant valoir une écriture singulière, hantée par la notion d’instabilité. Au gré des fluctuations d’éthos créés par un moraliste volontiers ironiste et satiriste, la narration se perturbe de variations, de turbulences et de discordances. La langue se trouble d’apports étrangers, de néologismes, de ruptures de ton imprévisibles et incongrues. Plurielle et fluide, l’approche retenue ici mobilise les catégories de la rhétorique classique et sa taxonomie des figures, mais aussi la narratologie, les théories du style, de l’humour ou de l’ironie, l’esthétique de la réception, la philosophie du langage, la pragmatique, la linguistique. Elle s’inscrit dans les études stylistiques contemporaines.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-04004630 , version 1 (25-02-2023)

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Copyright (Tous droits réservés)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04004630 , version 1

Citer

Jacqueline Fromonot. Figures de l'instabilité dans l'oeuvre de W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863). Étude stylistique.. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021, 978-2-7535-8198-2. ⟨hal-04004630⟩
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