Confession et éloquence romantiques chez Alfred de Musset

• Main Author: Picard, Vincent
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: French
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2003
• Subjects: Literature; Modern literature; Musset, Alfred de (1810-1857); Romance literature; Sand, George (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) (1804-1876)
• ISBN: 9780612886735; 0612886735

This thesis presents a rhetorical analysis of Alfred de Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siècle. The methodology used for the purpose of the analysis gives a certain originality to this dissertation. It is quite unusual among the literary scholars to associate rhetoric to a text that is typically romantic by its form and content, rhetoric being traditionally used for discourse analysis only, not for a novel. What our research has shown us is that nobody has ever approached, with a rhetorical eye, that novel which, moreover, has almost never been studied nor commented. The main idea for this paper was that the literary genre of the confession, because of its religious and judicial origins, necessarily implies a desire of persuasion. To obtain total redemption of his crimes or sins, one must convince the other that he regrets what he has done, that he acted against his own will, that he suffers from what he did, that he acted without knowing his actions or words would hurt someone; one can even say that he is the victim of false accusations, etc. Rhetoric is then called to play an important part in this justification and persuasion enterprise. That is why we came with this hypothesis that there was in Musset's novel a persuasion mechanism working to gain the support of the reader toward the narrator's thesis. This dissertation tries to emphasize the persuasion mechanism by doing a rhetorical analysis of the text.