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Le rapport que Baudelaire entretient avec l’élégie est complexe et contradictoire. La « note plaintive » est souvent aussi une « note criarde ». Baudelaire connaît bien la tradition élégiaque, et il rejette l’élégie larmoyante ou « canaille » (c'est-à-dire politique) de l’époque romantique, mais cela ne signifie pas que la plainte soit absente de sa poétique : lorsqu’elle s’exprime, c’est sur un mode oblique, saturnien, ironique, superlatif.

This study examines the ostensibly paradoxical link between machine and emotion as imagined by two very distinct fictions: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s symbolist novel L’Ève future (1886) and Ridley Scott’s dystopian science-fiction movie Blade Runner (1982). Both texts develop the motif of an android equipped with emotionality, more specifically two weeping machine-women: Hadaly and Rachel. Their ability to simulate feeling, or to make others experience emotions, is caught up in a contradictory dynamic that shines through in both corpuses, despite their chronological gap: on the one hand, the emotional machine represents the apogee of bio-robotic engineering, which in turn is motivated by a capitalist and patriarchal desire to subjugate women. On the other hand, the two female robots, through their ability to express emotions, claim a form of autonomy that would put them above their male creators.

“Autobiographical writing and the prose of ideas, as exemplified by Jean-François Marmontel’s Mémoires”Asking what the relationship is between autobiographical writing and the prose of ideas by using Marmontel’s Mémoires as an example amounts to pondering the more general question of the possibility of a so-called teary thought. It is about knowing whether, when one cries or is made to cry, one can still think. During the 18th century, when the public developed a taste for tears despite the triumph of reason in the Age of Enlightenment, it seems that pathos was used for rather crafty and resourceful argumentative purposes. Marmontel’s narrative offers a very distinct example of dialogism, particularly in its structure, which very schematically opposes private life in the first part and public life in the second part by making two contradictory opinions heard through the same voice. This voice is paradoxically unable to see the consequences of the century long ideological battles in the events of the French Revolution. If “the actor’s tears flow from his intellect”, as Diderot claims in the Paradoxe Sur le Comédien, it seems that the philosopher’s ideas come from the same source as his tears. As a result, registering one’s emotions and private life is intertwined with the intellectual and speculative process, for it is a way to establish dialogue with all the major figures of a century which, because of his death in 1799, Marmontel would not live to see.

The question of the relationship between the subject and art in literature, far from being limited to stakes of a thematic nature, also extens to the way in which the subject is affected by the intersection of writing practices with other artistic practices. This study aims to show how the work done by Olivia Rosenthal around Ils ne sont pour rien dans mes larmes originally connects the two aspects of this issue through the development of experimental devices that lead to an extension of the literary practice beyond the book. This practice is examined here through a comparison of the text Les Larmes with the performance and the film by the same name made in collaboration with Laurent Larivière. These different versions of the literary device not only highlight intermodal artistic practices, but also, by putting the subject in the center of the device, they also point out that the dialogue between these practices has a human interest: the diversification of ways in which the subject may have access to the understanding of others and of himself.

La Gran conquista de Ultramar est une traduction castillane marquée par le nouveau souffle donné au projet de croisade au XIIIe siècle. Variante christique du modèle épique, ses héros sont dépeints pétris d’émotions glorifiant l’exploit accompli et éveillant l’empathie. Mais les émotions sont-elles un guide fiable pour l’action et comment les concilier à la raison ? Elles sont l’argument clef de l’appel à la première croisade par Pierre l’Ermite, dans une mise en abîme de l’art de convaincre par la narration. Le corps, instrument de Dieu, est omniprésent en particulier au travers des larmes, contagieuses et héroïques. La fondation des États latins, en particulier les troubles de la succession de Baudouin II et la régence de Mélisende, offre un riche manuel d’édification politique en résonnance avec le XIIIe siècle castillan.