Les revues culturelles, lieux de la parole littéraire :
regards métacritiques dans Liberté, L’Inconvénient, Contre-jour et Spirale
Whilst Literature Studies are professionalizing and culture becomes less and less prominent in traditional media, literary reviews offer a distinctive voice for criticism. Liberté, L’Inconvénient, Contre-jour and Spirale offer intellectuals, critics and academics alike an adjoining space for the practice of cultural criticism, which positions itself somewhere between scientific publications and mass media. Whether they identify themselves primarily as hermeneutics experts, mediators or scholars, the critics who participate in those reviews all avail themselves of a literary word. Each chapter of this thesis will examine one of the four publications named above, retracing their history and analyzing meta-critical texts published in their pages to outline the differences and similarities between their conceptions of literary criticism, and its function and application. Methods used to conceptualize reviews as groups are akin to the works of Andrée Fortin and Michel Lacroix. By analyzing the recurring themes, the filiations (as Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe and Anne Caumartin’s works exemplify) and the rhetoric (particularly the notion of ethos as developed by Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth Amossy) of these literary reviews, this thesis will reveal what constitutes, for the critics studied here, the singularity and the value of the literary word.
Quebec litterature Literary magazines and journals Literary criticism History of ideas Liberté (journal) Spirale (journal) Contre-jour (journal)