Le zele autobiographique dans Aurélia de Gérard de Nerval
Autobiographical zeal in Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval

Summary/Abstract: The critique devoted to Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia, published in the previous issue of this journal, begins a thematic sketch of the work by examining two functions of "pain" in the narrative, a "constituting" function and another "instituting" one. The analysis proposed here rather questions its inscription in the poetics of the genre of autobiography. From a comparative perspective combining three angles of attack in the author's critical fist, the aesthetics of reception, narratology, and enunciative linguistics, this article draws, starting from Lejeune's Autobiographical Pact, a line of demarcation between Aurélia and Rousseau's Confessions. This distance is measured by the deployment of certain categories of narratological analysis indicating the singularity of the Nervalian work vis-a-vis the generic model. Even if Aurélia aligns perfectly with the codes of autobiography defined by Lejeune, it nevertheless goes beyond the geometry of the genre by an aesthetic project founded in urgency, a fragmentary and heterogeneous composition of the "I" author-narrator, a narrative temporality rooted in an instant torn from the present moment, to be part of a more complex poetic writing. Thus, the Nervalian narrative escapes the schema of the configuration of the genre in its Lejeunian conception. If identity and the autobiographical pact form constitutive elements of the unity of the autobiography as a "contractual genre", these criteria, which are considered normative, nevertheless seem to focus exclusively on "publication"; They are therefore far from founding a homogeneous literary category, worthy of a science of "poetics".

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