Dire et ne pas dire : la Conversion d'un chevalier et la Confession contournée de Montaigne — deux études sur le non-dit dans Le Chevalier au lion et Les Essais

This dissertation deals with two different works The Knight of the lion of Chrétien de Troyes (circa 1170-1180) and The Essays of Montaigne through the theoretical perspective of the unspoken borrowed to Nietzsche's Hinterfragen taken up by Pierre Macherey's A Case of literary production [1st edition, 1966]. In a first part, this work advocates for a fresh reading of Yvain's so-called « madness ». It argues that it is rather a case of spiritual conversion : a Christian Metanoia explained via Foucault's posthumous book Confessions of the Flesh (2018) which tackles texts belonging to early Christianity. Overall, this dissertation pleads in favor of a new analysis of this novel of Chrétien by insisting on the fact that the genre of the novel encompasses theological debates of its time, such as that on penance, while also borrowing other cultural matters other than the sole « matière de Bretagne ». We show that the novel has a transgeneric quality from a literary standpoint but also from a social point of view and from a theological one. It also challenges the divide between human and non-human, while it triggers a debate about knighthood through a reflection involving a gender component. That we are dealing with a « courtly » novel is thereby fundamentally questioned. In a second part, this dissertation deals with the unspoken of Augustine's Confessions within The Essays. It argues, in line with the work of Erich Auerbach, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani or more recently that of Takeshi Kubota that Augustine's Confessions are indeed present in The Essays albeit non explicitly quoted in Montaigne's text. After having tracked the name of Augustine in The Essays, it turns out Montaigne plays with the genre of confession, diverts it and subverts it, offering an anarchic version of it on the verge of being mystical. This work thus all the way through questions the grounds for this augustinian unspoken while reflecting at the same time upon its implications in terms of genre on this hypertext (Gérard Génette) that are The Essays. Overall, through a philosophy of literature approach defined by Pierre Macherey, this work proposes a fresh perspective on the History of French Literature in a revised epistemological frame which takes seriously the religious literature to engage both those works. The unspoken theoretical angle allows to study them by an in-depth questioning of the silence that has allowed their existence.