Abstract EN:

The thesis aims at analyzing what is at stake in the writing practice and in the writer's destiny in the contemporary literary field. Writing is apprehended under its two complementary aspects : first, as the intersubjective experience of a creative subject; then, as the product of a social system that can promote the practice itself and acknowledge the writer. The thesis is built into two parts. The first volume sets the framewok of the research and retrospectively surveys the decisive moments in the history of the book and of the writer. A description of the contemporary literary field, of its rules and of the role of its many actors is completed by a sociological portrait of the writers who compose it. This portrait was elaborated with the help of the data of a questionnaire filled in by the writers themselves. The second volume analyzes the writing practice, its meaning, its form - material as well as symbolic - from the contents of a series of thorough discussions with recognized and prospective writers. The conditions required to become a writer- that is to say the stage leading to the publication of the text - constitute the last part of the research. This comparative approach of the two populations of writers enables us to boing to light the obvious and unconscious functioning rules of both the literary interaction and production.