Abstract EN:

The subject matter of this thesis, refusing the division of the pastorale into genre, is the knowledge of a figure - the shepherd - whose experience defines the religious and critical dimension. In the first part ("the shepherd of signs". A political and religious figure of interpretation), is postulated the existence of a semiotics of the sheperd, the link between his knowledge and a metaphysics of love: a christian figure of the shepeard'calender a political figure conjured up by the educational dimension of the poets of the renaissance or of the classic age (la bruyere, fenelon, la fontaine), eventually, a fictional figure, through which the aristocracy of the early 17th century revisists the meaning of the neo-platonicism that fostered the representation of perfection in the 16th century (l'astree). In the second part (the poet's experientia and love. Attempt at an anthropological analysis of the pastoral logos (1504-1627) is set the hypothesis of a pastoral topics, constituted by the imitation of poets through five texts: sannazar's arcadia, longus's amours pastorales, montemayor's diana, tasse's aminta, guarini's pastor fido. Underlining the founding dimension of the writing of the eulogy in the locus amoenus it analyses the matrix of the pastoral hermeneutics of desire and of the link between language and body on historical grounds. The third part (hermeneutics and criticism. The body, political and religious field of the pastoral experience. 1571-1631) aims at demontrating how pastoral topics had a fundamental critical dimension in the period of the building of french absolutism; how it enables the writing time of its own which will lie, if need be, in the eroticised practice of mourning. In between chapters, a "passage", whose notion is borrowed from walter benjamin, allows an investigation on the signification of ancient experience in the period considered and to establish similitudes between different aspects of the notions tackled.