Abstract EN:

This work studies the paradoxical nature of cultural transmission through the particular prism of contemporary poetry. On the one hand, this poetry is conscious of being shaped and informed by the culture of the past; on the other, it actively intervenes in the shaping of that culture and thus plays a central part in its transmission and survival. In order to understand the stakes of this tension, the dissertation analyses representations of Antiquity and the figure of anachronism in the works of the French poet and philosopher Michel Deguy and the Russian-American poet and literary critic Joseph Brodsky. These two authors have very different cultural, political and linguistic backgrounds and their views on cultural transmission are correspondingly antithetical; while Deguy insists on “reinventing” the meaning of “relics” from the past through a play of poetic “profanation,” Brodsky believes that memory must be carried by forms and works aiming to recreate “cultural continuity. ” A comparative analysis of these two poets’ writings allows us to show that their relation to the culture of the past is heavily influenced by the circumstances they encounter in the present. The thesis demonstrates how their respective selection of specific elements drawn from the tradition of Antiquity and the use of different poetic devices to integrate these elements within their poetic texts are historically determined, and correspond to diverse ways of “reading” and interrogating the present world. Each of these poets creates his own particular “anachronisation system” through the intellectual and poetic gesture of transmitting the culture of Antiquity. A close examination of these different systems takes us to the core of a peculiar encounter between past and present, and helps us understand the relations that exemplary texts and, more generally, contemporary poetics maintain with culture as a whole.