Autorité et constitution d’autorité poétique dans la première modernité : Pétrarque et Joachim Du Bellay

Abstract

Throughout his work, Petrarch stages an author, guiding fundamentally the reader’s perception and comprehension of his texts. Using textual figurations of the author, Petrarch aims at giving evidence to his conceptual authority and to his normativity for future poetic imitation. In this context, Petrarch relies pre-eminently on two dispositifs: sodalization and singularization. That is, on the one hand the author can appear as a singularly creative individual; on the other hand he can stylize himself as a constitutive member of a social and cultural community. In his perface to L’Olive, Joachim Du Bellay not only refers to Petrarch’s use of singularization and sodalization when conceiving the author as social individual and as poetic authority. Du Bellay also intensifies and amplifies the Italian model, confirming thus the crucial role of the construction of an “author” for the debate about poetic authority in the Early Modern period.