Styles, apories et impostures

Abstract

Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand : Style, apories & impostures... Why such an incredible amount of recent publications about style, while so few of them are actually able to project a new light on the field ? The first reason lies in the absence of a real critical sense which would lead to adopt linguistic terminologies although the epistemological background of linguistics is not really mastered. The second reason is the contempt towards literature — as a personal experience — and history — as a type of general causality — since the advent of structuralism. A third reason may be added : the constraints of the French official recruiting selection process for teachers, which assumed a continuing parallelism between the grammatical form and the superficial content of the texts. The double aim of this paper is to suggest that no new wine can be pured in such old vessels without being wasted, and to explain how stylistic readings must take in account the historicity of the text and the subjective historicity of the reader himself, far beyond the simple use of a technological and impersonal vocabulary. Here are the ethics of reading.