The “mandarin paradox” is a famous philosophical problem, mentioned in Balzac’s Père Goriot. It takes the form of a question: “what [would you] do if [you] could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin somewhere in China by mere force of wishing it, and without stirring from Paris ?” This paradox examines our conscience and the moral ability to bear an unpunished crime. Balzac, and other writers after him, wrongfully attributed this problem to Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. In our paper, we present the history of the “mandarin paradox”, showing the way Balzac reused and recreated this moral question to construct a new literary character: the arriviste. This young man, searching for a place in high society, dares to “kill the mandarin” and to build his career on this murder. Hence, his arrivisme relates to the “mandarin paradox”, notably in the Félicien Champsaur’s novel, L’Arriviste.

According to the critics, this novel by Aragon was a turning point in his works. While the novel series known as The Real World was allegedly defined as a form of (Socialist) realism, Aragon then went beyond the strict boundaries of the novel as a genre in his late period. In this novel, the rules of enunciation play a major part in the blurry building‐up of a semantic structure. The structure relies on internal monologue – even, to widen the scope, on free indirect speech or literary devices giving free course to subjectivity. The term “intersubjectivity” may even be used, as it is quite obvious the fictionalised biography of French painter Théodore Géricault is closely intertwined with Aragon’s own life. It relates the career of an artist struggling with the torments of History, as well as the awaken ing of his political and moral conscience.

Written in the context of the late 1970s, Samuel Beckett’s mirlitonnades poems evoke the possible return of the old ghosts of the past, which, if one is not careful, will once again affect and infect the present and compromise the future. Samuel Beckett’s quest for the worst has historical sources – to be found in the Second World War – as well as literary sources, namely Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which the destiny of Edgar both interested and moved him. According to philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to whom one of the poems of mirlitonnades is dedicated, certain outsiders and artists are bearers of ‘‘human qualities" that are "contrary to social requirements". Thus they may be able to prevent the worst from happening again.

The return of the theme of the Great War in literature imposes on the contemporary reader a double heritage: that of grief and guilt. The postmemory rediscovery of loss is therefore accompanied by a prise de conscience of forgetting or indifference, in family memory and History, in relatoon to war’s anonymous victims. In the fiction compared in this paper, Douze lettres au soldat inconnu by Olivier Barbarant and Visites aux vivants by Cathie Barreau, loss is thematized by deconstructing the specter of the Great War. The two authors attempt to libertate the specters from the aura of anxiety, on the one hand in the hope of taming the past, on the other to give voice, as well individual integrity, to the forgotten subjects of the Great War.

This article explores the motif of return as a poetics of the past René Char’s most famous collection of poems : Fureur et mystère. This  constant movement of return reveals the thematic importance of the past for Char.  If the presence of the past can first be seen through the themes and the formal structure of the poetic writing – verbal tenses, figures of speech, images – the originality of the return in Char’s poetry lies in his revolutionary conception of time. The poet deconstructs the chronological vision of time in order to make the past present. In other words, the motif of return appears to establish the past as a mobile temporal frame which calls celebration rather than nostalgia.

In this article, it will be a question of a detailed and analytical reading of the incest, written by Ch. Angot, in order to explore the stigmas of "scriptural incest" by which the author expresses the torments of the past by transgressing the canonical rules of writing. The titular camera will be questioned and invested to show the tangled form of the novel. Moreover, the intertextuality will serve as theoretical support in order to examine the contribution of inter‐intra‐textual clashes for a good interpretation of this "scriptural incest".

19th century literature makes the body one of the objects of interest treating it as a surface on which signs appear that are a trace of emotions swirling inside it. Zola is one of those writers who put the body centrally to their work, making it a starting point to deepen the mystery of a man. The presented study is an analysis of affects manifesting through the gesture and movements of the body. The main character’s body is, according to the biological model of the epoch, a hysterical type. However, it is not just a hysterical body, but it is also paroxystic which means, the penultimate moment before the end. It is this rift, externalized in the dynamic posture of the body, that is acting out, assigned to a man, which is the ambivalence of this seemingly obvious model of oversensitive femininity, common in discourses of the 19th century.