La double nature de l’image d’auteur

Abstract

When dealing with the author’s image, one has to distinguish between the image of self built by the author in her text, or “authorial ethos”; and the image of the author as produced outside the literary work in the discourses of the editor, the critics, etc., or representation of the author constructed by another person. At the crossroad of Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Narratology, this paper endeavors to illuminate these two categories of images, calling for a further exploration of their intrinsic interrelation. It first describes the notion of author’s image, inviting to an in-depth analysis of its various manifestations; it illuminates the notion of authorial ethos, showing how it is constructed and what functions it fulfils in literary discourse. It then proceeds to a short analysis of a text borrowed from Littell’s novel, The Kindly Ones, in order to suggest the complex articulation between the intra-textual and extra-textual images of the author.