Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Arthur DEFRANCE

This dissertation takes as its object the Nara period (710-794) and examines the two most ancient poetry collections in Japanese literary history : the Kaifû-sô ("Collection of fond remembrance of the past", 751) and the Man'yô-shû ("Collection of the myriads of leaves", after 759). The former is a short collection of poems in Classical Chinese and the latter, a long anthology made up of approximately 4500 pieces, mostly written in Japanese. These two contemporary anthologies allow us an insight into one of the most crucial issues in Japanese literary history : the ties between the literary corpus written in Japanese and that written in Classical Chinese, which accounts for more than half of the literary production of premodern Japan. This question is usually grasped through the lens of a cultural dialectic, the wakan ("Japan and China") dialectic, a concept originating in the Heian era (794-1192), which as such possesses little applicability in the Nara period. Our inquiry seeks to tackle the issue using an understudied approach : that of languages. Drawing from the studies on bilingualism and on the perception of languages in ancient societies (Rome, Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe, premodern India), we demonstrate that the Nara period was linguistically very diverse and that it represents a moment of further linguistic opening up. This process leads to a transformation of language attitudes (what Harald Weinrich has called the "language consciousness") and to an upheaval in the language landscape (Andrew Ollett's "language order"). Nara Japan is a very multilingual country, whose literary and court language define themselves in relation to this multiplicity. Furthermore, although Japan had learnt to read Classical Chinese in its own vernacular through the reading technique of kundoku ("vernacular reading"), the country resumes its contacts with the Chinese language as used in China. The resinified form of Chinese therefore constitutes a new linguistic entity, that distinguishes itself from Japanese more than ever before. We put forward the view that the transformations pertaining to languages have capital consequences for the construction of the Japanese poetic corpus in Nara Japan. The two languages become more distinct than they have ever been and the two poetic collections reflect this growing distinctiveness of each language. Both collections, therefore, weave a distinct narrative of Japanese literary history, which allows them to ignore or to marginalise the corpus in the other language. Each narrative also serves the interests of different political factions, which draw their prestige and their social position from their identification with one language or the other. We also show that hybrid poetic forms, which weaves together Japanese and Classical Chinese poetry (most notably in the Man'yô-shû) are not only marginalised, but that they also become rarer as the language gap deepens between the two languages. Finally, we suggest that the Nara period language order did not perpetuate itself as such and that the wakan dialectic that unifies the japanese and the chinese streak in a common order could only establish itself upon the ruins of that of Nara.