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Abstract

Literary criticism in France experienced a new boom with the publication of Sur Racine (1963) by Roland Barthes. This author was recognized as the initiator of a new form of criticism, transforming the literary essay into a unique genre. We read in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975): “the essay is almost a novel: a novel without proper names”. In 2002, Pierre Michon published Corps du roi, a set of five essays in which he wrote the biography of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner, among others. The path had been traced by Roland Barthes, it was just necessary to follow it, and Pierre Michon erases the adverb almost and adds proper nouns in his essay. Because he is the author of and character in his biographies. Pierre Michon, using the Christian theme of the resurrection, likes to take people who have existed and bring them back to life. Lives, he says, have an ancient tradition in the West and are distinguished from biographies by highlighting supernatural traits that feature even more prominently in hagiography. In addition, this genre helps to recreate an interior life that has not been witnessed. It is from the concept of the king’s two bodies that Pierre Michon distinguishes in his work the mortal body of writers from the eternal body of literature. So we will analyze in this article how Michon shows how these writers became Great Authors. To do this, we will comment on the function of hagiography in Michon’s works, as well as its connection to the author’s narrative brevity. Finally, we wish to emphasize the construction of this literary genealogy that Pierre Michon creates for himself and to include Corps du roi in a critique of writers which in France has its roots in Impressionist criticism.

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