Entre stéréotypie et singularité : la construction de l’ethos de Laurent de Premierfait dans ses prologues

Abstract

The turning point of the fourteenth to the fifteenth century saw the emergence of auctorial voices that were more and more involved, subjective and conscious of their talent. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the notion of ethos, coming from discourse analysis, allows to characterize the voice of a translator the fifteenth century, Laurent de Premierfait, in close relation with tradition. The analysis of the prefaces to his translations shows the large influence of the communication situation and enunciation scene, which is determined by patronage and the poetical tradition inherited from fourteenth-century translations. It appears that this particular situation forces the translator to negotiate his own representation in the text. In this sense, the author of this paper intends to characterize the two êthê emanating from these prefaces through rhetorical, poetical, discursive, as well as extra-discursive signs: the ethos of a moralist, in accordance with the expectations of the audience, and the ethos of a humanist, which reveals a singular and individual positioning from the translator in the writers’ community.

Keywords

• Premierfait (Laurent de)
• Traduction médiévale
• Ethos
• Prologue
• Patronage
• Scène d’énonciation