Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot : les paradoxes du roman, le roman des paradoxes

摘要

This paper seeks to demonstrate not only the connections betweenCervantes and Sterne, on the one hand, and between Sterne and Diderot,on the other, but also those linking Cervantes and Diderot, which havehitherto been neglected, and to do so by going beyond superficialresemblances in plot or characters. The paper traces these multipleconnections by means of a series of paradoxes -two opposed ideaswhich are neither endorsed nor dismissed as true or false, but kepttogether in an enriching and creative opposition or balance- on twodistinct levels, story and narration, which exhibit opposed visions ofreality and ways of reading. Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot wrote novelsfull of paradoxes, which make explicit the paradoxes implicit in allnovels, the paradoxes that define the novel as a genre.