Author and character: François Villon and the French new criticism

Abstract

The poetic corpus attributed to François Villon was composed in the second half of the fifteenth century, around the beginning of the reign of Louis XI. Since the nineteenth century, his editors considered this traditional attribution of authorship as self-evident, in light of the modern conception of the author as the creator of the work of art and the guarantee of its authenticity. At the end of the nineteensixties, the debate on the author’s death questioned the prevailing method at the time of critical explanation of the work based on biography. The choice of a poet particularly studied by the biographical tradition aims at  highlightinf some of the  effects of that debate on literary criticism. Until then, concerned mostly with the context of enunciation, the criticism of Villon turned to the analysis of the linguistic construction of his poetic character in the text. But the new criticism is also based on the prerequisite of biographical criticism, according to which the empirical author of the work would be the famous outlaw François des Loges. Thus, the poetry of Villon is considered a fictional autobiography of that historical individual . Then, in this article, the  new criticism of Villon is presented  not as a break with the biographical criticism (as it intends to be), but as a recasting of analysis  on common  ground.