Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2013

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

French

Major Professor

John B. Romeiser

Committee Members

Mary McAplin, Katherine Kong

Abstract

Saint-Exupery asserts that man’s empire is the interior. In lieu of this assertion, we aim to delimit certain spaces of the intimate geography of the writer. The first level of this study thus consists of identifying the spatial configurations which organize the two major works of maturity belonging to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Terre des hommes and Le Petit Prince.

We consider the spatial configuration a vast field, a constellation rich in referential diversification to which belong multiple intimate spaces.

The second level consists of detailing the intimate spaces belonging to this spatial configuration. From the tremendous density of Saint-Exupery’s work, I identified certain structures with symbolic and universal value, symbols hidden sometimes in the shadows of the most simple gestures, objects, or elements.

The scope of this approach is to observe to what extent the functionality of these intimate spaces is efficient for revealing the landscape of a writer’s secret world.

In this work I referred to the Saint-Exupery’s work ensemble using excerpts from his novels, notebooks and letters or correspondence, because a part of an artist’s creation cannot be considered and examined except in the contextual assembly of the entire work.

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