Vers un motif cynique dans le roman français du dernier tiers du XIXe siècle

Within the field of a rhetorical and stylistic analysis of the literary forms, this paper aims to approach the possible emergence of a linguistic device which creates a cynical text effect. Considering that the modern cynical stance – which tends to be understood as a disillusionment that blurs established value systems – takes shape during the last third of the nineteenth century, could the cynical consciousness happen to freeze into a linguistic pattern of the narrative genre ? Our research first focuses on an enunciative routinized strategy in Flaubert’s novels and then extends to an explorative construct phraseology of an ensemble of French novels of that period. In this way, the extensive concept of motif leads us to observe co-occurrences and semantic fields, including the contextual motivation of the lemma "dégoût".