This Master seminar is designed to debate on the emergence of the first person narrative novel in France Enlightenment and to explain the popularity's reasons of ways of writing as the memoirs, the letters and the diary within the fictional field. The prosperity of the novel goes together with a strong tendency of the self to occupy the front of the stage. The narrator is the most often the hero of the plot. He is burnt by a strong desire to tell his life, to expose is most intimate feelings and secrets, to redefine his former acts and to understand their consequences. Frequently the first person narrative reveals unconscious emotional failures like dinial, repression and other pathological disorders.

The first person narrative novel becomes a discursive field of fiction very appreciated by the most important writers of that time. Novels of Marivaux, Prevost, Diderot, Laclos and Rousseau will be read through the prism of theoretical approaches such as critical history, narratology, socio-critic, poetic and discourse analysis.