LA FIGURE DU FILS: PALIMPSESTES MYTHIQUES ET BIBLIQUES DE NATHACHA APPANAH, EDEM AWUMEY, AMÉLIE NOTHOMB ET CAMILLE DE TOLEDO

This thesis offers a comparative study of the figure of the son in four contemporary Francophone novels: Tropique de la violence by Nathacha Appanah, Les pieds sales by Edem Awumey, Soif by Amélie Nothomb, and Thésée, sa vie nouvelle by Camille de Toledo. Drawing on a mythocritical and biblico-literary approach, the research explores the metamorphoses of the mythical and biblical archetype of the son in a literary context marked by a crisis of foundations and the dislocation of collective narratives. The analysis is structured in three parts: first, it explores the theoretical framework of contemporary rewritings of myths and biblical texts; second, it focuses on the mythocritical reinterpretation of the son; and third, it investigates the deconstruction, mutation, and survival of this figure through a mythanalytic lens. The corpus presents characters shaped by a hauntological logic, detached from any explicit literary filiation, where the hypotext no longer persists as a narrative foundation, but rather as shadow, trace, remnant, or counterpoint. The analysis reveals that these figures have relinquished their founding roles (to inherit, to save, to transmit, to build) and instead embody mourning, silence, the failure of filiation, and the collapse of reference points. The son emerges less as a builder than as a survivor of his own hypotext. His gesture is defined more by infra-politics than by heroism: a refusal to inherit, a testimony of failure, a voice fragmented by the inability to believe or to mend. The text, transformed into a crypt, shelters these voices that no longer reach anyone. This interdisciplinary study, at the crossroads of hermeneutics, biblical studies, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, offers a re-reading of foundational figures in light of a post-traumatic world where myth and biblical narrative endure as haunted palimpsests, embedded in a post-filial structure. Its originality lies in the transversal approach it adopts to illuminate how contemporary literature revisits a foundational figure through the tensions between memory, loss, and transmission.