« Vous avez bien là dequoy vous contenter les yeux, l'odorat & l'appetit ». Usages, fonctions et enjeux du lexique des perceptions sensorielles dans les récits de voyages français en Amérique (1545-1618)

What words should be used to describe the sensations of a “new” world? If there is a literary genre that asks this question, it is that of travel literature. Long before the interest in the sensibility of the romantic traveler of the 19th century, men sought to translate their sensations into narratives that served first as eyewitness accounts. Visual perception has thus been linked to the genres of history and inquiry since antiquity. In the Renaissance, travel literature encompasses the history of the discovery of America, the evolution of medicine and the interest in the body, and, finally, the enrichment of language: literary and scientific discourses are both employed in travel literature, because they are both based on the use of experience and knowledge. This thesis highlights this meeting of disciplines by studying a corpus of nine travel narratives to French America (Canada, Florida, Brazil) from Jacques Cartier's 'Brief recit' (1545) to Marc Lescarbot's 'The history of New France' (1618). The thesis considers the process of lexical creation that applies to a new perception. How to say what is unheard of, what has never been felt? The study of the lexicon of the three senses least studied by critics - taste, smell, and touch - allows us first to consider the links between perceptions and sensations, between what is really experienced, and what the traveler-authors translate into texts. Any sensation is necessarily mediated by language. How then to account for this tension between perceptions, sensations and reality? These first questions reveal the extent to which the subject is at the crossroads of a certain number of disciplines, but the research is resolutely literary. In this thesis a lexical approach is adopted which incorporates historicist analyses of the French language in order to study how Renaissance men perceived their bodies, the vocabulary they used to express sensations, and the way they reported on them in travel accounts. The perspective is also comparative: it seems impossible to study this corpus without placing it in a broader European context. Finally, in an attempt to decentre the history of knowledge, it was also important for us to focus on the indigenous oral tradition: how did the American populations, particularly the First Nations, perceive the arrival of the Europeans? The first part of the thesis considers the linguistic stakes of the reconstitution of perceptions in the texts: what are the terms present in the French language of the 16th century used by the authors? Are the texts of the corpus original on this point when we consider the ways in which these terms had been used beforehand? The second part compares a subjective perceptive discourse with a theory of perception as a mode of access to knowledge. In other words, we examine the link between travel literature and medical and scientific knowledge of the time. Finally, we are interested more broadly in the tensions at work in travel literature between a lived perception, source of authentic representations, and a codified perception, artificially articulated to the need to create a sense of wonder, of the extraordinary and of alterity.

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