De l’empathie représentée à l’empathie suscitée : deux fonctionnements en régimes romanesque et poétique: Les écritures de Jean Rouaud et de Simon-Gabriel Bonnot

My contribution addresses empathy and its manifestation in literature. Initially, I explore the Roualdian corpus (1990-2004; 2011-2019) in order to uncover the empathy elicited and the empathy represented in the novels; these arise from the implementation of specific narrative strategies according to the period of writing, “La vie poétique”, the writer’s avowed autobiographical cycle, reinterpreting mainly the novelistic writing of the first cycle. I then analyze the poetry of Simon- Gabriel Bonnot (2016-2020 ; 2022), a young poet and artist suffering from the autism spectrum disorder in the form of high-potential Asperger’s syndrome. Entering this singular form of writing will enable us to understand how this poet empathizes with nature, which he feels is as much alive as he is, to the extent that the relationship between poet, nature and writing appears to be osmotic.

Keywords: Theory of Mind, empathy, novel, poetry, Jean Rouaud, Simon-Gabriel Bonnot