Poetics of typographyFrom the analysis of a corpus of contemporary albums to the implementation of writing activities at the end of elementary school ; Poétique de la typographieDe l’analyse d’un corpus d’albums contemporains à la mise en oeuvre d’activités d’écriture à la fin de l’école primaire

In this thesis, I looked at the materiality of text in a corpus of albums understood as devices where texts and images interact within a specific medium (Ortel, 2008). I put forward the idea that writing, from a semiotic (Christin, 2009), linguistic (Anis, 1988) and stylistic (Serça, 2012; Dürrenmatt, 2015) perspective, could be analysed as a ‘metascripture’ in children's books. Drawing on Anne-Marie Christin's concept of the ‘métissage’ of writing and Jacques Anis' concept of “vilisibilité”, I demonstrated that the writing in certain albums was both text and image, and that it was therefore possible to use Peirce's categories for interpreting images (namely the index, the icon and the symbol) to comment on the text and go beyond Lessing's traditional opposition between literature (the arts of time) and painting (the arts of space).Starting from the idea that writing belongs to the arts of time and the arts of space, in my thesis I devised a new typology in which the image of the letter could be broken down into a typographic figure, a proto-figure (when it is still a scribble and refers to a pre-scriptural time) or a disfigurement (when it expresses the loss and oblivion of writing). By rethinking the temporal space of the letter's inscription on the album's double page, I also analysed the forms of the text, palimpsest when writings are superimposed in space-time, figurative or disfigured compositions when the texts are not arranged on the page in a linear fashion but form islands of meaning, the reception of the typography then being as much a matter of the intelligible as of the sensitive in a complex and meaningful spatial setting. From a didactic perspective, the second part of my thesis focused on writing and rewriting using a corpus of albums with ‘meaningful’ typography, which I proposed to call ‘metascriptural’. With this in mind, I analysed a corpus of one hundred and fifty texts produced by pupils at the end of cycle 3 in primary school (drafts, reception writings, writing and rewriting pages from ...