| Summary: | The author begins by giving a brief summary of the many studies Daniel Fabre devoted to literature (organised in two periods, before and after “the institution of culture”). She then discusses the problems of reception and comprehension that this type of anthropology of the symbolic may encounter in the field of literary studies. But she also demonstrates the pertinence of this type of analysis for certain new approaches to literary criticism, ethnocriticism in particular, which emerged in France in the 1990s. This method is then applied to Zola’s La Fortune des Rougon through a study of “juvenile ghosts”, of their “invisible initiation », of the “conflicts of cosmologies” (thus of the contrast between the most sedentary characters, the Rougon family, and the most nomadic, the Macquarts), going so far as to ultimately raise the question of the textual processes of cultural semiotisation involved, the “savage mind” of literary narrative and the very notion of realism.
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