Imagologie et imaginaire: entre intérêts historiques et culturels et questions de poétique

Abstract Imagology and imagination: between issues of poetics and cultural and historical interests. Imagology today seems to waver between two complementary poles that critics, either in the past or the present, tend to set against. Indeed, on the one hand there is a vast production of studies focused upon literary images considered for their relationship to the historical and cultural time frame in which they were originated, with the expected relationship to the ideology, the representations of the exotic and the social and cultural issues comprising the context. On the other hand, there are studies more expressly focused upon those images which intervene at the level of the artist’s creative process : they give rise to questions of poetics and show a specific orientation to the interpretation of his imagery. Owing to its analytic and hermeneutic possibilities, imagology today appears to offer the most promising perspectives within the field of literary and comparative studies.