La critique de Robert Charbonneau /

This study focuses on a rather neglected, although significant, part of Robert Charbonneau's (1911-1967) works: his criticism. Founder, with some friends from college, of la Releve (1934) and les editions de l'Arbre (1940), well-known novelist Charbonneau creates a critical work closely linked to that publishing and intellectual experience. Thus, literature, according to Charbonneau, is an economic phenomenon. But literature also fits in a world where the human is the dominant feature, where it is a preferred way to shed light on the human mystery. Influenced by Maritain and Mounier, admirer of Dostoevski and Mauriac, Charbonneau, with his Catholic viewpoint, conflicts with traditional French-Canadian nationalism because of the opening onto the world and the search for universality he proposes. The novel appears as the human expression's ideal form. Charbonneau finally wishes that French-Canadian literature be alive, human, and universal, and that its American meaning be understood. National is, in his opinion, unessential since a literary work is necessarily produced somewhere and, above all, intended to be literary in the first place