The purpose of the paper is not to describe and analyse these three concepts - although such an enterprise could be useful because they might prove their efficiency as sensitive indicators of all the changes in modern societies - but, by discovering their overlapping areas, to raise the students' awareness of the spiritual, intellectual and even material values of a nation on the one hand and of the artistic values of literary works on the other hand. The study of autobiographical texts reveals the existence of some stylistic patterns which may constitute the" food" for fruitful intercultural studies within the general framework of the teaching of foreign languages.
