This thesis explores the notion of authenticity and its existential, aesthetic and political determinations in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar. It aims to trace the desire for authenticity in Yourcenar's fiction and criticism and to assess the strategies employed to preserve the possibility of authentic representation. The investigation focuses on two aspects of the problematic of authenticity: subjectivity and politics. Both are discussed by Yourcenar in predominantly aesthetic terms. She argues that individual existence cannot be understood in its own uniqueness because it is entrapped within representational structures. The impasse of representation also affects the political self-constitution of nations and communities. Yourcenar's response to this problem is developed through her meditation on art and time. She observes that authenticity is not a question of original creativity, but one of accepting the perishing of all representations in time. She also understands realism as a critically aware choice to accept the limits of narrative representation. Yourcenar attempts to rescue the notion of authenticity for modernity by foregrounding difference and repetition. The thesis discusses this strategy in relation to de Man's thought on irony and history, Benjamin's writing on film and translation, and Heidegger's analysis of spatio-temporality. The last part of the thesis focuses on poststructuralist interpretations of Heidegger by Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard. It is argued that the model of political self-realization which Yourcenar proposes for post war Europe can be associated with Heidegger's vision of national identity in Nazi Germany. Yourcenar's Memoires d'Hadrien is used as a case study showing the ambivalence of her discourse on authenticity, a discourse which hovers uncomfortably between modern political aestheticism and the desire to overcome aestheticism at large. This conclusion helps to contextualize Yourcenar's work in relation to political and philosophical modernity. It also highlights the vicissitudes of the search for authenticity in twentieth-century Europe.

Surrealism is a major European movement in the 20th century Avant-Garde and is still influencing current practices. The Surrealists explored the senses, in particular the visual, to discover and exploit images created by word associations and by the echoes and interactions between art and poems. This dissertation focuses on the translation of Surrealist texts, from French into English, incorporating Surrealist practices into the translation process. It involves what I call a ‘visual surrealisation’ of Surrealism in translation. ‘Visual surrealisation’ refers to the enhancement of the visual aspect of the Surrealist practice and language, using the Surrealists’ own visual practices in translation. This thesis will experiment specifically with practices derived from automatism, bringing to the fore these word associations: contradictions, collage, cadavre exquis and the representation of the body. Automatism was a driving force in Surrealist practice and encouraged impulsive freedom of association. ‘Visual surrealisation’ has the potential to be extended to the translation of other Avant-Garde texts, which the fifth chapter demonstrates. The creative translation approach developed here involves the question of seeing and reading, the notions of ludicity and constraint in both literature and translation, and lastly translation and the position of the translator. Bassnett, comparing the relationship between author and translator to the relationship between writing and rewriting, criticises the prevailing power of the notion of authorship which restrains the translator’s work and creativity. These are new and current issues in translation studies, moving away from the original debate of ‘free’ versus ‘literal’ translations, and from the idea that translation is derivative. The experiments with visual forms provide the opportunity to consider the appropriate use of the senses in translation, which are yet another emerging area in the field. This project suggests that the translator’s engagement in the process of ‘surrealising’ both Surrealist texts and non Surrealist texts contributes to our understanding of the nature of literary translation and the emerging debates on the subject.

The notebooks in which Artaud constantly worked in the final years of his life (1946– 48) bring together writing, drawing and attacks on the very materiality of the paper. In bringing together these three regimes – visual, textual, material – the notebooks represent the culmination of Artaud’s complex ontology. They also continue to pose a unique set of problems for his readers. These three regimes come together on what Artaud calls the “subjectile”, yet as he uses this word only three times, approaching it asks that we traverse his entire oeuvre. Framing this thesis is the question of how reading Artaud, especially the notebooks, might engage we readers as ourselves subjectiles; how “reading” must be understood in an expanded sense to take in textual, drawn and material elements at once. Artaud’s writings have an unparalleled importance in continental philosophy of the “long twentieth century”: perhaps most inalienably in Deleuze & Guattari’s appropriation of the figure of the “Body without Organs”, and in Derrida’s careerspanning interest in Artaud’s writing and drawing. This thesis will forge critical responses to how these writers accommodate and appropriate Artaud into their systems. What is at stake in responding to their highly original literary-philosophical readings is not merely a philological pedantry concerning Artaud. Rather, I propose to both examine elements of these philosophies in order to scrutinise, appropriate and respond to the modes of reading Artaud which underlie their projects, and to trace how the themes which they identify are taken up within Artaud’s own oeuvre: to find both critical responses to and productive lines from their work. On the one hand, this concerns the aleatory formation of subjectivities in Deleuze and Guattari, through which they imbricate Artaud in a Spinozist project; on the other hand, Artaud’s own ideas on ontological anteriority and the methodology of case-studies runs against Derrida’s deconstruction. As such, rather than using Artaud to illustrate a philosopher’s ontology, I will engage with Artaud as a metaphysician and metontologist in his own right – one whose project is deeply embedded in materiality, thought and causation. Central to this proposition is close examination of Artaud’s articulation of the “subjectile” in relation to matter, in particular following his journeys to Mexico and Ireland, and his development of what I will call his lucid materialism.

The purpose of this thesis is to focus on one of the main characteristics of Annie Ernaux's works, namely the blurring of boundaries between self and others. Basing my approach on Rimbaud's famous Je est un autre ("I is another person") as well as on Foucault's definition of transgression as a blurring of boundaries, I examine the various levels of transgression at work in Ernaux. My methodology includes a study of thematic and stylistic features, narrative strategies and identity, intextextuality, paratext and reader-response. My corpus includes not only Ernaux's works of fiction, semi-fiction or autobiography, but also various critical or journalistic pieces as well as interviews, including an unpublished interview with the writer. The structure of my thesis reflects the blurring of boundaries between the private and the public spheres in Ernaux's works. Starting with the divisions at work within the first person (chapter 1), I then examine a semi-private sphere- the world of characters inspired by real life and by fiction - in chapter 2. The last three chapters explore more public areas: reader-responses (chapter 3), the interactions between the first person and the critics ( chapter 4 ), and finally the potential of journaux- diaries as well as journalistic writings- in Ernaux ( chapter 5).In conclusion, I argue that the narrative voice in Ernaux is not only transpersonal, but also transgressive and trans-generic, and that the acts of reading and writing lie at the heart of the links between je (I) and les autres ( others).

This thesis explores the relationship between thought, language and the body in the work of Antonin Artaud. I wish to re-assess Artaud's work in the context ofa critique of representation, specifically as regards to how to represent the body. Artaud's work, I argue, questions the nature of representation and expression, and seeks to express thought as a corporeal force, overcoming the separation of the written word from its material and corporeal origins. On the one hand Artaud seems to desire a direct, unmediated form of corporeal expression, yet he continually draws attention to the body's mediation, as if what he calls the 'veritable corps' (or the 'corps sans organes') only comes into being through this mediation. Artaud's 'veritable corps', I will suggest, is a mediated one, but one which expresses continual processes of destruction and recreation, in opposition to both the living body as it is viewed from the outside, and to any representation of the body as a complete or fixed form. The unfinished nature of most of Artaud's work, and its ambiguous status as 'work', bears witness to this. The surface or membrane is constantly emphasised throughout Artaud's texts and drawings both in metaphorical terms, for example through skin imagery, and literally, through drawing attention to the surface of the page. If Artaud constantly engages with the surface of the page, and always uses surface imagery, this is because his corporeal experimentations, which later became his project for the creation of a new anatomy, occur as a process of destruction of these surfaces. I argue that Artaud's work should not be categorised according to the different media that he engaged with, but should be read as a perpetual striving towards an ultimate, overarching form of gestural expression that arises from the materiality of the objects he produced.

Georges Bataille is a thinker whose work is especially hard to encapsulate within disciplinary boundaries, owing to his engagement with a vast and seemingly contradicting array of genres and themes: from philosophy to sociology, ethnography and economics, to art, poetry and fiction. Bataille’s work defies easy systematisation and has accordingly provoked a heterogeneous range of critical responses. This thesis aims to approach Bataille’s work as a whole, taking into account that wholeness in Bataille cannot be approached from an objective or strictly ‘scientific’ perspective. Bataille himself claimed to have engaged with a project that opposes the notion of utility, that aims to communicate what is found in excess, in moments where discourse and knowledge fail; in other words, in his experience which, although ‘internal’, must be communicated to the reader. In order to address this difficult integrality of Bataille’s work, I pursue a focus on transgression, as the notion that serves to unify the different aspects of Bataille’s thought and that brings out their fundamental connection. Transgression signifies the moment when the rational, discursive universe is abolished and temporality is measured in terms of the present, replacing future concern - necessarily linked to usefulness and accumulation - by unproductive expenditure. Its fundamental value on an existential level, highlighted in the content of his work, is accompanied by another level, by the very act of writing where language is itself disrupted. This paradoxical project of writing that which exceeds language is in need of another narrative, that of fiction, whose reading cannot be separated from the theoretical ideas underlining it and vice versa. In this thesis, Bataille’s novels are treated as a direct source of his thought, bringing to the fore the importance of the reader as having an active role in his project of communicating what he calls an inner experience. The thesis is divided into two parts: in the first I approach Bataille’s theoretical writings via a series of related themes: economics, sacrifice, inner experience and eroticism. In the second part, I approach these themes through successive chapters on Bataille’s major fictional writings: Story of the Eye, Madame Edwarda, Blue of Noon and My Mother.

Gérard de Nerval's French translations of Goethe's Faust are key works in Franco-German cultural relations, but they have been mythologised; this thesis presents a nuanced view of works that continue to be the principal conveyors in France of arguably the foremost work of German literature. Less well known than his translations, Nerval's own Faustian dramas the Faust fragment ([1827(?)]), Nicolas Flamel (1831), and L'Imagier de Harlem (1851) have received little scholarly attention and yet reveal much about his, and indeed other French, interpretations of Faust. The thesis examines Nerval's convergences with and divergences from Goethe diachronically in order to identify and then compare what may be termed Goethean and Nervalian Faustian paradigms, thereby discovering more about Nervalian aesthetics. Alongside Goethe and Nerval, two literary figures of pre- eminence, the thesis investigates intercultural relations that bear on Nerval's Faustian writing in France during a dynamic period. The first chapter contextualises Nerval's Faustian writing: Nerval's own interest in, and identification with, the figure of Faust; greater interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in foreign culture in France; relevant aspects of the life and work of key foreign authors and artists from disparate periods and countries who contributed significantly to the development of early Romantic aesthetics in France are discussed and analysed: the reception of Shakespeare, Dante, Scott, and Byron demonstrates salient similarities with that of Goethe. Closely related to this ascendancy of foreign literature in France is the country's increased enthusiasm for and engagement with the German myth of Faust, especially Goethe's retelling of it, across different media. In Chapter Two a close reading of Nerval's 1828 and 1840 translations of Goethe's Faust, alongside Stapfer's and Sainte-Aulaire's of 1823, investigates their convergences with and divergences from the German author in lexis, prosody, content, and ideology. The issue of domestication and foreignisation in translation, as expounded by Friedrich Schleiermacher; cultural tensions between lingering neoclassical and incipient Romantic aesthetic values; social constraints in France, including censorship; linguistic barriers to translating Faust into French, and the related difficulties of translating metaphor and connotation, an aspect in which Nerval displays his poetic ability in his Faust translations, are addressed in this chapter. The final section of Chapter Two identifies and analyses pervasive divergences from the Goethean Faustian paradigm in the French translations. The third chapter considers Nerval's Faust fragment and Nicolas Flamel, identifying the principal intertextual influences on these Faustian fragments before analysing the following aspects with reference to Goethe's Faust: the protagonists' character; their relationships with women; the portrayal of the devil; and the transposition of 'Auerbachs Keller' to Paris. Similar aesthetic tensions that are found in Nerval's translations are also discovered in these adaptations. An analysis of Nerval's final Faustian drama, L'Imagier de Harlem (1851), brings Chapter Three to a close. Following the identification of key intertextual influences, divergences from and convergences with the Goethean Faustian paradigm are again identified and analysed.

Drawing together a number of different recent approaches to Samuel Beckett’s studies, this thesis examines the convulsive narrative trajectories of Beckett’s prose works from Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1931-2) to The Unnamable (1958) in relation to the disorganised muscular contractions of peristalsis. Peristalsis is understood here, however, not merely as a digestive process, as the ‘propulsive movement of the gastrointestinal tract and other tubular organs’, but as the ‘coordinated waves of contraction and relaxation of the circular muscle’ (OED). Accordingly, this thesis reconciles a number of recent approaches to Beckett studies by combining textual, phenomenological and cultural concerns with a detailed account of Beckett’s own familiarity with early twentieth-century medical and psychoanalytical discourses. It examines the extent to which these discourses find a parallel in his work’s corporeal conception of the linguistic and narrative process, where the convolutions, disavowals and disjunctions that function at the level of narrative and syntax are persistently equated with medical ailments, autonomous reflexes and bodily emissions. Tracing this interest to his early work, the first chapter focuses upon the masturbatory trope of ‘dehiscence’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, while the second examines cardiovascular complaints in Murphy (1935-6). The third chapter considers the role that linguistic constipation plays in Watt (1941-5), while the fourth chapter focuses upon peristalsis and rumination in Molloy (1947). The penultimate chapter examines the significance of epilepsy, dilation and parturition in the ‘throes’ that dominate Malone Dies (1954-5), whereas the final chapter evaluates the significance of contamination and respiration in The Unnamable (1957-8).

Each of us has his own meditative practices, his own path to what Bataille called 'inner experience'; but among them the most widespread, the most well-trodden, are the comedies we construct to reach erotic effusion. Subject as these are to interdictions in a more or less direct correspondence to their proximity to the heart of our being, the conjuring up of the god of eroticism constitutes our fundamental, and perhaps our only remaining religious activity. The image of this god, to whom we sacrifice ourselves in the expenditure of the petite mort, is our earliest intimation of that unreality onto which death (that absolute expenditure) opens. Man is never so alone as when he comes: when the universe, under a terrible muscular contraction, shrinks to the borders of his own body, from whose limits, at the sovereign moment, he dissolves into ecstasy ... at which point he loses himself - is lost in his orgasm. This point of ecstasy marks the limit of human experience: when consciousness, no longer able to distinguish itself from the universe that bore it, is lost in the night. It is the dreadful plenitude of this moment that tears itself away from and confounds the unfathomable movements of the heart we call love, which never fails to take almost all our breath away, but in whose violent consummation, it need hardly be added, resides our only hope of communication.

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