GHOST TREE SOCIAL tells a coming out story of sorts. In terms of style, many of the poems are short, imagistic lyrics, though some are extended catalogues. Specific natural images—lakes, rivers, and snow—are often contrasted with cultural markers. The imagistic poems are thinking through the work of Sylvia Plath. The catalogue poems shift between diaristic, narrative, and critical modes, responding to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and the essays of Edouard Glissant. Voice-driven fragments disrupt the more traditional lyric poems. The fragments fall between formal lyrics like confetti from a gay club’s rafters; or the fragments hold the lyric poems in bondage. The lyric poem then re-signifies as form through resonances with the other discursive and poetic form of the fragment. Following critical writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, the re-signification of lyric form reflects the need for new signs for self and community organized queerly as opposed to more typical binary categories—man or woman, living or dead, rich or poor, white or black—where the first term is privileged and the second term often denigrated.

The aim of this dissertation is to study the evolution of the Russian anti-utopian literary genre in the new post-Soviet environment in the wake of the defunct Soviet socialist utopia. The genre has gained a renewed importance during the 2000s, and has been used variously as a means of dealing satirically with the Soviet past, of understanding the present, and of pondering possible courses into the future for the Russian Federation. A guiding question in this study is: What makes us recognize a novel as anti-utopian at a time when the idea of utopia may appear obsolete, when the hegemony of nation states has been challenged for several decades, and when art has been drawn towards the aesthetics of hybridity? The main part of the dissertation is comprised of detailed analyses of three novels: The Slynx (Kys', 2001) by Tatyana Tolstaya; Homo Zapiens/Babylon (Generation ‘P’, 1999) by Viktor Pelevin; and Ice Trilogy (Ledianaia Trilogiia, 2002−2005) by Vladimir Sorokin. The further development of the genre is subsequently discussed on the basis of seven novels published in the past decade. A main argument in the dissertation is that the genre has been modified in ways which can be seen as a response to social and political changes on a global scale. The waning power of the nation state, in particular, and its broken monopoly as the bearer of social projects marks a new context, which is not shared by the classic works of the genre. Analysis of this evolution in post-Soviet anti-utopian novels draws on sociological as well as literary studies. The dissertation shows how the analysed novels use the possibilities of the genre to problematize various forms of societal discourse, and how these discourses work as mutations of utopia. Prominent among these are historical discourses, which reflect the increasing importance of historical narratives in public political debates in the Russian Federation.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse two novels written by Aldous Huxley an anti-utopian novel Brave New World (1932) and a utopian novel Island (1963). The examination of both Huxley´ s works is based on the analysis of literary genres. The thesis outlines difficulties concerning a precise definition of the terms "utopia," "anti-utopia," and "dystopia." The genesis of the genres is also briefly mentioned. The thesis also deals with both common and distinct features of the genres. Because of the purpose of the analysis regarding Brave New World and Island, the thesis includes Huxley´ s other works (essays and novels), dystopian novels Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and a utopian novel Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells.

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La contre-utopie est une branche de la science-fiction qui, à l’opposé de l’utopie, s’attache à décrire non plus des mondes idéaux mais des sociétés cauchemardesques. Bien qu’ancien, le genre ne prend réellement son essor qu’à la fin du XIXème et au XXème siècle et accompagne donc les développements de la société industrielle pour lui renvoyer l’image de ses défauts.Cette thèse se propose de lire certaines des images forgées par contre-utopies à partir d’un schème scientifique, celui de la thermodynamique, soit cette discipline qui, à partir de l’étude de l’économie des machines à vapeur, a servi de tremplin à la révolution industrielle au XIXème siècle. Parce qu’elle a pour but de tracer une physique de la valeur économique, le recours à la thermodynamique va nous servir à analyser l’économie des contre-utopies et à tracer par ce biais les contours d’une théorie critique des sociétés décrites.S’intéressant à la contre-utopie dans la perspective d’une critique du monde industriel, les œuvres retenues pour le corpus, tant cinématographiques que littéraires, sont avant tout issues d’Amérique du nord (États-Unis), d’Europe (France, Grande-Bretagne) et du Japon et produites au cours du XXème siècle, siècle où les effets de l’industrialisation des sociétés dévoilent leur caractère néfaste. En examinant avec de nombreux exemples à l’appui comment la contre-utopie procède à une transposition politique de principes physiques, cette thèse a pour objectif de mettre en évidence les leçons de philosophie morale et politique que l’on peut retirer du genre tout en envisageant sous un angle nouveau les rapports entre science et science-fiction. / Counter-utopia is a branch of science-fiction which, contrary to utopia, describes either ideal worlds but nightmarish societies. Although ancient, the genre really takes off at the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth century, accompanying the developments of the industrial society to send it back the image of their main defects.This thesis suggests to read some of the images made by counter-utopias from a scientific scheme, that of the thermodynamics, a discipline which, from the study of the economy of steam engines, was one of the main springboard to the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. Because it aims at drawing a physics of the economic value, the recourse to thermodynamics is going to serve us to analyze the economy of counter-utopias and to draw by this way the outlines of a critical theory of the described societies.Being interested in counter-utopia in the perspective of a criticism of the industrial world, the works held for the corpus, films and literature (novel and short stories), belong to works produced in North America (United-States), Europe (France, Great-Britain) and Japan during the twentieth century, a century in which the effects of the industrialization of societies show their fatal aspect. By examining with numerous examples how counter-utopia proceed to a political transposition of physical principles, this thesis has for objective to enlighten the lessons of moral and political philosophy given by the whole genre and to consider under a new angle the links between science and science fiction.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

In my dissertation Theory of Petrified Worlds on the Example of Anti-Utopian and Dystopian Literature, I deal with anti-utopian and dystopian literature, which has been largely neglected by Czech scholarship. After the introduction to the issue I deal with the detailed analysis of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, after which I devote my attention to the theoretical definition of terms, including the historical mapping of previous research. I focus on the historical context of the emergence of the genres, including a deeper analysis of its beginnings, i.e. the development of utopian literature from Plato to William Morris and Herbert George Wells, and in detail describe the emergence of anti-utopian literature primarily as an opposition to utopian tendencies and its evolution into dystopia. A major part of the work deals with a specific semiotic analysis of the characteristic and constitutive features of the genres of anti-utopian and dystopian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes, among other things, the closed and petrified world of the novels, which gave the name to the presented theory, the strict division of society, the existence of newspeak, the characteristics of the main and secondary characters, as well as the social and political context of the analysed works. In...