Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Les romans City of Glass et Leviathan de l'auteur états-unien Paul Auster mettent en scène deux types d'espace bien distincts en perpétuelle tension. Le lieu clos de l'écriture, refuge privilégié pour les écrivains, précède l'espace ouvert urbain dans lequel les protagonistes choisissent éventuellement de se propulser, et lui fait face. À l'intérieur de ce nouvel espace comparable à un labyrinthe, les écrivains connaissent une transformation marquée et irréversible. L'objectif de ce mémoire est de révéler comment la dichotomie des espaces permet d'expliquer la mutation subie par les personnages. L'originalité du projet vient du fait qu'il s'agit probablement de la première étude à faire un lien entre la configuration spatiale des romans d'Auster et le processus de métamorphose et de dégradation traversé par les personnages. Il s'agit aussi de la première recherche à qualifier la chute et le destin funeste des protagonistes, pourtant largement abordés par les critiques, de devenir-monstre. Les notions d'une herméneutique des espaces romanesques servent de cadre théorique afin d'évaluer la construction spatiale des œuvres, élément clé de la problématique de cette analyse. Cette première partie de l'étude se voit prolongée et renforcée par la théorie de la déterritorialisation, puisque les personnages passent d'un contexte spatial à un autre, ainsi que par une observation de la crise existentielle vécue par les protagonistes pendant leur aventure. Le recours au mythe grec de Thésée en tant que référence pour saisir les motifs associés à l'imaginaire du labyrinthe permet également de poser un regard mieux orienté sur le sort qui attend les héros dans le dédale austérien. Dédoublement identitaire, perte du statut de sujet, hybridité, altération de la connaissance de soi et métamorphose en monstre sont autant de répercussions qui attendent les personnages délaissant leur pièce d'écriture pour s'engager dans l'hostile labyrinthe. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Paul Auster, espace romanesque, écrivain, labyrinthe, métamorphose, monstre, City of Glass, Leviathan.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Etudes anglophones : linguistique : Metz : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Notes bibliographiques.

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Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

Paul Auster is regarded by some as an important novelist. He has, in a relatively short space of time, produced an intriguing body of work, which has attracted comparatively little critical attention. This study is based on the premise that Auster's art is the record of an entertaining, intelligent and utterly serious engagement with the possibilities of conceiving of the identity of an individual subject in the contemporary, late-twentieth century moment. This study, focussing on Auster's novels, but also considering selected poetry and critical prose, explores the representation of identity in his work. The short Foreword introduces Paul Auster and sketches in outline the concerns of the study. Chapter One explores the manner in which Auster's early (anti-),detective' fiction develops a concern with identity. It is suggested that Squeeze Play, Auster's pseudonymous 'hard-boiled' detective thriller, provided the author with a testing ground for his subsequent appropriation and subversion of the detective genre in The New York Trilogy. Through a close consideration of City of Glass, and an examination of elements in Ghosts, it is shown how the loss of the traditional detective's immunity, and the problematising of strategies which had previously guaranteed him access to interpretive and narrative closure, precipitates a collapse which initiates an interrogation of the nature and construction of ideas about individual identity. Chapter Two develops a suggestion that City of Glass was written in response to particular emotional concerns of the author by turning to an examination of the memoir-novel, The Invention of Solitude. This chapter examines the extent to which Auster's Jewishness is implicated in his understanding of identity, and in the techniques with which he expresses his concerns. It is argued that Auster's engagement with texts and memories important to him in order to find a voice adequate to the task which he assumes in The Invention of Solitude, reveals the ethical imperative of recognizing and accepting a relationship to alterity. The influence on Auster of certain Jewish writers, like Edmond Jabes, is considered in the course of the chapter. The third chapter addresses the issue of the description of Auster's work as postmodernist, in the light of what the study has presented as Auster's ethical engagement with alterity. Critical responses to Auster's texts are canvassed, before it is suggested that aspects of the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas may be useful in considering these important issues in Auster's oeuvre. Chapter Four returns to a consideration of The New York Trilogy, examining its final part, The Locked Room, before discussing In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace. All three novels are narrated by first-person narrators who, in very different situations, come (consciously and unconsciously) to negotiate their own identities in relation either to other people or to adverse circumstances. The chapter thus considers the manner in which these texts figure Auster's concern with relationships between individuals and otherness. Chapter Five seeks, as a means of concluding the study, to consider aspects of Auster's presentation of the manner in which identity is connected to perception, and to an engagement with that which is other than the self This chapter focuses on Auster's figuration of necessary responses to the otherness of the objective world and to chance as a radical alterity. Beginning with a consideration of an early essay, the chapter explores relevant aspects of Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan and Mr Vertigo, considers elements in Auster's poetry, and demonstrates the usefulness of exploring the influence on his work of the 'objectivist' poets and aspects of Dada and Surrealist poetics. The seemingly punitive severity of the fates of some of Auster's protagonists is shown ultimately to be positive, and (potentially) redemptive, reflecting Auster's profoundly ethical conception of the responsibilities and possibilities of selfhood.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The scope of this work is to understand the ways in which different elements concerning a postmodern view of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things come together to conform a comprehensive understanding of this narrative. I plan on considering urban subjects and their movements within the city by means of space ―the place they occupy inside the city, their activities―how they plan on surviving, and the ways in which history and memory collide to form a sense of community that is long gone. Also, elements such as the city itself as a place where interactions between people living in duress are conducted, and the space as background for those interactions. All of these aspects will play part in finally acknowledging to what extent is this a city of ‘Last things’ a place which is on the verge of destruction, but that recycles and transforms the last things into new ones. This will take on the form of the point of view of a newcomer to the city, someone who experiences these new situations as she finds herself into them, with the fresh eyes of someone who has been outside it, and understands what the difficulties are in finding a sense of belonging in a place which does not lend itself to do so, but in doing so finds herself entangled in the city’s movements.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / “People everywhere have hopes, but America is the only nation to claim its own collective dream. Politicians have invoked The American Dream ever since historian James Truslow Adams first coined the phrase in 1931. In his best-selling book, “the epic of America”, he described the dream as the average American’s “star in the west which led him on...in search of a home where toil would reap a sure reward, and no dead hands of custom or exaction would push him back into ´his place`”. The phrase caught on like wildfire and endures still, though its meaning is often vague. To some the “sure reward” is a luxury car. To others it’s a college degree, a steady job that pays the bills, or a house in the suburbs and a family of four `a la Ozzie and Harriet. But the dream is above all America’s own brand of optimism, which was brought over by the first settlers and which presumes no limits to what anyone can have or achieve.”

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / The aim of this investigation is to discover and analyze the ways in which Paul Auster, through his narrative, conveys a postmodernist view of man and his environment, specifically through a recurrent theme of his fiction: Nothingness. Nothingness is herewith regarded as a characteristic of the post-modern, fragmented city- urban nothingness- and the effects of this nothingness dimension upon the city’s inhabitants is further analysed.

Facultad de Filosof?a y Humanidades / Departamento de Ling??stica / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Introduction From the emergence of the term Utopia in Thomas More?s book of the same name, many controversial and prolific discussions have appeared throughout time. These discussions involved not only cultural and sociological aspects, but also those concerned more with the inner dimension of the self: his desires, ambitions and transformations. What More really meant by using this term we have no certainty, because in it he refers to several different factors that have an effect in the life of the island portrayed in his book. In opposition to Utopia, meaning ?a happy place where a person has nothing to worry about because his/her government provides everything they need?, there is Dystopia, which could be defined as ?a society being controlled by a repressive state, in both individual and collective ways?. Starting from this point, the general topic that gives rise to the object of study in this work is the urban subject, Anna Blume in Paul Auster?s In the Country of Last Things, immersed in a dystopian city nearly to be extinguished and conditioned by spaces that exert powerful forces on the prevalence of the self.