Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / Chance is a key figure in our daily lives, since we are uncertain about events in our future that may affect our health, economic stability, or personal interactions. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that chance affects a human life deeply -- as deep as a person's convictions, beliefs, and other matters central to someone‟s life-plan. If she had not missed her train, she would never have met her spouse. Had she lived in other times, she may have been a black slave in Georgia instead of an American citizen with equal rights.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / The purpose of this work is to study Paul Auster’s feminine characters in terms of their dramatic contribution and relevance as women. They will show us their strength and firm attitudes to face life’s adversities, which are conditioned by the author’s recurrent themes of chance, solitude, urban nothingness and desolation.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licencia en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Our research began through Blake’s poetry, by seeing how the people he portrayed were engulfed by the city, how this new modern construct affected their daily living. As Heather Glen has very accurately stated in her Blake’s London: “The eighteenth-century London street was […] a place where that sense of the other as object –often as feeble and wretched object- […] was the dominant mode of relationship (148).” This new type of urban mode of living is extreme to the 18th century Englishman, a place where the rule becomes to survive, if you can, in this distant society. “This world simply is. Reciprocal human relationships in which otherness is acknowledged and the needs of all harmonized do not exist: the only relationships […] are instrumental ones. People have become objects (155).” As is very well shown through Glen and Blake in this case, this is a very bleak prospect. Cities become in a way, object-enemies, by this I mean that the city is distant and unfamiliar, in much the same way people are according to Glen, and each citizen has to do what he can to survive in this hostile world. Glen specifically focuses her analysis on Blake’s London, a portrayal of this growing metropolis that pushes the common Londoners further into ‘their’ corner; they watch it with fear because it is becoming distant. They belong in the city, for without them the city would not function, yet they are mere objects, they are not part of its creation or development. They are not free in the city.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The urban subject has been a matter of frequent discussion among writers from different ages and origins. In the present, we cannot conceive an exploration of human subjectivity without taking into account the urban experience. The contemporary self is, in fact, an urban self. Under that vein, "the city and the urban subject" is the main object of study of the seminar that frames this thesis. The work that has been chosen for the exploration of the urban experience is Paul Auster´s novel, City of Glass written in 1985, and part of The New York Trilogy. The reason behind this choice is that the novel posits a search for identity in an urban context, specifically in New York City. This well known metropolis can be said to be an icon of the American tradition, it has inscribed their history in it, and it is, at the same time, a tissue of experiences and perceptions that continually interweave through time. Naturally, as time goes on, people change, perceptions change, and the urban environment also changes. But in spite of this obvious transformation that affects almost everything, New York included, some people prefer consistency, regularity and uniformity, like the main character of City of Glass.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / Paul Auster is considered a postmodernist writer. His novels can be categorized under different genres, as, for example, science fiction, picaresque or detective novels. His influences are very wide and come from different sources such as fairy tales, his own unconscious and from a variety of writers, i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka or Samuel Becket.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Ce mémoire a pour objectif de rendre compte des thèmes dominants du genre uchronique dans ses manifestations contemporaines aux États-Unis. Le premier chapitre se consacre à la genèse et à l'évolution de l'uchronie. Nous y exposons les différentes définitions du terme en confrontant les multiples visions de l'uchronie tirées des essais sur le sujet. C'est également le lieu où l'on verra les acceptions liminaires du mot et où nous nous positionnerons à travers ses nombreuses définitions afin d'établir un lexique qui permettra d'analyser les différentes œuvres à l'étude. Le second chapitre s'arrête sur le roman Man in the Dark de Paul Auster. Nous y mettons à l'épreuve les définitions issues du premier chapitre et nous y soulignons les passages clés du récit uchronique. Nous identifions les leviers narratifs propres au genre, analysons les différentes thématiques abordées et élaborons une lecture qui met en relief la vision politique qui transpire de l'œuvre. Le troisième chapitre aborde par le biais de la guerre culturelle qui sévit actuellement aux États-Unis, deux autres œuvres uchroniques. Nous y faisons d'abord l'histoire du terme de guerre culturelle (culture war) et élaborons sur la notion de polarisation idéologique qui en découle. Nous constatons que ce message d'abord et avant tout politique se retrouve tant dans le roman graphique DMZ de Brian Wood que dans la trilogie Assassin de Robert Ferrigno, œuvres soumises à l'étude. Les leviers uchroniques de ces deux œuvres sont repérés et les effets de lecture suscités sont analysés par l'entremise de la théorie sur le suspense élaborée par Raphaël Baroni et de celle sur la science-fiction avancée par Irène Langlet. Nous y révélons les thèmes que se partagent les deux œuvres. Pour finir, nous établissons une relation entre le climat politique qui prévaut actuellement aux États-Unis et ces œuvres qui réinventent des événements historiques fondamentaux dans la représentation que les États-Uniens ont d'eux-mêmes. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Uchronie, littérature américaine, post-11 septembre, polarisation idéologique, Paul Auster, Brian Wood, Robert Ferrigno.