The opus of Joseph Joubert (1754--1824) was for a long period barely known, due to the fact that it languished unpublished, both during his lifetime and after his death, until the complete version of his Notebooks was brought out in 1938 by Andre Beaunier (reissued in 1994). It was thanks to this new form which his thoughts now took that a completely new Joubert came into view. No longer was he merely a moralist, as portrayed by Sainte-Beuve, whose version held sway for a number of decades, but a diarist as well, i.e., writing his thoughts on a daily basis, in the bourgeois tradition of the books of hours. However, there is something else visible in Joubert's works, for, as Maurice Blanchot put it, "[Joubert's] journal, while it still takes days as its starting point, is not a reflection thereof, but reaches toward something other than them" (Le Livre a venir). Toward what does it reach? On the one hand, one can see, as Georges Poulet does, that Joubert "is not a philosopher, a moralist or an aphorist, but a wonderful poet of light." (Etudes sur le temps humain ). On the other hand, however, Joubert, in a way which is surprising and as yet unexplored, is also a thinker who takes on novelistic thought, that is, the Hegelian world, and thus the world of prose in all of its fullness. If we consider novelistic thought as superimposing essence onto existence in an attempt to discover the former within the latter (which makes the novel the locus, through the experience of weariness, of the question of man's salvation in a world in which religion's possibilities are elusive), this study ventures a survey of the Notebooks, paying particular attention to the forms taken by return in Joubert's thought and then following the uncompleted circles of detour which Jacques Ranciere has called "The Book of Life" (La parole muette). Notebooks also provide one of the first manifestations of what today is known, with all of the contradictions which this entai

The work of Marguerite Duras comprises seventeen "texts-films" distributed throughout its filmic period from 1969 to 1985. These texts guides of films constitute a particular form of filmic writing which utilizes three different modes of expression. Located at the three decade old border, the text-films being studied here, Detruire ditelle, (1969), Nathalie Granger (1972), Agatha (1981) differently ask the same question of the literary, theatrical and filmic genre all while escaping from it. The "texte-film" which is primarily plural and plurifunctional is showed here in three states, at three moments of its continuous creation. In a rejection of the traditional structures of transposition of writing to film, they challenge authorities as varied as the dialogical form, the dramatic text, the scenario. Stages of a long renouncement of writing or revivals of a creativity unceasingly searching for new ways to express itself, the "texts-films" studied here are holding essential keys to understanding the very whole work of Marguerite Duras.

This Master's Thesis analyses the work of Charles Cotin an abbot and a poet who, between 1630 and 1665, successfully proved himself in the Literary Salons of France. This thesis will try to determine how his work illustrates well the Gallant esthetics and how his poetical choices reflect but also challenge the great tendencies of the Gallant literature. The analysis of Cotin's Work divides itself into three facets: Lampoons, Religious texts and Gallant poetry. The Gallant esthetics is shown differently as Cotin progressively extricates hermeneutic rules and then try to adapt Theology to the King's entourage. Cotin's work will also be able to show the links between a Gallant literature and the social background of this time.

Until recently, criticism has dismissed Flann O'Brien's journalism (written under the pseudonym "Myles na gCopaleen") as not worthy of study, and has tended to focus on the elements of satire in his novels. This thesis demonstrates the importance of O'Brien's Cruiskeen Lawn column, written for the Irish Times between 1940 and 1966, by studying the column's use of the satirical parody. After presenting a brief history of the critical reaction to the column, I discuss how satirical parody is employed in O'Brien's novels, grounding my argument in previous critical studies of O'Brien's satire. I then apply this understanding of O'Brien's fiction to his journalism, establishing the column as a significant body of writing worthy of continued critical study.

Inter-related passages from his 1850 Hawthorne and his Mosses and 1851 Moby-Dick provide maps into the formulations of Melville's basic epistemology which allow us to better understand the author's interest in fragmentation, and in turn help us trace the developments of Melville's creative consciousness during the years 1853--1856, the period in which the author produced sixteen works of experimental short prose fiction following the critical failures of his longer romances. Although the study approaches the collected body of sketches as the major shift in the author's stylistic evolution, emphasis is placed on individual texts within the period which mark key shiftings in Melville's ongoing experimentations with modalities of form. A paradigm of tenuous equilibrium without reconciliation is embodied in various image strands throughout the works and will be shown to give shape to the experimental formlessness of Melville's sketches. Collectively, the strands make up Melville's aesthetics of incompleteness.

This thesis shows how literary primitivism is the pivot around which Davenport's literary designs spin. Thematically as well as technically the material in his first four collections of short stories is all derived from a desire to explore the beginnings, or the primitive wellsprings, of writing and art. The collage-like construction of picture and sentence will be shown to evolve from a knowledge of palaeolithic cave painting, humanity's first writing system, while Davenport's use of cataloguing and paratactic systems will be shown to evolve from ancient Greek. His primitivism also reveals itself in a Rousseau-like concern to highlight the advantages of primitive civilization on a modern industrial one and how the lessons learned from that are invaluable for present-day society.

Jane Austen revises the sentimental epistolary tradition by introducing a structural epistolarity that replaces the anatomical vocabulary of female corporeality with the domiciliar terminology of female domesticity. In Austen's novels, the epistolary metaphor of the passport links letter reading, the heroine's education process, and views of domestic space. Epistolary issues aligned with domestic spaces indicate the metaphorical relationship between the structural dialectic of closed and open and the epistolary paradox of writing to dissemble character and reading to reveal character. Letter writing and reading represent the spatial order within prescribed views and tours of houses and grounds. The heroine's critical letter reading allows her to distinguish between character types presented through different domestic contents, and the letter's interpretive authority finalizes her social education by serving as a passport figuratively transferring her between natal and martial households.

An artwork does not obliterate the traces of its making. In the contemporary technological context such "untidiness" is effectively erased through instrumental methods of production. A great divide exists between instrumental and poetic modalities of disclosure which is no more apparent than in the arts of cinema and architecture. The motion picture camera is the emblem par excellence of the voyeuristic sensibility of the disembodied 20th century spectator who inevitably is the very same "body" which inhabits the built world. The British artist-filmmaker Peter Greenaway calls into question numerous aspects of traditional and technological ways of looking and making relevant to architectural creation as similarly constitutive of both functional and poetic realms. Rather than suppress or deny the traces left upon a work, he valorizes and amplifies them to create a self-reflexivity between work and working as an intertwining of the process and work horizons. His ultimate concern is for "content" or poetic meaning as the aesthetic experience of depth which he sees as a matter of the form and style of making.

The most outstanding features of Gesualdo Bufalino's literary works are outlined in this dissertation. Bufalino, a Sicilian writer, made a name for himself in Italian literature in the early Eighties. / The first part of this thesis deals with the author's biographic background and existential experiences which ostensibly contributed the most to his shifting life onto the literary page. It ends with an analysis of Diceria dell'untore , the novel which made him famous. / The dissertation provides then an in-depth analysis of the various themes connected with memory, the centrepiece of this author's artistic universe, from which he ceaselessly carves out the contents of his writings. Memory makes up his prevailing narrative structure. / This feature draws him close to French writer Marcel Proust, whom Bufalino makes frequent reference to, but from whom he succeeded in taking an arm-length stand, since Bufalino elaborates and interprets reminiscing his own way. Carrying memory's materials over into fiction, a typical procedure of European literature from the previous century, is dealt with by Bufalino in a manner all of his own. / Components from the author's regional culture, interspersed in his literary works, have been singled out, making thus possible a comparison with other Sicilian authors. / Bufalino's literary experience may thus be seen as deeply rooted in Sicily, but at one and the same time it may also be seen as an interpretation of European literary trends in the twentieth century.

The creation part of this thesis will take the form of four short stories. The first one is the story of Jonas. The day of his solemn vows, Jonas leaves the monastery after having seen a woman who has awaken in him a desire of freedom absent until then. The second tells the story of Denise, a waitress in a restaurant stuck in a feeling of deep solitude. She regains contact with the world through a cat that awakes in her the desire to share her life. The third story will be of Maryse, the woman whom Jonas saw. Maryse is a country girl who had left her small town to live with her fiance in the city. She leaves him to regain the purity and calm of her small country town. The last story is the story of Jean, Maryse's fiance. After she leaves, he goes looking for his missing cat, witch will lead him to Denise. / The notion of chance is omnipresent in the works of Milan Kundera. Concentrating mainly on three novels, La Valse aux adieux, L'Insoutenable Legerete de l'etre and L'Immortalite---where the author proposes a "Theory of chance"---this study focuses on the foundations and consequences of chance in the fictitious world of Kundera. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)