Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Michigan state university, 2004. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

In the latter half of the 20th-century and into the 21st, William Burroughs, Samuel Delany, and bioartists such as Oron Catts, Orlan, and Stelarc have all attempted to create works which respond to the increasing biopoliticization of contemporary society. The biopolitics of today seek to regularize life and structure it according to the imperatives of economic thought, a process by which the human becomes the Foucauldian homo oeconomicus. This restricted logic of biopolitics desperately tries to cover the explosive excess of the world today, what Bataille calls general economy. The artists under consideration in this work attempt to uncover this state of excess. While they are typically seen as exploring fantastic realms of the transgressive or, in the case of bioartists, attempting to emulate science fiction, in fact it is their realism which provokes. These artists reveal the heterological body, that which cannot be contained or described by the biopolitical regime. In so doing, they rewrite our standards of taste and point the way to understandings of the human that have been otherwise unavailable to us. William Burroughs in Naked Lunch highlights the manipulability of affect in contemporary society through the reduction of the human to bare life. He uses the figure of flesh/meat as a way of depicting the heterogeneous body and to generate a counter-affect, or free-floating affect, which unlike typical affect, is not worked up into emotion. Samuel Delany, too, describes the heterogeneous or destabilized body in the heterotopia of his novel Dhalgren. While Burroughs is unable or unwilling to gesture towards the potentially radical implications of the heterogeneous body, Delany proposes a new model of community that rests upon the revelation of the heterogeneous body, a community which acts as one informed by an affirmative biopolitics. Bioart, a somewhat vexed genre of art, attempts to construct artworks that both utilize and critique new science and technology of the body. The life sciences are complicit in the rise of the biopolitical state and further the view of the human as constrained by its material substrate. Fetishistic bioart problematically reproduces a fascination with the life sciences and advanced technology. However, the bioart which I call sacred has a demystifying effect and attempts to use the knowledge gained by the life sciences to expand our understanding of the human, going beyond the bounds of that very knowledge itself. / English

I argue that the procession is a deliberate, desirable, and destabilizing social formation. In scholarship of the American nineteenth century, the procession is lost among the clutter of other urban assemblies—crowds, parades, riots—and never fully articulated as a unique vehicle for collective expression. The procession is an attractive alternative to tyrannical majorities and unwise crowds because of its linearity, rationality, and encompassment. Central to the trope of the procession, however, is the wayside or the periphery, adjacent spaces which are often discarded or suppressed by the procession’s forward movement. I trace the variations of this American allegory—national progress and its exclusions—across different genres in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne (domestic-cosmic sketches), Walt Whitman (war-time poetic fantasies), Emily Dickinson (regal satires), and as an informing but repudiated element of Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or The Huts of America. These authors critique chaotic and gaudy groups, and instead propose gentle and haptic ones. Whitman, Dickinson, and Delany also have in common their oblique contemplations of the Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination. Although Lincoln’s multi-state funeral procession is an overwrought spectacle, the procession is so often virtuous because it is the opposite of the state funeral: the authors I consider presuppose, in their sporadic ways, an austere nature to the procession, as fundamental as the dictums “We, the people” or E pluribus unum. Yet, the “grand difficulty,” in Hawthorne’s words, is that in reality and on the streets, the procession’s conceptual intuitiveness—as all-inclusive and leveling as a “procession of life”—recedes from view, deteriorates into chaos, and must be constantly rehabilitated. My tropological analysis of American literature grapples with a vision of democratic organization and process that is not conceived of as the result of collective self-articulation and -determination. What is startling about membership in a procession is how often it does not respect individual choice. It is coercive; you are participating. The procession’s “measured and beautiful motion,” in Whitman’s words, topples assertive modes of authorship, leadership, and ownership because ever-present waysides flatten the hierarchy of center over periphery. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-03 12:51:58.064

This thesis investigates in which ways Samuel R. Delany’s novel Hogg challenge the discourse of normality as stipulated, supported and maintained by the capitalist Oedipal repression of desire. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the Anti-Oedipus, this thesis explores how Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire as a free and productive force can be seen as a disruptive element in a society that relies on repression of the subject for its stability. Furthermore, this thesis explores how the novel questions the understanding of civilisation being dependent on the individual’s submission to the Oedipus triangulation and in extension the Oedipal capitalist separation between the public and the private sphere. Ultimately, the main argument claims that Oedipal repression of desire only allows desire to invest in a restricted number of representations, making other identities than the heteronormative suspicious or invisible.  Hogg depicts a society where capitalism commodifies everything, and need the Oedipal subject to ensure its stability. The characters in the novel that do not subject themselves to the capitalist discourse escape the subjection to the Oedipal triangulation, and are thus free to invest their desire in any way they choose, primarily in non-heterosexual and salirophiliac activities. These characters can be seen as schizoid subjects that are constantly threatening to expose the fragility of the social structure by embodying a contrast to the hegemonic discourse and therefore constantly question its authority as main creator of reason and reality.

"L'image que l'on donne/ N'est pas toujours la bonne" Les Cowboys Fringants, “Les Hirondelles” Malgré les changements dans le traitement des femmes au fil des décennies, les vraies policières continuent de souffrir des injustices de la part de leurs supérieurs masculins, ainsi que de la communauté qu'ils ont juré de protéger. Tant que la fiction reflète la réalité, on peut s'attendre que le genre de la polar du type policier démontrera non seulement les injustices entre les sexes, mais aussi les façons différentes que les victimes féminin y répondre. Comme des vrais policières, les détectives féminins fictifs sont trop souvent des victimes, même quand elles sont les protagonistes, même si leurs auteurs sont des femmes. Preuve de la discrimination contre les femmes policières réelles et fictives seront explorées dans cette thèse en regardant l'histoire des romans policiers, à travers des études de cas réels impliquant des policiers féminins réelles, ainsi que l'analyse de certains personnages clés dans les textes de discussion par Chrystine Brouillet, Vicki Delany et Louise Penny. En conséquence, il sera démontré que les images projetées par les agents de polices féminins réels et fictifs, quelles ne sont pas toujours bonnes, sont de plus en plus varié à la suite du mouvement féministe et en raison de la résistance littéral et imaginaire aux stéréotypes sexistes. Même si elles sont maintenant les protagonistes, les femmes détectives fictionaux faire face aux un réduction du l'agence et sont soumisent aux attentes différentes de genre que leurs homologues masculins. Aspects de l'inégalité des sexes présents dans les sociétés occidentales d'aujourd'hui se glissent dans la fiction et agir dans une manière pas toujours possible dans la monde réalité. Parfois, les situations sexistes sont résolu dans fiction, malgré le fait qu'ils existent toujours dans les vies quotidien de certaines femmes policiers. Les stéréotypes autour qu'est-ce que ça veut dire d'être policier causent des injustices du genre et existent souvent simultanément avec des images de femmes qui nient ces mêmes stéréotypes. La représentation de la femme policière est donc multiples, les stéréotypes reproduit, mélangé, ou effacé complètement. Masculinity is still regarded as the embodiment of strength and heroism and the female body, weakness and victimization. Philippa Gates, Detecting Women, 282 Despite changes in the treatment of women over the decades, policewomen continue to suffer gender injustices at the hands of their male superiors, as well as from the community they are sworn to protect. The injustices they face are publicized by such media as the CBC, though often in an exaggerated fashion. As fiction often reflects reality, one can expect that the genre of the police procedural will demonstrate not only such gender injustices but also various ways victims respond to them. Like real policewomen, fictional female detectives are too often victims even when they are the protagonists, and even when their author is a woman. Evidence of the victimization of real and fictional policewomen will be explored in this thesis by looking at the history of detective fiction, and through real case studies involving real female police officers, as well as the analysis of certain key characters in focus texts by Chrystine Brouillet, Vicki Delany, and Louise Penny. As a result, it will be shown that the images projected by actual and fictional female police officers, while not always positive ones, are becoming more varied as a result of the feminist movement and as a result of literal and imaginary resistance to sexist stereotypes. Despite having moved into a protagonist position, fictional female detectives all too often have reduced agency and different gendered expectations than their male counterparts. Aspects of gender inequity present in Western societies today creep into fiction and are played out in ways not always possible in reality. Sometimes, sexist problems present in the fictional texts are resolved despite the fact that they still exist in certain policewomen's everyday lives. Stereotypes of what a police officer should be function in ways that reflect and reproduce gender injustices and often exist simultaneously with images of women that resist and oppose these same stereotypes. The representation of policewoman is thus multiple, reproducing stereotypes, blurring them, or erasing them altogether.

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This dissertation offers an examination of Delany's critical trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism and postmodernism across a gamut of genres from SF to sword-and-sorcery, pornography, autobiography and literary criticism. Delany's engagement with semiotics, Foucault and deconstruction form the theoretical focus, together with his own theories of how SF functions as a literary genre, and its standing and reception within the greater realm of literature. The impact of Delany as a gay, black SF writer is also examined against the backdrop of his varied output. I have used the term 'dislocation' to describe Delany's tackling of traditional subjects and genres, and opening them up to further possibilities through critical engagement. Lastly, Delany is also examined as a postmodern icon. A frequent participant in his own texts, as well using pseudonyms that have developed into fully-fledged characters, Delany has become a critical signifier in his own work. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language. / text

This dissertation offers an examination of Delany's critical trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism and postmodernism across a gamut of genres from SF to sword-and-sorcery, pornography, autobiography and literary criticism. Delany's engagement with semiotics, Foucault and deconstruction form the theoretical focus, together with his own theories of how SF functions as a literary genre, and its standing and reception within the greater realm of literature. The impact of Delany as a gay, black SF writer is also examined against the backdrop of his varied output. I have used the term 'dislocation' to describe Delany's tackling of traditional subjects and genres, and opening them up to further possibilities through critical engagement. Lastly, Delany is also examined as a postmodern icon. A frequent participant in his own texts, as well using pseudonyms that have developed into fully-fledged characters, Delany has become a critical signifier in his own work. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

One aim of emancipatory social movements is to make political communities more inclusive. The way in which a movement pursues transformative political change depends on its account of how political actors understand one another as members of a shared community. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, I argue that acknowledgement is a mode of practical understanding that effectively combats exclusionary ideas of political community. I acknowledge you as a fellow member of my political community because you enact a commitment to the community's fundamental principles; enacting such a commitment is what makes you a member of the community. My acknowledgement itself consists in a responsiveness to the fact—independent of my own judgment— that you are a member of the community. This responsiveness manifests in how we comport ourselves in relation to one another in daily political life, which is the primary locus of intervention for effective efforts at making political communities more inclusive.