This work contains a series of essays examining childhood trauma through the lens and experience of the author.

This practice-led thesis situates the experimental novella <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> within the context of interdisciplinary approaches to experimentation which cross the arts, humanities, literature and sciences. The novella and thesis develop a queer avant-garde poetics and writing methodology that I have called transliteracy. Transliteracy builds on my situated and embodied writing practice as a queer identified novelist and nonnative English speaker. I have mobilised the perceived 'otherness' of English to produce narratively and linguistically experimental prose fictions (Waidner, 2010, 2011). Transliteracy develops this practice by sharing agency (the capacity to influence the narrative) across assemblages of human and nonhuman, fictional and real, material and semiotic 'actors', to use the philosopher of science Bruno Latour's (1987, 1999) term for participants in action and process. Transliteracy has allowed me to subvert normative versions of authorship, intentionality, causality, and process in <i>Gaudy Bauble</i>, and to produce a radically subverted version of a plot that is intelligible and captivating to the reader. <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> inaugurates a genre I have called agential realist fiction, which is original in its genre-bending, gender-bending, interdisciplinary and queer avant-garde orientation. The practice was further shaped according to a generative constraint, which dictated that the most marginal actors on and beyond the page were made relevant for the plot. This conceptual apparatus is also reflected in the novella's narrative as a 'not quite' detective story: <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages what happens if previously inconsequential actors are allowed to become effectual, rather than actions located within a conventional protagonist. Enacting an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" (Foucault, 1980, p. 81) in fiction, <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages a landscape of reversed power relations, a locally subverted surface of emergence in fiction, where radically nonnormative phenomena and imaginaries can come into being. The thesis connects transliteracy to a wider political LGBTQI+ project and agenda.

Contemporary cultural practices sometimes appear dispassionate, distant and clinical—committed to conceptualism or formalism. Yet works by Jacques Roubaud and Jacques Jouet (both members of the Oulipo, a group of experimental writers in France that use formal and mathematical constraints to generate new literary forms) suggest a complex relationship between epistemology and affect. This thesis argues that contemporary literary and artistic projects that appropriate the tropes of clinical procedure and experimental constraint, suggest alternative forms of knowledge that implicate the body and emotions of the experiencing subject. In these projects, affect and emotion travel through reason, logic, system and constraint and are transformed in the process. Therefore any analysis of forms of affect in these works must also consider the procedural and scientific aspect, that which makes them "projects". My research, drawing on recent work that places emphasis on affect, considers these projects as test cases often mediating between a series of dichotomies such as reason/emotion and mathematics/poetry. Curiously it is in the encounter with epistemological systems that the value of affect, embodiment and subjectivity is underscored, and this thesis interrogates the various ways that contemporary projects articulate affect almost despite themselves. By passing through a scientific impulse to inquire about and test the validity of epistemological systems, these projects underscore the role of affect in producing knowledge. This thesis insists on the continued importance of the Oulipo in contemporary culture and seeks to provide a larger, interdisciplinary context for oulipian experimentation by analysing similar works in the visual arts. This thesis has four chapters, each based on the materials that the projects themselves investigate: 1) numbers and mathematics, 2) lists, collection, and census-data, 3) itineraries and travel, 4) weather and meteorology. Projects bear witness to what the poet Lyn Hejinian has called the romance of science: its rigor, patience, thoroughness and speculative imagination (Mirage, 1983, 24) In so doing, these projects reveal forms of affect that only emerge through this 'weird science' as literary and artistic experiments.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Samanta Gimenez Fluture.pdf: 8428221 bytes, checksum: 73735a0313842176804a2cc947de8050 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-03 / This research questions how the book can be rethought through technological advances of today, contemplating the mobile device, its own culture and its features. For this matter, it studies both the book and the mobile device as medias for experimentation and artistic creation, following a path that deconstructs them layer by layer: text, paper, devices, infertace and context. Basing on practices that transgressed the limits of these means over time, like concrete poetry that overflows the word, the artist book that deny the codex and the narratives that become interactive, mobile and contextual, this theoretical study meets practice for a reconstruction proposal. From a need for experimentation and lab activities conducted during this course, finally, I, phone project is presented. Inspired by the works of Eduardo Kac and the dialogue between art and technology, this project is a propose to put togheter again the studied medias, in order to set up a new syntax, a hybrid support, the book-machine , rethinking the book for today technologies. As a result, possible paths in the area of paper computing are unfolded. In the end, this research seeks to contribute with fresh eyes and perspectives on books as art and technology, in a way that the creative process not just absorbs the contemporary advances, but also uses them to break their own limits. / Ao questionar como o livro pode ser repensado para os avanços tecnológicos de hoje, no caso, contemplando uma cultura própria do dispositivo móvel e suas funcionalidades, esta pesquisa estuda tanto o livro quanto o dispositivo móvel como suportes para experimentação e criação artística, desconstruindo-os nos dois primeiros capítulos. Fundamentando-se em vertentes que transgrediram os limites destes meios ao longo do tempo, como a poesia concreta que rompe com a palavra, o livro de artista que rompe com o códice e as narrativas que se transformam em interativas, móveis e contextuais, este estudo teórico transborda para a prática. Dessa forma, a partir desta necessidade de experimentação e de laboratórios realizados durante o percurso de pesquisa, foi realizado, por fim, o projeto prático Eu, fone. Este capítulo, de poética livre, inspira-se nos feitos de Eduardo Kac e o diálogo entre arte e tecnologia para propor uma reconstrução dos meios estudados, com o propósito de configurar uma nova sintaxe baseada em um suporte híbrido, o livro-máquina . Como resultado, desdobram-se caminhos possíveis na área de paper computing, ficando uma contribuição para as criações com meios eletrônicos, apontando para uma forma de criar que não apenas absorva os avanços tecnológicos contemporâneos, mas que os use para romper com seu próprios limites e ir além

Samuel Beckett is often thought of as an experimental writer but little critical attention has been paid to the question of what the term ‘experimental’ means when applied to Beckett’s work (and arguably literature in general). One might suggest that to call Beckett an experimental writer is to identify him as a member of the avant-garde, placing his writing in opposition to more commercially-orientated, ‘mainstream’ works of literature. Alternatively, the term might be taken to highlight Beckett’s formal innovations – his capacity to change conceptions of what literature is and does. This study, though, will specify another way in which we might understand Beckett’s writing to be experimental. Drawing on Beckett’s engagement with experimental and therapeutic psychology, the study suggests that Beckett’s works might be seen as experiments in a more scientific sense. Through readings of his later works for page, stage and screen, the chapters of this study suggest that Beckett’s writing can contribute to our knowledge of psychological concepts such as perception, attention and mental imagery. Beckett’s works, I argue, might be defined as experimental insofar as they position and stimulate human bodies in ways that allow us to better understand our complex, but partial, experiences of the world.

Can words create worlds? My fiction thesis, El mundo es mentira (The World Is a Lie), explores different voices and points of view to examine the ways in which they not only tell stories, but also generate spaces, atmospheres and, ultimately, worlds of their own. Moreover, the book aims to be a meeting ground where these voices dialogue with the voices of the literary tradition, reinterpreting and rewriting it. This collection was conceived as an experimental laboratory as well: it is comprised by short and micro-stories which question and challenge conventional forms of storytelling by incorporating poetic, memoiristic and essayistic devices.

This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.

The thesis, entitled "The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde and Postmodernism," attempts to construct a post-Joycean literary genealogy centred around the notions of a Joycean avant-garde and literary experimentation written in its wake. It considers the last two works by Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as points of departure for the post-war literary avant-gardes in Great Britain, the USA, and France, in a period generally called "postmodern." The introduction bases the notion of a Joycean avant-garde upon Joyce's sustained exploration of the materiality of language and upon the appropriation of his last work, his "Work in Progress," for the cause of the "Revolution of the word" conducted by Eugene Jolas in his transition magazine. The Joycean exploration of the materiality of language is considered as comprising three stimuli: the conception of writing as concrete trace, susceptible to distortion or effacement; the understanding of literary language as a forgery of the words of others; and the project of creating a personal idiom as an "autonomous" language for a truly modern literature. The material is divided into eight chapters, two for Great Britain (from Johnson via Brooke-Rose to Sinclair), two for the U.S. (from Burroughs and Gass to Acker and Sorrentino) and three for France...

The aim of this thesis is to present the French author Georges Perec in greater detail - his life and works, constraints he used in his experimental literary work, the reception of the author in the Czech and English contexts - and to compare the Czech and English translations of a selected extract from his novel Life A User's Manual. The first part of the thesis deals with the author's life and includes information on his published works. Its second part gives an overview of his texts translated into Czech, as well as of the reception of the writer's work in Czech media. The aim of the following part is to give a similar summary but with respect to the English context, and it sketches out some translation problems English translators encountered while translating Perec's work. The fifth part is dedicated to the writer's masterpiece Life A User's Manual. It outlines the main plot of the novel, the formal constraints Perec bound himself with, and his approach to writing in general. The final part is a comparative translatological analysis of the Czech and English translations of the fifty-first chapter.

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