Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less viable. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. These literary texts, or what I label "con-script," are not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematize their own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of "false documents," the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English-, Spanish-, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. "The Art of Con-Fessing" juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries supposedly written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their "own" personal writing. "Mediations of Media" features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in "Con-Centering the Archive" via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

Les entreprises, les administrations, et parfois les particuliers, doivent faire face à de nombreuses fraudes sur les documents qu’ils reçoivent de l’extérieur ou qu’ils traitent en interne. Les factures, les notes de frais, les justificatifs... tout document servant de preuve peut être falsifié dans le but de gagner plus d’argent ou de ne pas en perdre. En France, on estime les pertes dues aux fraudes à plusieurs milliards d’euros par an. Étant donné que le flux de documents échangés, numériques ou papiers, est très important, il serait extrêmement coûteux en temps et en argent de les faire tous vérifier par des experts de la détection des fraudes. C’est pourquoi nous proposons dans notre thèse un système de détection automatique des faux documents. Si la plupart des travaux en détection automatique des faux documents se concentrent sur des indices graphiques, nous cherchons quant à nous à vérifier les informations textuelles du document afin de détecter des incohérences ou des invraisemblances. Pour cela, nous avons tout d’abord constitué un corpus de tickets de caisse que nous avons numérisés et dont nous avons extrait le texte. Après avoir corrigé les sorties de l’OCR et fait falsifier une partie des documents, nous en avons extrait les informations et nous les avons modélisées dans une ontologie, afin de garder les liens sémantiques entre elles. Les informations ainsi extraites, et augmentées de leurs possibles désambiguïsations, peuvent être vérifiées les unes par rapport aux autres au sein du document et à travers la base de connaissances constituée. Les liens sémantiques de l’ontologie permettent également de chercher l’information dans d’autres sources de connaissances, et notamment sur Internet. / Companies, administrations, and sometimes individuals, have to face many frauds on documents they receive from outside or process internally. Invoices, expense reports, receipts...any document used as proof can be falsified in order to earn more money or not to lose it. In France, losses due to fraud are estimated at several billion euros per year. Since the flow of documents exchanged, whether digital or paper, is very important, it would be extremely costly and time-consuming to have them all checked by fraud detection experts. That’s why we propose in our thesis a system for automatic detection of false documents. While most of the work in automatic document detection focuses on graphic clues, we seek to verify the textual information in the document in order to detect inconsistencies or implausibilities.To do this, we first compiled a corpus of documents that we digitized. After correcting the characters recognition outputs and falsifying part of the documents, we extracted the information and modelled them in an ontology, in order to keep the semantic links between them. The information thus extracted, and increased by its possible disambiguation, can be verified against each other within the document and through the knowledge base established. The semantic links of ontology also make it possible to search for information in other sources of knowledge, particularly on the Internet.