Since long before her death, and up to our present day, critics, scholars and readers have considered the body of work by Virginia Woolf in the reflection of a gloomy light. This wide opinion, if not directly caused, is at least enhanced by her numerous negative and even traumatic life experiences. Very little attention has been paid, or focus put, even by the most thorough and astute Woolf scholars, on another aspect of Woolf’s life and of her work. This thesis reveals another side of Woolf not only as a funny and entertaining woman, but as a sufficiently masterful manipulator of her craft to have used her fiction writing talent as an enhancement of her nonfiction works, and which included humor in the process.

Willing to overstep literary conventions in order to ensure that meaning and purpose reign over structure, cross-genre writing works to push boundaries of genre and tear down the walls of limitation. This cross-genre thesis aims to test literary restrictions of structure and style and, as literary endeavors often do, to rattle our existence. In this thesis, nonfiction and fiction work together to drive meaning to the surface of the page, meaning that is universal in the individual stories as well as in the human experience. Although some characters are fictional and some real, they often intersect, their journeys and discoveries merging into one. The many voices of this thesis, while diverse, speak to similar themes and meaning. The main character of "Silhouettes," a homosexual male who yearns to find his identity away from the place he once called home, experiences feelings of abandonment and loss. The narrator of "A Crimson Trail" longs to uncovers truths about her uncle's suicide and endures similar feelings of loss. "Abandoned Laurels" explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and wades through themes of mourning, regret, and shame. The remaining stories explore similar themes, including those of longing, death, and familial relationships. Shorter pieces are scattered amongst longer works and supplement themes developed in the thesis. Each section contributes to the characters' longing for identity, recovery, and understanding of the past. These related characters and their stories--both real and fictional--merge in a collective endeavor to sift through loss, explore the past, and, most importantly, find identity and hope in the future amidst the rubble of the present.

As the written accompaniment for The Luxury of Tears, a twelve-minute documentary video exploring the emotional impact of sexual assault on male survivors and their partners, this document examines the visual texts of both the fiction and nonfiction genres. Specifically, I contend that fiction film manufactures male survivorship with regard to rape events in such manner which contributes to the thematization of social silence. Such silence perpetuates the feminization of rape as a social problem, and dissolves the development of male survivor resources. A discussion of production processes, challenges, and resolutions is included.

Le récit littéraire au tournant du XXIe siècle peut se présenter sous la forme du récit d’enquête. Cette thèse se propose d’examiner ce modèle tel que le mettent en œuvre Thierry Beinstingel, Jean Rolin et Emmanuel Carrère. La pratique de ces trois écrivains pourrait permettre de mieux repérer l’esthétique et les enjeux de cette modalité narrative en émergence. Dans ces récits, le narrateur se trouve d’abord privé de vérité par un récit autoritaire, contre lequel il reconquiert son autonomie perceptive. Sa liberté retrouvée se manifeste par l’entrée dans l’enquête. Le narrateur élit alors un objet de recherche, un motif aléatoire ou improbable, personne, projet, objet, territoire et entreprend le récit de son exploration. À partir de ce prétexte, il interroge donc le sens de sa présence au monde et s’observe percevant, lisant, interprétant et réagissant. Sa liberté se traduit alors par son implication sensible et réflexive. Entre récit de réalité et fiction, ces récits volontiers digressifs opèrent aux confins de la narration, de l’essai et de l’investigation journalistique. Un tel modèle met en œuvre une attitude ou un ethos de chercheur hésitant et perplexe. Cependant, se construit en arrière-plan une dynamique à la fois narrative et réflexive, au cours de laquelle l’énonciateur entre dans l’observation intense du monde présent, y conduit librement sa réflexion au moyen, entre autres, de la dérive essayistique, renouvelle le discours critique sur l’état de société et propose des modalités de reconstruction imaginaire du monde, réaffirmant une liberté créatrice, voire une capacité insurrectionnelle contre la prétention du monde tel qu’il est à être le seul possible. / Literary narrative forms at the dawn of 21st century sometimes take the form of an enquiry. The present thesis aims to examine in detail this narrative technique as practised by Thierry Beinstingel, Emmanuel Carrère et Jean Rolin. The way they use it could help to understand and identify the aesthetic qualities and purposes of this emerging narrative mode. In these stories, the narrator feels his own thoughts as locked inside an authoritarian doxa which he must first overcome to recover his freedom of perception. He can then become involved in the enquiry, which can be understood as a phenomenological way to be aware. He then selects an arbitrary or improbable motif as the goal for his quest, which may be a person, an object, a project, an area, and undertakes to tell the story of his own inquiry. From this starting point, he begins to question the meaning of his existence and to observe himself making sense of, reading, thinking about and reacting to things. Between fiction and nonfiction, these frequently digressive tales often border on novels, essays or investigation journalism. The narrator always looks puzzled, hesitant and does not seem to trust his own approach. Yet in the background we witness the emergence of a dynamic both narrative and introspective through which the narrator becomes an acute observer of the world around him. He follows freely his train of thought through among other things the use of the essay form to drift from an idea to the next, finding new means of expressing the critique of social problems, creating novel ways of building new fictional worlds and perhaps even managing to rebel against the idea that there is no alternative to the world as it exists.