Mémoire en recherche-création / Notre recherche s’intéresse aux moyens par lesquels la fictionnalisation du vécu, dans le roman autofictionnel Le Voyage dans l’Est de Christine Angot, permet d’approcher le réel et de dire l’indicible. La métatextualité apparaît comme un moyen important, mettant en évidence la fidélité à l’expérience revendiquée – et donc l’écart vis-à-vis du témoignage littéraire et judiciaire. En outre, l’éthos de l’écrivaine oscille entre l’apparente authenticité et l’incertitude délibérée, une stratégie alternant entre la révélation et la dissimulation du trauma. Enfin, la répétition représente une stratégie narrative et stylistique structurante pour l’ensemble du texte. Au bout du compte, l’expérience de la répétition – avec les nombreuses variations (ou stratégies) étudiées dans notre essai – des événements que constitue fondamentalement la narration du Voyage dans l’Est mène à leur resignification autant qu’à l’agentivité de l’auteure. C’est cette idée de la répétition, à la fois comme moyen d’écrire le trauma (puisque composante essentielle de ce dernier) et comme moyen de le dépasser, qu’explore particulièrement notre création. S’éloignant de l’autofiction, le roman s’ancre néanmoins dans le réel par un intertexte juridique dialoguant avec l’histoire de la protagoniste (elle-même avocate). Deux relations symétriques, séparées par dix ans – et un processus judiciaire –, sont développées : la première – qui a entraîné le dépôt d’accusations –, à l’adolescence, avec un professeur; la seconde, avec l’avocat qui a agi comme poursuivant dans le dossier. L’usage combiné du « je » (narratrice autodiégétique) et des pronoms « tu » et « il » (désignant respectivement l’enseignant et le procureur) évoque, en le subvertissant, le triangle amoureux. Sous forme de fragments, les événements traumatiques sont progressivement reconstitués, à travers la seconde relation, qui s’écarte de la première par des différences croissantes, et qui permet ultimement à la protagoniste de s’en détacher. / Our research focuses on the means by which the fictionalization of lived experience, in Christine Angot's autofictional novel Le Voyage dans l’Est, makes it possible to approach reality and to say the unspeakable. Metatextuality appears as an important means, highlighting the claimed fidelity to experience – and therefore the deviation from literary and court testimony. Furthermore, the author's ethos oscillates between apparent authenticity and deliberate uncertainty, a strategy that alternates between revealing and concealing trauma. Lastly, repetition represents a structuring narrative and stylistic strategy for the entire text. Ultimately, the experience of repetition – with the many variations (or strategies) explored in our essay – of the events that the narration of Le Voyage dans l’Est fundamentally constitutes leads to their resignification as well as to the agency of the author. It is this idea of repetition, both as a means of writing trauma (since it is an essential component) and as a means of going beyond it, that our creation particularly explores. Moving away from autofiction, the novel nevertheless grounds itself in reality through a legal intertext dialoguing with the story of the protagonist (herself a lawyer). Two symmetrical relationships, separated by ten years – and a judicial process – are developed : the first – which led to the laying of charges –, in adolescence, with a teacher; the second, with the lawyer who acted as prosecutor in the case. The combined use of the "I" (autodiegetic narrator) and the pronouns "you" and "he" (respectively designating the teacher and the prosecutor) evokes, while subverting it, the love triangle. In the form of fragments, the traumatic events are gradually reconstituted, through the second relationship, which diverges from the first through increasing differences, and which ultimately allows the protagonist to detach herself from it.

Consacré aux Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1671-1674) de Madame de Villedieu, ce mémoire étudie la gaieté, omniprésente et protéiforme, de l’œuvre. La gaieté des Mémoires est souvent troublante : tout en répondant à l’impératif incontournable de divertir les lecteur.trice.s, elle révèle la violence du monde et des hommes. Une étude de sa poétique permet alors d’éclairer la perspective singulière et inattendue qui traverse ce roman-mémoires. Le premier chapitre s’attache à analyser certains éléments de la structure narrative de l’œuvre qui, tout en provoquant l’agrément du lectorat, sont aussi porteurs d’un point de vue critique sur l’Histoire, et particulièrement sur l’histoire des femmes. Le deuxième chapitre consiste en une exploration de l’hybridité générique des Mémoires. Ludiques et polémiques, ces nombreuses transgressions à l’égard des codes scripturaires typiquement masculins remettent en question à la fois l’ordre de l’écrit, et les valeurs qui les structurent. La méthode employée est inspirée par l’analyse du discours, et nourrie par plusieurs travaux portant sur la poétique des genres. Finalement, le troisième chapitre examine la gaieté d’Henriette-Sylvie, en tant que narratrice et personnage, à travers le prisme de la rhétorique. Si les mots d’esprit et les réparties ironiques de la narratrice-personnage permettent d’évoquer plus librement plusieurs réalités contraires aux normes de la bienséance, la gaieté inébranlable d’Henriette-Sylvie témoigne aussi de l’obligation qui pèse sur elle de plaire et de divertir. La gaieté est alors envisagée comme faisant partie d’une stratégie énonciative visant à séduire et convaincre. Pour éclairer le contexte, à la fois historique, polémique et générique avec lequel dialogue le roman, ce mémoire s’appuie également sur les travaux ayant pour objet le rire et le comique à l’âge classique, la Querelle des femmes dans l’espace social et littéraire, et le pyrrhonisme des libertins. / Dedicated to the Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1671-1674) by Madame de Villedieu, this thesis studies the omnipresent and protean gaiety of the work. The gaiety of the Mémoires is often troubling: while it responds to the inescapable imperative of entertaining the reader, it reveals the violence of the world and of men. A study of its poetics allows us to shed light on the singular and unexpected perspective that runs through this novel-memoir. The first chapter analyzes certain elements of the narrative structure of the work which, while provoking the pleasure of the reader, also carry a critical point of view on History, and particularly on the history of women. The second chapter consists of an exploration of the generic hybridity of the Memoirs. Playful and polemical, these various transgressions of typically male scriptural codes challenge both the order of the written word and the values that structure it. The method used is inspired by discourse analysis, and informed by several works on the poetics of literary forms. Finally, the third chapter examines Henriette-Sylvie’s gaiety, as narrator and character, through the lens of rhetoric. While the narrator-character’s witty and ironic repartee allows for the freer evocation of many realities contrary to the norms of decency, Henriette-Sylvie’s unwavering cheerfulness also speaks to her obligation to please and entertain. Cheerfulness is then seen as part of an enunciative strategy to seduce and convince. In order to shed light on the historical, polemical and generic context with which the novel is in dialogue, this work also relies on works dealing with laughter and comedy in the classical age, the Querelle des femmes in the social and literary space, and the Pyrrhonism of the libertines.

The Victorian need to compartmentalise and define women’s sexuality in terms of opposing binaries was paralleled by the vague idea that the period’s French and British literatures were at odds with one another. Elucidating the deep connections between, and common concerns shared by, French Naturalist and Realist and British New Woman authors, this thesis shatters the dichotomies that attempted to structure and define women’s sexuality in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The thesis focusses on novels and short stories by French authors Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and New Woman authors Sarah Grand, Ménie Muriel Dowie and Vernon Lee. In a time during which the feminist movement was gaining momentum, and female sexuality was placed at the heart of a range of discourses, and scrutinised from a number of different angles – not only in literature, but in medicine, psychology, sexology, criminology – the consideration of the female sexual self and her subjectivity brings together the work of authors whose oeuvres have been largely considered as antithetical. Previous work has indeed shown the centrality of female sexuality to both literatures, yet never compared them. This thesis rediscovers the significance of both literatures’ investment in a discourse revolving around female sexuality by contrasting the French male authors with the British female writers, and uncovering unexpected parallels in their claims about the contemporary situation of women. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe’s feminist philosophy frames the thesis’s comparative analysis, questioning and re-examining these authors’ representations of female sexuality. The ideas of sensuality and rationality, motherhood, reproduction, marriage, and prostitution thus become recurring concerns throughout it. The thesis’s first chapter considers the female as sexual subject and/or object of the male gaze, in a range of New Woman and French literature. The second and third chapters are organised around the themes of marriage and prostitution, and the final chapter considers issues of female sexuality within the fantastic short story.

Whereas the relationship between real autobiography and its fictional forms has been studied at length, the equivalent relationship for diaries has barely been acknowledged, let alone explored. This thesis follows the history of diary-writing – as a field that includes real and fictional diaries and the complex relations between them – in twentieth-century French writing. I take as my starting point the moment in the 1880s when, following a series of successful posthumous diary publications, a new generation of writers became aware that their own journaux intimes would probably come to be published, with considerable consequences for the way their literary œuvre and their very persona as an author (or their textual author-figure) would appear to readers. Of this generation, André Gide exerted by far the greatest influence over the course of diary-writing, and four works in particular experiment, in extremely diverse forms, with the literary possibilities of the diary: Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891), Paludes (1895), Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and his Journal 1889–1939 (1939). After the Second World War, diary-writing continued to draw on forms established by Gide, but now inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject: Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947–62) cast light on attitudes towards the diary at the time of a theoretical exclusion of the writing subject; Roland Barthes experimented with diaries at the point of a return of the writing subject (1977–79); and Annie Ernaux's published diaries between 1993 and 2011 demonstrate the role of diary-writing within the modern field of life-writing. Rather than making a gradual progress towards literary recognition, this history of diary-writing shows that, in a great variety of ways, diaries have consistently been used for their marginal or supplementary role, which simultaneously constructs and qualifies a literary œuvre and author-figure.

The esteemed French author, Marcel Proust, revolutionized the way that literature fuses with visual art. Through the detail of his novella Un Amour de Swann, Proust creates a world in which the idolatry of a painting destines one man to a life void of fulfillment in love. This thesis explores the intrinsic connection of painting and literature to love through Proust’s treatment of the Botticelli fresco, Les Épreuves de Moïse, and the carefully crafted lesson that Proust teaches to integrate art into the fabric of life. Proust’s advice reaches far beyond the constraints of his own words, and through an analysis of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, Proustian guidance is brought to a universal scale. For Proust, art truly was a way of life, this thesis seeks to embody just that.

This study of the graphic field in notes on space, undated (log 3) focuses on how the white emptiness of a page plays a structural role in the articulation of dissociated fragments of notes. According to the criteria of three theorists (Genette, Lapacherie, Baetens), the distinction between non-linear and tabular proves to be non-exclusive in this particular work. Ostensibly, this non-figurative writing instigates interactive contemplation and lends itself to multiple entries, like an object one contemplates from every possible visual perspective without ever constructing a representation or image. The poetic form that du Bouchet explores renders perceptible the latent materiality of all text.

L’imaginaire de François Rabelais se présente souvent à la faveur d’éléments étranges, ambigus et équivoques qui proviennent de la virtuosité stylistique mise en œuvre. Cette liaison nette entre l’imaginaire et la technique se manifeste dans de nombreuses descriptions dont l’auteur nourrit le Tiers livre et le Quart livre. Appréhender les pratiques descriptives dans ces deux œuvres nécessite une analyse à deux niveaux distincts de la technique d’écriture : le style et les objets décrits. Pour le premier, le recours aux théories rhétorique et dialectique de l’époque permet d’illustrer le procédé d’hybridation qui renvoie aux multiples pratiques descriptives existant avant Rabelais. Pour les seconds, le rapprochement avec l’art des grotesques souligne, par ses figures capricieuses et composites, la supériorité de l’artifice sur la nature. En se reportant au réel et au fictif dans le système complexe de rapport entre le mot et le référent, cette investigation révèle la modalité de l’« ingénieuse fiction » forgée par l’artifice de Rabelais. / The imaginary world of François Rabelais appears often as strange, ambiguous, and polysemic, a result of his stylistic virtuosity. This close connection between creativity and technique shows itself in the numerous descriptions with which the author furnishes his Tiers livre and Quart livre. Full comprehension of the descriptive practices in these two works requires an analysis at both levels of his written technique : the style and the objects described. For the former, a consideration of the rhetorical and dialectical theories of Rabelais' contemporaries illustrates a process of hybridization, which refers to the multiple descriptive practices available to Rabelais. For the latter, a connection drawn to the grotesque in art emphasizes, by its capricious and composite figures, the superiority of artifice over nature. By placing the real and the imaginary within the complex system of relationships between the word and the referent, this investigation finds a modality of " ingenious fiction " forged by the artifice of Rabelais.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The creation of the French Penal Code of 1791, which failed to address the legality of prostitution, and the social climate of nineteenth-century France led to the rapid development of sexual commerce. The spread of syphilitic diseases soon became a serious crisis, and the fault of the spread of syphilis and disease was quickly ascribed to purchasable women. Other social crises of the time, such as problems with sewage and the spread of disease and decay also came to be associated with prostitution. My thesis will examine ways in which male artists of the time used literature and painting to suppress the contagious, transgressive sexual female, and the ways in which the representation of this female illustrates deeper anxieties and fears of the French bourgeois society about class and gender. I have constructed my argument in the context of two literary/artistic prostitute figures: the “heart of gold” and the “man-eater.” The “heart of gold” is characterized as a prostitute with qualities of goodness and integrity, who must ultimately die as the only way to reconcile her deviant behavior. The “man-eater,” by contrast, is a woman who destroys the men who seek her, driving them to financial, emotional, and even physical devastation. In order to complete my thesis, I have used a selection of primary sources (the works of Balzac, Dumas fils, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Manet), analyses of nineteenth-century French literature, and several historical sources, as well as the memoirs of Céleste Mogador, a courtesan in nineteenth-century France. The goal of my thesis is to examine the two literary figures mentioned above in the context of gender relations and power, the spread of disease, and decay and degeneration.

(in English): This work will consist in an analysis of the antiheroes in modern French literature, especially in "Roman Noir". Before treating the topic of antiheroes in mystery fiction we will describe the history of this type of protagonists in world literatures, from the classic literature to the modern one. To be able to understand the problematics of antiheroes in Roman Noir, we will also describe the history of French mystery fiction. Regarding the analysis of antiheroes in this sub- genre of crime fiction, we will start with the character of Maigret. Although the novels of G. Simenon are not real Romans Noirs, we consider them as a "passage" of the detective novel - in the traditional sense - to the Roman Noir. Furthermore, in this work, we will analyze characters of real Romans Noirs; first, the crude and surprising behavior of Nestor Burma, a famous character of Léo Malet, then the mediocrity of protagonists of the novels Morgue pleine and Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest of Jean-Patrick Manchette, and finally, Fabio Montale, an atypical investigator from a novel series of the late twentieth century written by Jean-Claude Izzo.