Souvent conceptualisée comme l’envers ou l’opposé de la raison, la folie, presque toujours synonyme de débordement, semble vouée à outrepasser toute limite définitoire ou conceptuelle posée par la pensée rationnelle. Cette pulsion de délimitation ou de classification inhérente à la rationalité, trouve dans le genre l’une de ses expressions les plus représentatives. Partant du constat que la folie ne cesse de transgresser les frontières traditionnelles de genre, ce travail étudie les liens entre les représentations littéraires de la maladie mentale et les questions de genre sexué (« gender ») comme littéraire, dans un corpus composé de romans, nouvelles et pièces de théâtre de six auteurs (Janet Frame, Jenny Diski, Sarah Kane, Ian McEwan, Anthony Neilson et Will Self), publiés entre 1951 et 2004. Animées par une dynamique toujours renouvelée de subversion des catégories établies, ces oeuvres invitent à une réflexion sur le rapport particulier qu’entretient la folie à la frontière, qui de simple ligne de démarcation ou de séparation se fait point de contact, puis espace à part entière. À travers leurs représentations de la folie, les récits étudiés privilégient le plus souvent, en effet, une esthétique et une épistémologie de l’entre. Cette réflexion s’articule donc principalement autour des images et des usages de la liminalité dans ces histoires de fous et de folles qui, au fil de leur (re)définition de l’appartenance et de l’identité des textes et des individus, esquissent une cartographie mobile des « contrées à venir » dont Deleuze et Guattari font la destination de toute écriture. / Traditionally conceptualised as the underside or the outside of reason, madness most often rhymes with excess; as such, it continually threatens to transgress all definitional or conceptual limits set by rational thought. Indeed, at the core of rationality is an impulse to delimit and classify, of which categories of genre and gender are quintessential examples. Starting from the observation that depicting madness regularly entails crossing, questioning and redefining genre and gender boundaries, this work investigates how literary representations of madness relate to the classification and conceptualisation of gender and genre in a selection of novels, short stories and plays by six different writers – Janet Frame, Jenny Diski, Sarah Kane, Ian McEwan, Anthony Neilson, and Will Self – published between 1951 and 2004. With the subversion of established categories as their central aim and dynamics, these works call for an exploration of the specific way in which depictions of madness, by using the border as one of their core motifs, impact the conceptualisation of borders. No longer a mere demarcation or dividing line between spaces, or simply a meeting point, the border becomes a full-blown space for individuals and texts to inhabit. Indeed, through their representations of madness, the borderline stories under study seem to embrace and promote both an aesthetics and an epistemology of the in-between. This work therefore focuses on the images and uses of liminality in stories of madmen and madwomen that, by remapping textual and sexual identities, have begun to chart these “lands to come” which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are the true destination of all writing.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) is known for being one of the most prolific, translated, and unconventional New Zealand novelists. Her work, however, includes a vast production of poems, which scholars and translators have ignored or, at least, not considered worthy for a comprehensive approach to her. Frame's work has undergone the further limitation of a strongly biography-based hermeneutics: from the gossiping around her alleged schizophrenia, to the popularity of the filmic version of her autobiography (An Angel at My Table) by Jane Campion, and the countless legends that have sprung around her, she has often been stigmatised and labelled the 'mad writer' of Campion's movie. This thesis links the risks of the life/myth-driven perspectives to the current lack of interest in Frame's poetry. Her poetic production is here presented as a fundamental part of her oeuvre and her idiosyncratic approach to writing. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature on Frame and thus reconfigure her role as a poet. Through a combination of methodologies grounded in literary and verse translation theories, creativity and genre studies, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, this thesis investigates the most significant traits of Frame's prose and poetry, particularly the traits shared by both. It critiques past translations of Frame's prose into Italian where these have not taken into account the poetic value of her work, and suggests strategies for the translation of her verse into Italian, arguing that an informed approach to her poetry in translation may greatly contribute to a reconfiguration and re-evaluation of her legacy.

Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)

This dissertation pairs a nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, and a twentieth-century New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, to consider points of overlap between two novelists who were unusually sensitive to the problem of political thinking and decision in situations of state emergency. Consisting of three chapters on Melville’s later maritime fiction (Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor) and two interleaving chapters on Frame’s late autobiographical and fictional writings (An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians), the dissertation explores how, in the work of these writers, figural work builds around interlinked questions of emergency and judgment. Both writers are interested in situations of peril when the fragility of bodily life is exposed and when the coherence of given political orders is tested. Both probe the response of the human legislative urge and the limits of the power of judgment in the time of crisis and exception, producing narratives of the tense moment of executive decision. Their literary forms heighten awareness of the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of different modes of judgment--whether cognitive, moral, legal, aesthetic, or political--under emergency conditions. Out of this engagement with the nexus of judgment and security, both writers ask what might happen if we were to abide with precariousness and insecurity rather than default to the often destructive praxis of security. Melville and Frame also push the capacities of language and form in their attempt to represent the possibility of modes of judgment adequate to such political renewal. In their rhetoric and formal structures--including their experimental “disfiguration” of narrative lines--and in their creation of intricate, reflexive literary voices, these writers imagine what it would mean to come up against the limit of, and even to overturn, accepted categories of knowledge and thought, of calculation and judgment.

This dissertation pairs a nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, and a twentieth-century New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, to consider points of overlap between two novelists who were unusually sensitive to the problem of political thinking and decision in situations of state emergency. Consisting of three chapters on Melville’s later maritime fiction (Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor) and two interleaving chapters on Frame’s late autobiographical and fictional writings (An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians), the dissertation explores how, in the work of these writers, figural work builds around interlinked questions of emergency and judgment. Both writers are interested in situations of peril when the fragility of bodily life is exposed and when the coherence of given political orders is tested. Both probe the response of the human legislative urge and the limits of the power of judgment in the time of crisis and exception, producing narratives of the tense moment of executive decision. Their literary forms heighten awareness of the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of different modes of judgment--whether cognitive, moral, legal, aesthetic, or political--under emergency conditions. Out of this engagement with the nexus of judgment and security, both writers ask what might happen if we were to abide with precariousness and insecurity rather than default to the often destructive praxis of security. Melville and Frame also push the capacities of language and form in their attempt to represent the possibility of modes of judgment adequate to such political renewal. In their rhetoric and formal structures--including their experimental “disfiguration” of narrative lines--and in their creation of intricate, reflexive literary voices, these writers imagine what it would mean to come up against the limit of, and even to overturn, accepted categories of knowledge and thought, of calculation and judgment.

In reading the literary criticism on Janet Frame's work it soon turns out that Frame was deconstructive before the concept was even invented. Thus, deconstruction is used in this essay to close-read a passage in the title story of her collection of short stories, The Lagoon (1951). The main hierarchical dichotomy of the passage is found to be the one between "the sea" and "the lagoon," in which the sea is proven to hold supremacy. "The sea" is read as an image of the great sea of English literary/cultural reference whereas "the lagoon" is read as an image of the vulnerably interdependent, peripheral pool of it, in the form of New Zealand literary/cultural reference. Through this symbolic and post-colonial reading the hierarchical dichotomy between "the sea" and "the lagoon" is deconstrued and reversed. In the conclusion, a post-colonial trace of Maori influence displaces the oppositional relation between "the sea" and "the lagoon."

This thesis examines the nature and value of metafictional practices in the careers of postwar novelists. Discussions of metafiction have been central to accounts of postwar literature. Where debates in the 1980s and 1990s about metafiction tended to make claims about its distinctive political and theoretical power, recent work in the study of institutions has folded metafiction into the routine operation of the literary field, and attacked previous claims to distinctive value. In this thesis I both historicize self-reflexive literary practices in the literary field, an element largely absent from the earlier scholarship, and present historically determinate claims about the value of these practices, an element I suggest is missing from the more recent work. To do so, I turn to the study of autobiography, specifically Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'autobiographical space.' In the first chapter, I explore how J. M. Coetzee develops academic literary criticism in his fiction. In the second chapter, I examine how Janet Frame responds to both the demands of a national literature and biographical inquiry into her life. In the third chapter, I address how Philip Roth handles the relationship between the politics of identity and the postwar novel. Self-reflexive practices, I show throughout, are ways of writing that were encouraged by particular formations in the literary field and were handled by writers through more or less explicit treatments of autobiographical space. I argue, though, that while these practices can be remarkably inventive, they carry no guarantees for political, theoretical, or aesthetic value.