Cette étude qui interroge l'ensemble des fictions policières de Leonardo Padura Fuentes propose une réflexion sur la place et la spécificité de l'écriture de cet auteur dans la tradition de la littérature policière cubaine. Cette réflexion identifie et met en lumière les liens qu'entretient la fiction policière de cet écrivain avec la réalité quotidienne, ainsi que l'ancrage de ces récits dans un référent identifiable, condition indispensable pour que ceux-ci assument le rôle traditionnel de peinture sociale du roman policier. Ce travail analyse comment, grâce au remaniement des canons du genre, à la rénovation de la tradition littéraire policière cubaine et aux liens tissés avec la réalité, Leonardo Padura Fuentes transcende le littéraire pour livrer, au-delà de ses fictions, une vision réaliste d'une société cubaine contemporaine en crise, proposant de la sorte une chronique sociale ainsi qu'un éclairage particulier et original sur l'histoire de Cuba des vingt dernières années. / This study examines all of Leonardo Padura Fuentes' detective novels and offers a reflection on the place and the specificity of this author's writing within the tradition of Cuban enigma-crime literature. This dissertation identifies and highlights links that connect the police drama of this writer's novels with Cuban society's everyday reality, as well as arguing for the anchoring of these stories within an identifiable historical referent, a prerequisite for the traditional role of social investigative writing. This work analyses how, thanks to the redefinition of gender cannons, the renovation of the Cuban detective novel literary tradition and its links with reality, Leonardo Padura Fuentes transcends literature to deliver, beyond its drama, a realistic vision of a contemporary Cuban society in crisis, proposing a social chronicle as well as a particular and original focus on the history of the Cuba of the last twenty years.

Dans ce travail, l‟objet de notre étude a été la série de romans néo-policiers de l'écrivain Leonardo Padura - le plus grand représentant de ce type de textes à Cuba - dont les oeuvres, tout en conservant les traits qui permettent au lecteur de les reconnaître comme des romans policiers, révèlent une profonde transgression générique à tous les niveaux - modal, thématique et formel. Avec ces textes, Padura est parvenu à démanteler le canon du roman policier révolutionnaire, dont la pratique s‟est perpétuée à Cuba jusqu‟au milieu des années quatre-vingt, subventionnée par le régime révolutionnaire. Nous avons tenté de démontrer que la transformation générique entreprise par cet écrivain sur les modèles traditionnels du roman policier lui permet d'actualiser le genre et de l'utiliser comme instrument pour questionner l'ordre établi d‟un régime qui a prétendu uniformiser une société conçue comme multiple et hétérogène par l'auteur. En même temps, cette transformation lui permet d‟entrer dans la discussion sur la question générique, de revendiquer la nature systématiquement modificatrice des genres littéraires et de polémiquer sur le dogmatisme normatif qui se propose de classifier les genres en compartiments étanches et d‟enfermer le roman policier dans le cadre isolé de la « sous-littérature ». / The aim of our research is to study a series of neo-crime novels by the writer Leonardo Padura - the leading exponent of this genre on the island of Cuba-, whose works, while upholding the traits that enable them to be read as detective stories, feature a profound generic transgression at all levels - modal, thematic and formal. He sought to breathe new life into the genre Ŕwhich had been thoroughly exhausted on the island since the mid 1980sŔ and show that by relieving it of its entire political-ideological burden and treating it from a literary perspective, it could attain high artistic merit. In this way, and as we have set out to show, Padura has managed to revitalize the genre and use it as an instrument for questioning the order established by a regime that has sought to bring uniformity to a society that the author considers to be multiracial and heterogeneous. Furthermore, by transforming the formulas and the narrative structures of the crime novel in his own writings, which include and invert the genre‟s traditional models, Padura has managed to challenge the regulatory dogmatism that seeks to classify genres into watertight compartments and relegate the crime novel to the confines of “sub-literature”.

A presente investigação tem por objeto de estudo o romance El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009), de autoria do cubano Leonardo Padura. Em uma análise formal de tal obra, a pesquisa debruça-se sobre a posição de seus narradores, sobre a construção de seus personagens e sobre a estruturação de seu enredo, compreendendo seu funcionamento literário enquanto sintoma cultural da sociedade de consumo contemporânea. Assim, discute-se o pastiche da literatura policial noir engendrado pelo autor, bem como suas maneiras não realistas de figurar a história, situando o livro em meio ao panorama estético e ideológico da pós-modernidade. Com isso, busca-se esclarecer a relação dialética que se estabelece entre a forma narrativa do romance e o atual processo de transição histórica vivenciado por Cuba o qual conduz a ilha à integração ao sistema mundial do capitalismo tardio. / The current research aims to study the novel The man who loved the dogs (2009), by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura. In a formal approach to such work, the research focuses on the position of its narrators, on the construction of its characters and on the structure of its plot, understanding its literary functioning as a cultural symptom of contemporary consume society. Thus, the pastiche of noir crime fiction engendered by the author is put into discussion, as well as its non-realistic ways to figure history, in order to place the book amid the aesthetic and ideological panorama of postmodernity. Therefore, it intends to clarify the dialectical relationship established between the narrative form of the novel and the current historical transition process experienced by Cuba - which leads the island to integrate itself to late capitalism world system.

A presente investigação tem por objeto de estudo o romance El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009), de autoria do cubano Leonardo Padura. Em uma análise formal de tal obra, a pesquisa debruça-se sobre a posição de seus narradores, sobre a construção de seus personagens e sobre a estruturação de seu enredo, compreendendo seu funcionamento literário enquanto sintoma cultural da sociedade de consumo contemporânea. Assim, discute-se o pastiche da literatura policial noir engendrado pelo autor, bem como suas maneiras não realistas de figurar a história, situando o livro em meio ao panorama estético e ideológico da pós-modernidade. Com isso, busca-se esclarecer a relação dialética que se estabelece entre a forma narrativa do romance e o atual processo de transição histórica vivenciado por Cuba o qual conduz a ilha à integração ao sistema mundial do capitalismo tardio. / The current research aims to study the novel The man who loved the dogs (2009), by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura. In a formal approach to such work, the research focuses on the position of its narrators, on the construction of its characters and on the structure of its plot, understanding its literary functioning as a cultural symptom of contemporary consume society. Thus, the pastiche of noir crime fiction engendered by the author is put into discussion, as well as its non-realistic ways to figure history, in order to place the book amid the aesthetic and ideological panorama of postmodernity. Therefore, it intends to clarify the dialectical relationship established between the narrative form of the novel and the current historical transition process experienced by Cuba - which leads the island to integrate itself to late capitalism world system.

This dissertation examines the presence of postmodern episteme in the Spanish American narrative discourse at the threshold of the 21st century with an emphasis on three writers: Carlos Fuentes Macias, Mario Vargas Llosa and Leonardo Padura Fuentes. Those authors are representative figures of this literary period in different regions, and they have written novels considered by the critique as postmodern. In their novels, this episteme is present in particular characteristics from this aesthetic and literary period, mostly the theoretical principles of Jean Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Michael Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, Brian McHale, Nicholas Zurbrugg, Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Raymond Williams and Seymour Menton. All of these postmodern theories are reflected in the strategies and mechanisms used by these leading Latin American narrators and in the meaning that is conveyed through the novelistic discourse and how they point to the philosophical, aesthetical, and pragmatic cosmovision from this period. Chapter I functions as a theoretical approach to characteristics of Modernity, Postmodernity and their literary implications. Therefore, this study offers an outlook about what Postmodernity is from the sociological and anthropological points of view; what their key characteristics are; who the fundamental theorists are both in the international and Spanish American context; how Postmodernist‘s influence on art postulates a new aesthetic paradigm: the postmodern; and what formal, thematic and hermeneutic changes it has generated in the narrative genre. Finally, a critique and a personal stance in this polemic are offered. Chapters II, III and IV examine specifically the strategies and mechanisms used by these authors -Carlos Fuentes Macias, Mario Vargas Llosa and Leonardo Padura- to construct the postmodern narrative discourse in their respective novels -La silla del Águila, for Fuentes; La fiesta del chivo, for Vargas Llosa; and La novela de mi vida, for Padura-. These chapters disclose the presence of this episteme in the above mentioned works. The epilog concludes this study by pointing out the common characteristics of postmodernity present in each novel, and, in more general terms, the characteristics of this major Spanish American literary period in the narrative.