Depuis le XIXe siècle, les progrès techniques, développés à partir de la recherche et des découvertes scientifiques, ont transformé le monde. Ces transformations ont touché toutes les sphères de l'activité humaine, y compris la littérature. Cette thèse propose une réflexion en trois volets, trois modes sur les rapports entre la science et la littérature. La première partie comprend des analyses épistémocritiques de trois oeuvres emblématiques de trois périodes différentes: Louis Lambert d'Honoré de Balzac, En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett et Hier de Nicole Brossard. Deux genres sont ainsi abordés, le roman et le théâtre. L'objectif de ces analyses est de dégager des pistes de réflexions sur la création littéraire. Ces réflexions ont nourri, par la suite, une création littéraire, Fractures du dimanche: roman, qui constitue la deuxième partie de la thèse. Il s'agit d'une oeuvre hybride, qui vacille entre le théâtre et le roman, un travail d'écriture expérimentale, inspire de certaines théories scientifiques contemporaines. Enfin, dans la troisième partie, un retour sur l'écriture de Fractures du dimanche: roman mène à des essais d'épistémogénétiques sur deux des trois oeuvres étudiées. Ces essais jettent un éclairage nouveau sur le processus créateur.

This comparative study between eight fantastic narratives written by Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine poet, essayist and writer-, and Mircea Eliade -Romanian historian of religions and writer-focuses on the figure of the labyrinth as a metaphor of literature and an epistemic symbol. The approach is based on Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical theory, holding that texts are "inexhaustible," in the sense that every historical moment generates a new interpretation, and therefore the meaning is produced during the reader's encounter with the text. The argument is twofold. Firstly, based on Mikhail Bakhtine's theory of the chronotope in literature, the work examines the way the labyrinth, a fundamentally spatial figure, acquires a temporal coordinate, in the literary text. Secondly, it argues that there is a significant difference between the two authors, regarding the connotations of the destination that the travellers reach. At the end of their voyage, the protagonists -motivated by the ancestral longing for immortality, the quest for an existential mystery, and the desire to transcend the human boundaries- find something that is linked to the way in which the literary texts integrate elements from anthropological, religious and philosophical discourses. The analysis of their journey toward the centre of the labyrinth leads to a questioning of the nature of the real, an aspect that each author envisions differently. The mythical and theological meanings that can be attributed to the labyrinth in other discourses function in Borges's literary universes according to a different logic. In his works, this figure is mostly a metaphorical configuration of literature, which becomes reproduction of and reflection on itself, and hence its non-referential nature. Paradoxically, in Borges, the real is the experience of the unreal and it is absurd, incomprehensible and unsubstantial. Eliade's literary labyrinths are closely connected to the works of the historian of religions. In his literature, the real is the experience of the sacred and it is, therefore, moving, significant and substantial. In conclusion, the experience through the labyrinth as a literary journey in Borges, and an encounter with the sacred in Eliade are means of accessing a different reality, in the ceaseless effort of the human being to transcend the chronological time.

Un phénomène de " pornographisation " est de plus en plus perceptible dans la société contemporaine occidentale, entraînant une certaine banalisation de la pornographie. Ce phénomène est principalement véhiculé par les médias et les nouvelles technologies de sorte qu'il finit inévitablement par être perceptible au niveau du littéraire. C'est donc par l'analyse de la représentation de la sexualité que nous tenterons de cerner comment la " pomographisation " opère dans le phénomène littéraire en général et dans les textes du corpus. Publiés en 2001, ce qui assure une homogénéité synchronique, ils représentent symboliquement le passage au XXIe siècle. Les textes Putain de Nelly Arcan et La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. ont été choisis pour leur caractère autobiographique et le débat entre réalité et sexualité qu'ils soulèvent. Pornocratie de Catherine Breillat et Plateforme de Michel Houellebecq, quoiqu'aux antipodes dans leur façon de représenter la sexualité, sont deux textes de fiction fortement inspirés par la société occidentale contemporaine et la mondialisation des marches. Il s'agira donc de voir les enjeux posés par les limites de la représentation des pratiques sexuelles dans le littéraire, mais aussi de les mettre à l'épreuve de Sade qui règne depuis maintenant trois siècles en " sphinx dressé " aux frontières de la représentation des pratiques sexuelles. Expulsant le réel hors de ces représentations, c'est par un discours produisant des signes parfois subversifs que s'invente l'univers sadien au point de remettre en question la sexualité stéréotypée de la littérature occidentale. Il s'agira d'abord de voir si l'arrivée du nouveau millénaire apporte avec lui des textes pouvant ébranler les limites sadiennes et ainsi voir où nous en sommes à l'heure actuelle par rapport aux représentations de la sexualité alors que la société se prétend désormais exorcisée de ses tabous.

<p> The purpose of this thesis will be to examine closely James Joyce&rsquo;s <i>Ulysses</i> with respect to Fran&ccedil;ois F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s <i> The Adventures of Telemachus</i>. Joyce considered <i>The Adventures of Telemachus</i> to be a source of inspiration for Ulysses, but little scholarship considers this. Joyce&rsquo;s fixation on the role of teachers and mentor figures in Stephen&rsquo;s growth and development, serving alternately as cautionary figures, models or adversaries, owes much to F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s framework for the growth of Telemachus. Close reading of both Joyce&rsquo;s and F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s work will illuminate the significance of education and mentorship in Joyce&rsquo;s construction of Stephen Dedalus. Leopold Bloom and Stephen&rsquo;s relationship in Joyce&rsquo;s <i>Ulysses</i> closely mirrors that of Mentor and Telemachus as seen in F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s <i> The Adventures of Telemachus</i>. Through these numerous parallels, we will see that mentorship serves as a better model for Bloom and Stephen&rsquo;s relationship in Ulysses than the more critically prevalent father-son model </p>

After tracing the theo-philosophical roots of the eighteenth-century sentimental sensibility as Laurence Sterne used them in Tristram Shandy, this work examines the antecedents of twentieth-century sentimentalism as they appear in William Butler Yeats's memoir Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, in the first two chapters of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in the "Overture" and "Combray" sections of Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way. This study concentrates on how the focal characters' innate artistic sensibility emerges during their childhoods. Following sentimental patterns, the idealistic central figures are vulnerable to threatening realities that disillusion them. Melancholy accompanies their distress, and they react by wishing to withdraw physically and psychologically from an alienating world to which they feel superior because of their aesthetic sensibilities. These modern works conform to three specific sentimental characteristics that appear in Yeats, Stephen and Marcel. First, they respond spontaneously to sensory stimuli, which lead to associated ideas, often manifest as memories or synaesthesia that the characters elaborate both imaginatively and intellectually. The second sentimental trait is that the action of deeply-detailed scenes is often suspended to reveal characters. And the last sentimental element, which reinforces the Kunstlerroman and Bidungsroman aspects of these works, is that the protagonists turn to language to define both their realities and artistic identities, showing the evolution of sentimental sensibility in these potential writers.

As we gaze into the mirror of literary texts, we often forget that the images projected back at us are verbal constructs that may bear little resemblance to the reality they purport to represent. This is the case with a group of fifteenth-century Spanish texts that denigrate or defend women. We do not witness these women as they really were; instead, we see fictionally embodied projections of the fears and fantasies of both their authors and of the societies in which they were formed. We see how man's relation to woman plays itself out in a constant oscillation between overwhelming attraction and fear of the loss of control over both himself and woman; or, we see women who are so perfect and so willingly subjected to man's control that they will never achieve status as an individual. This dissertation examines three modes of discourse used by these texts to represent women. The misogynist discourse of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Luis de Lucena achieves near hallucinatory visions of chaos with its depictions of Woman as Wild Man: the incarnation of every excess and sin that men might dream of but know they cannot indulge in. These creatures destroy the “natural” order of society by defying its control. Attempts to tame them may fail, for only the annointed few are equal to the task. In contrast, the profeminist discourse of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Mosón Diego de Valera, Álvaro de Luna, and Fray Martín de Córdoba raises women up to a potential paradise of harmony and respect between the sexes, but below the surface of these portrayals of exemplary wives, widows, and virgins, we see the continuing discourse of male control. Indeed, this control is now tightened, so that even perfect women are tested, to see which will fall. Finally, we come to Teresa de Cartagena, this group's only female voice. Teresa borrows from both male-determined discourses and then subverts them so that she can at last free herself with the very words meant to imprison her and, by extension, all women. men.

Various approaches to the problem of inexplicable body pain exist. According to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, physical pain resists language by returning it to its original state, crying, before language is learned. Pain is projected in crying because suffering has no referent, and thus cannot be given objective reality in words. This viewpoint frames the problem of communicating pain as a struggle between doubt and certitude, and not as an intellectual challenge. Other theorists describe how referents are created to explain the phenomenon. Most theories on physical suffering are rooted in the dualistic conception of mind and body. The body is seen as a complex machine for apprehending reality whereby mind and body are inextricable. The dualist view born of modernity posits reason as the translator of sensation. In this way only an interpretation arrived at through reason—in other words, subjected to the discourses of power—can hold. For our analysis we take these conflicts—the division between human suffering and the rationalizations of it—as our starting point; however, we propose that all interpretations, beyond requiring that pain or disease have a biological, social, religious, philosophical or other justification, entail an ethical approach. This is because all knowledge wishing to do justice to both the physical and spiritual aspects of pain and disease requires an ethos. Only an ethical position that accounts for relationships with the other can interpret and understand suffering. Our study relies on Emmanuel Levinas' theories on alterity and the constitution of the subject. Levinas argues that pain gives alterity its impact. Disease and pain confront us with our own mortality. In that uncertainty, alterity is expressed. In this framework, we consider nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American and Peninsular texts and how disease and physical pain are represented.

This dissertation analyses the reception of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) in the XV century by Hernán Núñez, and in the XVI century by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas “ El Brocense.” The study takes into account the motives that made Laberinto de Fortuna one of Spain's most commented works, in a time when the printing press just arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The “Introduction” examines the advent of the printing press as an instrument that allowed for the creation of a literary canon that had protonationalistic undertones, and it establishes the political tone of the poem, and its peculiarities that differentiate it from the other major literary productions of the XV century. The first chapter, “Mena y su siglo,” presents a study of a century that is crucial for the understanding of Spain's literary creation in the Golden Age, by taking a look into the historical, political, and social aspects that form the intertextuality of Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna. It both takes a look at the role of the reader in the text, and the ability to interpret the signs that form its inner structure. In the second chapter, “Hernán Núñez leyendo a Mena,” the role of the reader is studied as it is documented in Hernán Núñez's commentary to El Laberinto de Fortuna: La Glosa de las Trescientas. In essence, this chapter presents a study of how an author becomes part of a literary canon, and it presents the challenge of concretizing the interpretation of a text from one century to the next. The third chapter, “Las Anotaciones: El Brocense y la edición de 1582,” concludes this study by presenting how the advent of the printing press has evolved from its arrival in Spain, and how books were read, and circulated from one medium to the next.

This dissertation examines homo/sexual representation in French and American literature and film from 1977-2001. I use the slash to distinguish between two areas of representation whose relationship forms the object of my comparative analysis. Focusing on narratives featuring sexual encounters between men, I analyze sexual representation as it ranges from reticence to frankness. I consider these same narratives in relation to what I call "homo representation," the interpretation of sexuality in minoritizing terms of identities, communities and politics. I argue that French texts demonstrate a greater frankness in relation to sexual representation; the dominance of a universalist tradition in France, however, inhibits the categorization of these texts and the sexuality they depict as "homosexual" or "gay"---or at least limits the political significance of that categorization. In contrast, I argue that the American texts I consider participate in a minoritized gay literature and subculture that has evolved in response to the greater reticence around sexual representation in the American mainstream. That mainstream, however, proves to be more open to "homo representation" on the levels of both culture and politics. I analyze texts by Renaud Camus, John Rechy, Dominique Fernandez, Edmund White, Cyril Collard, Gregg Araki, Guillaume Dustan, Dennis Cooper, Paul Smaïl, and Samuel R. Delany, situating them in the context of various genres. Applying minoritizing vs. universalizing strategies and normalizing vs. transgressive ones in different ways, these genres include coming out narratives (for which I propose an alternative gay Bildungsroman model), AIDS narratives, "ghetto" narratives, "assimilative" narratives and "queer" narratives. Within my American examples, minoritizing ghetto narratives predominate, establishing alternative community norms that are themselves challenged by more transgressive queer narratives. In my French examples, however, universalizing assimilative narratives are more usual, even as they reserve a surprisingly privileged place for transgressive sexuality in comparison with their more normalizing assimilative counterparts in the United States. I argue that these differences must ultimately be understood in relation to contrasting ways of situating sexuality, literature, and politics within the public and private spheres, even as those configurations continue to evolve in both countries through the 1990s and beyond.

The current study contemplates the relationship between narrative structure and memory in five contemporary Spanish novels. Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy literary critics have been quick to discuss the resurgence of historical memory in narrative. In particular, there has been an abundance of work that seeks to vindicate those who supported the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but whose voices were silenced upon the republic's fall to Franco's army in 1939. Nevertheless, despite the wide critical recognition of a movement to recuperate Spanish historical memory, critics have largely ignored the role played by narrative structure in the construction of said memory during the 1990's and the first decade of the 21st century. Contemplating what Hayden White calls "the content of the form" at the stylistic level as well as at the level of each novel's macrostructure, this study demonstrates that the narrative techniques utilized by Juan Marsé, Manual Rivas, Dulce Chacón, Javier Cercas and Bernardo Atxaga cast a particularly postmodern light onto the darker mnemonic shadows of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. Through a series of typically postmodern mechanisms, such as the use of multiple narrators, mediated texts and constant dialog between varying levels of fiction and metafiction, these narratives transcend mere historic reflection and nostalgia in order to contemplate the subjective nature of the very mnemonic processes through which they are ostensibly created. The narrative structures of the works discussed in this study emphasize the fact that objective truth cannot be attained by means of present, postmodern remembering, much less when said remembering is linguistically mediated through narration. Thus, rather than seeking in vain to recuperate an unascertainable historical truth, these authors create highly structured, though purely esthetic, fictional representations of history, representations whose narrative forms are a prescription for the epistemic ills of the disillusioned, fragmented and uprooted postmodern implicit reader.