Figure obsédante de l’imaginaire collectif, le fou a longtemps été chargé de significations qui le dépassent ; le mythe de la folie fait recette sur la scène littéraire mais les malades n’en sont que des figurants. Alors que le fou réel est maintenu dans les marges de la littérature comme de la société, le fantasme culturel de la folie est nourri et modelé au XIXe siècle par la littérature romantique ou fantastique et exalté au début du siècle suivant par les avant-gardes historiques. Un certain nombre de textes de romanciers du XXe siècle, parmi lesquels Georges Duhamel, André Baillon, Julien Green, Henry de Montherlant ou encore Alexandre Vialatte, mettent au contraire en œuvre un décentrement du regard littéraire de la folie vers le fou – du mythe à l’individu. Ce sont les modalités et les logiques de cette émancipation de la figure du fou et de son affirmation comme sujet – au sens de thème comme de subjectivité – autonome dans l’espace romanesque que ce travail s’applique à éclairer. Ces récits fictionnels qui font de la conscience aliénée à la fois le foyer et l’objet principal de la narration mettent en scène une folie presque familière, où l’idéalisation cède le pas à la représentation de troubles intimes et ordinaires, qui atteignent un personnage banal menant une existence modeste. Par leurs affinités sémantiques, syntaxiques et pragmatiques, ils forment un « sous-genre » romanesque, celui des "histoires de fous". L’enjeu de cette thèse est de déterminer le répertoire générique de ces romans tout en examinant la manière dont la folie interroge les moyens et les pouvoirs de la fiction romanesque. Il s’agit également de mettre au jour ce que la littérature nous aide à comprendre de cet impensable, envers de l’expérience partagée de la raison, et d’observer comment les romanciers contribuent à refléter tout autant qu’à remodeler les formes de cet objet social et culturel. / Haunting our collective imagination, the madman has always been laden with symbolic significance. The myth of madness is abundantly present in literature, however those characters with an actual mental illness are ultimately overshadowed. While mental patients are pushed to the margins of literature, just as they are pushed to the outskirts of society, this particular cultural legend of madness develops during the nineteenth century in Romantic and fantastic literature and stays in the spotlight at the beginning of the following century through the avant-garde artists. In contrast to the aforementioned representation of madness, a number of novelists of the twentieth century, including Georges Duhamel, André Baillon, Julien Green, Henry de Montherlant or Alexandre Vialatte, brought on a literary shift away from “madness” towards “the madman” – from the myth to the individual. The focus of this piece of work is on the modality and logic leading to the emancipation of the figure of the madman and its affirmation as an autonomous subject – in every sense of the world – in the literary field. These fictional stories, where the alienated consciousness is both the focus and the main subject of the narrative, present the reader with an almost familiar madness. They don’t idealize insanity but provide representations of almost ordinary disorders, which affect a banal character living a modest life. Through their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic preferences, these stories form a fictional “sub-genre”, called “histoires de fous”. This research aims at determining the generic features of these novels and at considering the way madness questions the means and powers of fiction. Another purpose is to shed light on how literature helps us understand this inconceivable experience, which represents the other side of the commonly shared human experience of reason and logic, and to study how novelists help to reveal as well as reshape the characterization of this social and cultural topic.

The aim of this thesis is to arrive at a characterisation of twentieth century poetry and science by means of a detailed study of the work of four poets who engaged extensively with science and whose writing lives spanned the greater part of the period. The study of science in the work of the four chosen poets, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978), Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), Edwin Morgan (1920 – 2010), and Miroslav Holub (1923 – 1998), is preceded by a literature survey and an initial theoretical chapter. This initial part of the thesis outlines the interdisciplinary history of the academic subject of poetry and science, addressing, amongst other things, the challenges presented by the episodes known as the ‘two cultures' and the ‘science wars'. Seeking to offer a perspective on poetry and science more aligned to scientific materialism than is typical in the interdiscipline, a systemic challenge to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is put forward in the first chapter. Additionally, the founding work of poetry and science, I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), is assessed both in the context in which it was written, and from a contemporary viewpoint; and, as one way to understand science in poetry, a theory of the creative misreading of science is developed, loosely based on Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The detailed study of science in poetry commences in Chapter II with Hugh MacDiarmid's late work in English, dating from his period on the Shetland Island of Whalsay (1933 – 1941). The thesis in this chapter is that this work can be seen as a radical integration of poetry and science; this concept is considered in a variety of ways including through a computational model, originally suggested by Robert Crawford. The Australian poet Judith Wright, the subject of Chapter III, is less well known to poetry and science, but a detailed engagement with physics can be identified, including her use of four-dimensional imagery, which has considerable support from background evidence. Biology in her poetry is also studied in the light of recent work by John Holmes. In Chapter IV, science in the poetry of Edwin Morgan is discussed in terms of its origin and development, from the perspective of the mythologised science in his science fiction poetry, and from the ‘hard' technological perspective of his computer poems. Morgan's work is cast in relief by readings which are against the grain of some but not all of his published comments. The thesis rounds on its theme of materialism with the fifth and final chapter which studies the work of Miroslav Holub, a poet and practising scientist in communist-era Prague. Holub's work, it is argued, represents a rare and important literary expression of scientific materialism. The focus on materialism in the thesis is not mechanistic, nor exclusive of the domain of the imagination; instead it frames the contrast between the original science and the transformed poetic version. The thesis is drawn together in a short conclusion.