L'objectif de nos recherches consiste à définir la notion d'extravagance en l'inscrivant dans le contexte qui en voit l'essor littéraire, de l'année 1623 (avec L'Histoire comique de Francion de Sorel) à 1666 (avec Le Misanthrope de Molière et Le Roman bourgeois de Furetière) ; il s'agit de montrer comment cette notion rend compte des enjeux socioculturels, littéraires et esthétiques du premier XVIIe siècle. Nos travaux s'inscrivent dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire : l'extravagance convoque à la fois le domaine de la médecine, l'histoire des traitements et de l'enfermement du fou, la question philosophique des rapports réversibles entre folie et sagesse, domaines que nous étudions en miroir des représentations littéraires de la déraison. Le trouble qui atteint l'extravagant perturbe son imagination en n'altérant que faiblement son entendement. Un savoir mal maîtrisé et des lectures nocives, qui sont souvent des romans, sont la cause de son délire : contrairement à l'idiot, son esprit n'est pas vide, mais interprète de manière erronée ce qu'il perçoit du monde. Ce trouble de l'esprit l'amène également à s'écarter du comportement prescrit dans l'espace social. Face au modèle de l'honnête homme, défini par les traités de civilité, l'extravagant est incapable de respecter les codes de la bienséance et de la politesse. Cette lecture nous permet de proposer une interprétation renouvelée des types comiques que l'on trouve dans les comédies et les histoires comiques des années 1620-1660, tels le capitan-matamore, le pédant, le provincial, etc... / The purpose of our research is to define extravagance by looking at this notion in context when it experienced its first literary successes, that is from 1623 (with L'Histoire comique de Francion by Sorel) to 1666 (Le Misanthrope by Molière and Le Roman bourgeois by Furetière). We therefore aim at showing how it illustrated sociocultural, literary and esthetical issues in the early seventeenth century. Our research is carried along pluridisciplinary lines: extravagance deals at the same time with medicine, the history of cures and the imprisonment of the insane and the philosophical question of reversible links between madness and wisdom, and this is why I am studying these fields while analysing literary representations of madness. The extravagant's disorder disturbs his imagination without really impairing his understanding. Uncontrolled knowledge and noxious readings, which are often novels, are responsible for his madness. Unlike the fool, his mind is not empty, but it blurs the way in which he perceives the world. Such mental confusion also makes him move away from accepted social behaviours. As opposed to the model of the honest man as defined by treatises of courtesy, the extravagant man cannot abide by proprieties and polite codes. This perspective leads me to formulate a new interpretation of the comic characters we can find in comedies and comic novels from the 1620-1660 era, such as the braggart, the pedant, the countryman, and so on...

L’œuvre de Michel Foucault est communément divisée en trois périodes : la période archéologique traitant d’épistémologie, la période généalogique consacrée à l’analyse des relations de pouvoir, et la période esthétique portant sur les « cultures de soi » gréco-romaines. Chacune d’entre elles se définit par une méthodologie particulière et une constellation de thèmes que nous récapitulons en partie dans cet ouvrage. Ce survol sert de travail préparatoire afin de relever une préoccupation qui semble parcourir l’ensemble de son œuvre. Elle concerne les « marges »; question qui se pose tantôt à l’aune d’un rapprochement entre littérature et folie, tantôt en lien aux concepts de « résistance » et de « bataille », et enfin, à travers l’étude des manières atypiques de se gouverner/subjectiver. Ainsi, notre enquête s’articule essentiellement autour des interrogations suivantes : « peut-on attribuer une fonction bien définie aux marges au sein de la (ou des) théorie(s) foucaldienne(s)? »; « quelles sont les figures de la marginalité et comment interagissent-elles avec les thèmes foucaldiens majeurs? »; « à quelles difficultés se heurte le lexique des marges, lequel inclut des notions telles que le dehors, la désubjectivation et les hétérotopies? ». / Michel Foucault’s work is generally divided into three periods: the archaeological period dealing with epistemology, the genealogical one devoted to the analysis of power relations, and the aesthetic period centered on the « cultures of the self » as understood by the Greeks and Romans. Each of these periods is defined by a particular methodology and a constellation of themes that we’ll partly recapitulate in this paper. This overview serves as a preparatory work in order to underline a preoccupation which seems to be constant all throughout his philosophical journey. It’s concerning the « margins »; a question raised at times with regards to the topic of madness and literature, or in relation to the concept of « resistance » and « battle », and finally, through the study of the atypical manners in which one’s self can/should be governed. Thus, our inquiry is essentially articulated around the following questions: « can we attribute a well defined function to the margins in the theoretical framework(s) of Foucault? »; « what are the figures of marginality and how do they interact with the main Foucauldian themes? »; « what are the difficulties proper to the lexicon of marginality which includes notions such as the outside, desubjectivation and heterotopy? ».

Depuis Platon, la métaphysique est empreinte de la valorisation hiérarchique entre la pensée rationnelle du logos et la pensée esthétique et relationnelle du mythos, par laquelle l’absolu et l’éternel ne peuvent être réellement connus que par le logos. Le mythos, sous-tendant les écrits sacrés et mythologiques, devient l’autre de la raison, relégué dans le domaine de l’irrationnel, voire, de la folie. La hiérarchie de valeurs, fermement établie après le progrès des lumières, crée une division au sein de l’individu qui forme la blessure au cœur de l’imaginaire occidental. C’est cette blessure que la poésie prophétique de William Blake et Friedrich Hölderlin, taxés de folie, cherche à guérir en dépeignant une manière de voir pour surmonter cet état divisé ainsi que la pensée strictement représentative et déterminante qui l’aggrave. Blake et Hölderlin s’efforcent de transformer l’imaginaire collectif issu des mythes qui ont un rôle majeur dans la formation de la perception de l’homme occidental et dont les interprétations ont servi à inculquer la vision de l’être divisé. Ils déforment et remodèlent les images mythiques et métaphoriques des concepts ontologiques devenues figées dans les traditions grecques et judéo-chrétiennes afin de rétablir l’unité de l’homme, mission prophétique qui implique la transformation de la connaissance fixe en reconnaissance active, créant la possibilité de faire évoluer la conscience individuelle et, à son tour, la conscience collective. / From the time of Plato, metaphysics has been marked by the hierarchical relationship which privileges the rational mode of thought of logos over that of the aesthetic and relational mode of mythos, whereby the absolute and the eternal are only knowable through logos. Mythos, underpinning sacred and mythological texts, becomes the other of reason, relegated to the domain of the irrational and even to that of madness. This hierarchy, firmly established after the progress of the Enlightenment, creates a division within the individual that forms the wound at the heart of the occidental imagination. It is this wound that the prophetic poetry of William Blake and Friedrich Hölderlin, both thought to be mad, seeks to heal by depicting a way of seeing in order to overcome this divided state as well as the strictly representative and determinative thinking which deepens it. Blake and Hölderlin strive to transform this perception of the individual which is reinforced by the myths that form the collective imagination, the interpretations of which have inculcated the view of the divided self. The two poets reimagine and recreate the mythical and metaphorical images of ontological concepts which have become solidified in the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions in order to reestablish the unity of the individual, a prophetic mission that implies the transformation of fixed knowledge into active recognition, creating the possibility for the evolution of the individual and, in turn, collective conscience.

This research emerges from an observation that Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker Series is not merely characterised by light-hearted comedy, but is underpinned by intricate philosophical ideas, especially those of twentieth century Existentialism and the related notion of absurdity. The study also investigates the interlaced functions of Adams’s fantasy and landscapes of alterity. Paradoxically, Adams’s fantastical creatures serve to illuminate the human condition and the follies and monstrosities that lurk at the heart of humanity. Not only does Adams’s fantasy mirror the maladies of twentieth century society, thus serving a satirical function, but it is also a mechanism for constructing meaning in the shape of alternative realities. Concepts related to alterity, such as simulation (Baudrillard), the structure of ‘reality’, dreaming (Descartes) and parallel universes are investigated as building blocks of Adams’s fantastic story space. Furthermore, the ideas of Sartre, Camus and other originators of Existentialism, a philosophy which considers the futility of existence and the compulsion to construct subjective meaning, are elucidated and explored in relation to Adams’s work. Existentialist concepts such as facticity and angst, as well as the Beckettian universe and the Theatre of the Absurd, are also discussed in the light of the Hitch Hiker series. Adams’s extensive satirical comment is also emphasised in this study. Adams’s satire does not merely castigate the evils of twentieth century society such as capitalism and bureaucracy, it also unmasks universal human vices such as pomposity and grandiosity, vices that are rooted in the rejection of objective morality. Although Adams comments on the folly at the heart of society, he also presents the reader with an alternative: the subjective reconstruction of one’s inner world in an attempt to spin individual webs of meaning from the nothingness at the world’s core. This study also investigates the ambiguous concept of madness as a subjective reality born of the necessity to construct meaning, and analyses Adams’s alternative landscapes based on the suggestion that ‘much madness is divinest sense’ (Emily Dickenson, in Ferguson et al., 1996: 1015). / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / English / MA / unrestricted

The aim of this thesis is to provide a close reading and a philosophical and anthropological interpretation of Burton's understanding of the concept of melancholy (as well as the concept of the human being and the world) as it is presented in his work ​The Anatomy of Melancholy​. The primary objective will be gradually to respond to the following questions: How did Burton perceive the concept of melancholy? How did he make use of it within his notion of ​the melancholic world​? Based on this, his vision of a remedy to the melancholic disease afflicting the whole world, together with the form of this treatment presented in The Anatomy of Melancholy will be thereafter shown and explained. This task will be preceded by an analysis situated on the edge between the history of ideas and intellectual history, cultural history, and philosophical anthropology with a small overlap with the history of mentalities. This analysis will firstly reveal the diversity and rich history of the concept of melancholy and, subsequently, open up the intellectual milieu and ideas which form the basis of Burton's notion of the problem of the melancholic world and its treatment. This thesis, especially in its final part, will rely on a contextual reading of ​The Anatomy of Melancholy​. In order to acquire an overall...

Mémoire en recherche-création / L’écriture implique invariablement le désir de dire, sans pour autant aboutir à un aveu. Mais, lorsque cet aveu constitue la source ou l’obsession de l’écriture, l’acte de dire ou de taire transcende le texte, matérialisant ainsi l’aveu lui-même. Ce mémoire de maîtrise en recherche-création s’intéresse à ce geste de révélation scripturale qui suit un événement traumatique, à partir des idées avancées par Michel Foucault dans l’Histoire de la sexualité, ouvrage publié en quatre tomes entre 1976 et 2018 . Le moteur de l’aveu au cœur de la création réside dans la culpabilité de la narratrice associée à la mort accidentelle de son père, mais un désir contraire freine cet élan, celui de passer sous silence la vérité, de celer l’histoire à raconter. C’est un texte composé de fragments, un collage hétérogène qui hésite non seulement à paraître, mais dans sa manière de paraître. L’essai quant à lui porte sur Les fous de Bassan d’Anne Hébert, roman où l’aveu est motivé par un sentiment de responsabilité né du double assassinat des cousines Atkins et partagé entre les membres de leur communauté, soit celle de Griffin Creek, lieu imaginaire situé sur la côte de la Gaspésie. Outre le sujet de l’aveu, les deux parties de ce mémoire croiseront les mêmes chemins – dont ceux de la hantise, de la foi et de la folie – pour cependant parvenir à des destinations différentes. / The act of writing invariably implies a desire to say without necessarily resulting in a confession. However, when the desire to confess constitutes the main motivation for writing, or even an obsession, the act of saying or hushing transcends the text, materialising the confession itself. This master’s thesis in Research-Creation looks at this gesture of scriptural revelation following a traumatic event, basing itself on ideas put forward by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, a work published in four tomes between 1976 and 2018 . In the creation part, the guilt associated with the accidental death of the narrator’s father acts as the primary motive of confession but a contradictory desire of silencing and sealing the truth puts a halt to this impulse. The text is composed of fragments, a heterogeneous collage hesitating not only to reveal itself, but in its way to do it. The essay on the other hand, focuses on Anne Hébert’s Les fous de Bassan in which confession is motivated by a feeling of responsibility towards the double murder of the Atkins cousins, shared between the different members of Griffin Creek’s small imagined community, located somewhere on the Gaspesian Coast. Beside confession, the two parts of this thesis will intersect through many themes – notably haunting memories, faith and madness –, ultimately ending in different destinations.

This dissertation is an institutional history of the Mississippi State Hospital. Specifically, it is a study of the use of the hospital as an institutional instrument to establish, maintain, reinforce state-sponsored racial segregation and white supremacy during the period of Jim Crow in Mississippi. Mississippi's institution for its mentally ill residents became an instrument to reinforce the state's racially, socially, and economically rigid society.

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