A comparative analysis of 100 Kurdish novels (written in Kurmanji dialect) examines how Kurdistan, the homeland of Kurds and Kurdish identity, is constructed within the territory of Turkish Kurdistan and in its diaspora. Stateless, mostly displaced and constantly in movement, Kurds lack a real territorial homeland, yet base their national identity on the notion of Kurdistan as their mythical homeland. Kurdish novelistic discourse suggests that definitions of Kurdish identity and ‘home-land’ are relative, depending on ideology and personal experiences, and that ‘Home’, ‘homeland’ and ‘landscape’ as social constructs, are not static entities but change constantly over time. A humanistic geographical approach sees literature, particularly the novel, as an instrument of geographical inquiry into a society or a nation. Using that model, and employing textual and contextual approaches, the study shows how and why the nation/society is constructed and clarifies the sense of home-land and identity embedded in the texts. The novelistic discourse in which ‘home-land’ becomes an ideological construct is mainly shaped by the political views of the novelists. However, compared to the novelistic discourse in Turkish Kurdistan, the Kurdish diaspora novelists have gathered around more diverse ideologies and politics that have led to diverse ‘home-land’ images. The novelistic discourse in Turkish Kurdistan also offers more nostalgic elements whereas diaspora theorists and scholars had identified these as exclusive to the literary works in exile. It can be concluded that feelings of nostalgia are invoked as much by the reality of living in fragmented territory and in a situation of statelessness, oppression and domination, as they are when living at a distance, removed from such experiences. In other words, although living in home territories, the literary characters still experience a sense of migration and detachment from home, which is infused with alienation and loneliness as if they are physically away from their homeland.

Few superhero scholars, if any, are discussing physical age or definitions of maturity. It seems Hollywood and consumers are reluctant to associate "adult" content with anything other than pornography, immature language, and excessive violence—a reluctance that should be explored by scholars and critics alike. Most superhero characters only reflect the insecurities of audiences who are currently undergoing the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. There are very few older, middle-aged, or retired superheroes depicted juggling the demands of a family along with their daring rescues. It is possible that superhero films could continue to enjoy longer, lasting success if they include more than the previously targeted immature audience. Live-action superhero films can target all ages more efficiently by avoiding the static "mature" audience narratives and presenting relatable and realistic adulthood with novelistic maturity along with adolescence and childhood.

Sensation fiction, which flourished in England from the 1850s to the 1880s, was viewed by Victorian establishment figures as a threat to prevailing social values. This dissertation focuses on the work of Charles Reade, who along with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was among the most well-known sensation novelists. While several novels by Collins and Braddon have been rediscovered by scholars since the 1980s, Reade's fiction remains neglected. With its explicit critique of the emerging regimes of power/knowledge in the fields of medicine, criminal justice, and sexual mores, Reade's work anticipates Michel Foucault's theories elaborated a century later. Although previous readings of Victorian fiction have drawn on the ideas of Foucault in an attempt to identify sensation novels as cultural productions complicit with a developing bourgeois hegemony, I argue that these novels represent a narrative genre that challenges and resists these disciplinary constraints. In addition, Reade's work provides a rare glimpse of alternative sexualities and gender identities in nineteenth-century fiction that can be read in light of feminist and gender theory. This dissertation recovers the fiction of Charles Reade as a body of work that anticipates recent trends in literary and cultural theory and that speaks to us today with an uncanny familiarity.

Ce travail vise une exploration du sens autour de l’identité dans les romans de Sylvie Germain qui est une auteure importante de la littérature française contemporaine. L’univers romanesque de l’auteure interroge l’existence humaine et incite le lecteur à se poser des questions sur la vie et l’identité. En mettant en jeu la vie fictive de ses personnages, Sylvie Germain dénonce les contraintes du monde moderne et contemporaine qui provoquent les troubles de l'identité chez les gens. Les romans de notre corpus (“Chanson des Mal-aimants”, “Magnus”, “L’inaperçu”) sont traversés par cette problématique de l’identité qui marque tout le parcours des acteurs-personnages. Dans notre étude, nous nous proposons de mettre en évidence les différents aspects de la problématique identitaire dans une perspective sémiotique. En examinant le dispositif affectif, cognitif et modal des personnages romanesques, nous nous attardons sur leurs rôles et attitudes de façon à relever le changement et la permanence dans leur construction identitaire. Notre étude s’appuie notamment sur l’analyse des “formes de vie” qui déterminent les modes d’existence et de persévérance des personnages dans leur cours de vie marqué par l’incertitude et les obstacles. Notre analyse cherche à déterminer les perturbations qui affectent la construction identitaire des personnages. A travers l’analyse sémiotique qui nous permet d’étudier les différentes dimensions du discours romanesque - narrative, figurative, affective, énonciative-, nous nous proposons de saisir les éléments significatifs concernant la configuration de l’identité dans l’univers romanesque de Sylvie Germain. / This work aims to explore the meaning of identity in the novels of Sylvie Germain, who is an important author of contemporary French literature. The novelistic universe of the author que stions the human existence and encourages the reader to ask questions about life and identity. By putting into play the fictional life of her characters, Sylvie Germain denounces the constraints of the modern and contemporary world that cause identity disorders in people. The novels of our corpus ("The Song of False lovers ", "Magnus", "Hidden Lives") are met by this issue of identity that marks the whole journey of actors-characters. In our study, we propose to highlight the different aspects of the problem of identity in a semiotic perspective. By examining the affective, cognitive and modal features of the fictional characters, we focus on their roles and attitudes in order to identify change and permanence in their identity construction. Our study is based in particular on the analysis of "life forms" which determine the modes of existence and perseverance of the characters in their course of life marked by uncertainty and obstacles. Our analysis seeks to determine the disturbances that affect the identity construction of the characters. Through the semiotic analysis that allows us to study the different dimensions of the novelistic discourse-narrative, figurative, affective, enunciative-we propose to capture the significant elements concerning the configuration of identity in Sylvie Germain’s novel universe.

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Notre thèse de doctorat se propose de montrer, selon une perspective historique et analytique, que toute l’œuvre théorique et romanesque d’Umberto Eco peut être lue, de manière originalement organique et problématique, à travers le thème de la dialectique interprétative entre texte et lecteur. Présent dans tous ses différents écrits, dans lesquels il nous amène à instaurer entre eux un dialogue intertextuel et intratextuel, fécond et critique, ce thème nous permet ainsi de soutenir qu’il est possible, voire significatif, d’envisager les divers aspects de l’œuvre échienne de façon cohérente et complémentaire. À ce propos, notre conviction est que, si les livres de sémiotique d’Eco s’interrogent surtout sur les règles et les modalités fondamentales pour une fructueuse coopération interprétative entre lecteur et texte, en vue de la définition d’un sens partageable de ce dernier, ses romans, loin d’être entendus comme une simple illustration didactique de ses conceptualisations théoriques, doivent plutôt être vus comme des formes de leur enrichissement successif. En effet, en y représentant allégoriquement les conséquences dramatiques des dérives herméneutiques liées au rapport interprétatif entre texte et lecteur, Eco se sert de la fiction narrative pour justement critiquer l’emploi de la sémiotique à des fins d’abstraction intellectuelle et pour l’ancrer, à l’inverse, dans le terrain concret de l’histoire, en mettant ainsi en valeur sa fonction critique, sociale et culturelle. / Our doctoral thesis intends to show, from a historical and analytical perspective, that all the theoretical and novelistic works by Umberto Eco can be read, in an originally organic and problematic way, through the theme of the interpretative dialectic between the text and the reader. The theme is present in all his different books. It leads us to establish a rich, critical, intertextual and intratextual dialogue and allows us to argue that it is possible, even significant, to consider the various aspects of his work in a coherent and complementary manner. In fact, our conviction is that, even though Eco’s semiotic books mainly focus on the fundamental rules and modalities of a fruitful interpretative cooperation between the reader and the text – in order to define a shared meaning of the latter –, his novels, far from being understood as a simple didactic illustration of his theoretical conceptualizations, should rather be regarded as forms of their successive enrichment. Indeed, through the allegorical representation of the dramatic consequences of hermeneutic practises pushed to the extreme – related to the interpretative relationship between the text and the reader –, Eco precisely uses narrative fiction to criticize the use of semiotics for the purposes of intellectual abstraction and to anchor it, on the contrary, in the concrete realm of history, thus highlighting its critical, social and cultural role.

Orientador: Aguinaldo José Gonçalves / Banca: Hélio de Seixas Guimarães / Banca: Valentim Aparecido Facioli / Banca: Sérgio Vicente Motta / Banca: Susanna Busato / Resumo: Esta tese tem como objetivo principal o estudo da poesia no Memorial de Aires, de Machado de Assis. Em uma primeira etapa buscou-se refletir a questão da poesia no romance no âmbito geral da prosa romanesca: Mikhail Bakhtin refere-se a essa problemática no ensaio "O Discurso no romance". Para ele, a poesia e o romance estariam em campos opostos: enquanto neste se constata uma tendência à fragmentação da linguagem (refletindo, direta ou indiretamente, a estratificação social); naquela, ocorre uma tendência à centralização da linguagem (refletindo os processos sociais mais duráveis). Em razão dessa particularidade a poesia no romance, na grande maioria das vezes, não desempenha um papel de relevo: ou é rechaçada, mediante a ironia, a sátira, a paródia e a análise crítica ou permanece sob a forma de núcleos isolados distribuídos ao longo do texto romanesco. Em alguns casos raros, como no romance Memorial de Aires, a linguagem poética não só é importante enquanto voz isolada, mas também teria uma função determinante na composição geral do estilo deste romance. / Abstract: The present dissertation has, as a main target, the study of poetry in Memorial de Aires, by Machado de Assis. In its first part, we tried to reflect on the poetry in the novel, in the general scope of the novelistic prose: Mikhail Bakhtin refers to this subject in his essay "Discourse in novel". As he considers, poetry and novel would be in opposite fields: while in the last one we confirm a tendency to a language breaking up (reflecting, direct or indirectly, the social stratification), in that one, it occurs a tendency to language centralization (reflecting the more durable social processes). Because of this particularity, poetry in novel, in its great majority, doesn’t play a relevant role: either it is rejected by irony, satire, parody and critical analysis, or it remains in the form of isolated nucleus, distributed along the novelistic text. In some rare cases, as in the novel Memorial de Aires, the poetic language is not only important as an isolated voice, but also would have a determining function in the general composition style of this novel. / Doutor

Cette thèse porte sur la question du lecteur dans trois textes de Rétif de la Bretonne : Le Paysan perverti (1775), Le Ménage parisien (1772) et Le Pornographe (1769). Malgré la diversité de son contenu et de sa structure, ce corpus a en commun de mettre en abyme la figure du lecteur. Bien que sollicité, souvent même à l’excès, le lecteur des trois textes entretient des relations très tendues avec l’auteur. Celui-ci s’emploie à conditionner l’exercice de la lecture tout en simulant de favoriser la liberté du lecteur. Ce rapport de force se déploie à plusieurs niveaux des ouvrages étudiés. Il est explicite à travers la figure du lecteur intradiégétique. Il est plus subtil et latent, en revanche, quand Rétif construit dans le texte l’image du lecteur « idéal ». Outre un attachement « viscéral » à l’oeuvre, nous décelons dans l’écriture romanesque rétivienne une conception moderne de la relation auteur/lecteur. « Inégal » dans sa production, « maladroit », « impertinent », Rétif a pourtant très tôt lancé une réflexion inédite sur le rôle du lecteur dans l’accomplissement du fait littéraire. Le lecteur y est, en effet, considéré comme l’émule de l’auteur : un copropriétaire potentiel, voire un propriétaire légitime de l’oeuvre dont dépend son devenir. Mais Rétif n’est pas pour autant prêt au partage, encore moins à être « dépossédé » de son oeuvre. Le tiraillement permanent de l’auteur transfigure ainsi l’expérience littéraire en une expérience humaine. / The thesis purports to investigate the ‘reader’ in three works by Rétif de la Bretonne which are: Le Paysan perverti (1775), Le Ménage parisien (1772) and Le Pornographe (1769). Though diverging in content and structure, the three works converge in the desire to inscribe the reader in the text. Although sought for, quite often in an exaggerated way, the reader in the three texts has an extremely tense relationship with the author who is committed to control the act of reading while pretending to leave the reader total freedom. This struggle for power is felt at various levels in the three texts examined; it is made overt through the figure of the intradiegetic reader but subtler when appealing to the figure of the ‘ideal reader’. Apart from the visceral tie to the text, we distinguish in the retivian novelistic discourse a modern conception of the author/reader relationship. Though ‘uneven’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘impertinent’, Rétif, early on, declared implicitly within his work a first-time vision of the role of the reader in the accomplishment of the literary act. The reader is in fact inscribed in the text as the emulator of the author: a potential and legitimate owner of the work on which depends his becoming. However, Rétif is not ready to surrender his authorship. The continual division of the author transfigures the literary experience into a human one.

On a souvent considéré qu’au cours du XVIIIe siècle s’opérait une mutation dans l’histoire du genre biographique, qui se manifestait par le passage des « Vies » aux « biographies ». Pourtant d’importantes transformations affectent la manière de raconter la vie dès la fin du XVIe siècle. Ces changements sont particulièrement sensibles dans un sous-genre de la biographie, la Vie d’écrivain. En effet, outre l’affaiblissement de la pression rhétorique qui touche les pratiques narratives dans leur ensemble, celle-ci est modifiée par une nouvelle habitude éditoriale qui consiste à inclure une Vie de l’auteur en avant-propos de l’oeuvre et par l’évolution du statut de l’écrivain qui commence à se différencier des autres hommes de lettres. Pour comprendre la spécificité du genre, il convient de définir les conditions de production de la Vie d’écrivain, liées aux nouvelles exigences de l’historiographie et au développement de la culture mondaine, en particulier de l’art de la conversation. La Vie d’écrivain permet, par ailleurs, de mesurer l’évolution du régime de l’exemplarité, à travers la régression des modèles éthiques traditionnels, l’apparition de nouveaux modèles, mais aussi la recherche de plus en plus affirmée d’une singularité de l’auteur. Il faudra enfin s’interroger sur l’apport particulier des Vies d’écrivains à l’histoire littéraire, en relation avec la place accordée à la narration, qui constitue l’évolution majeure du genre au XVIIIe siècle. Ces différentes questions, rencontrées au fil de notre travail, nous aideront à mieux comprendre les ressorts d’une démarche inhérente à la biographie d’écrivain : le va-et-vient entre la vie et l’oeuvre. / It has often been considered that, throughout the 18th century, there took place a profound change in the history of biographical genre, expressed by the shift from “Lives” to “biographies”. However, important transformations have affected the way of telling life as far back as the end of the 17th century. The changes are particularly noticeable in one subgenre of biography, the Lives of writers. Actually, besides the weakening of the rhetorical pressure which concerns the narrative practices, as a whole, it is altered by a new editorial habit which consists in including a Life of the author as a preface to the works and by the evolution of the status of the writer who, then, starts differing from other men of letters. So as to understand the specificity of the genre, it is advisable to define the conditions of production of the Lives of writers, linked to the new demands of historiography and to the development of society culture, particularly the art of conversation. Furthermore, the Lives of writers allows to assess the evolution of the system of exemplarity, through the regression of traditional ethical models, the appearance of new models, but also the search – more and more emphasized – for the writer’s peculiarity. At last, we shall have to wonder about the particular contribution made by the Lives of writers to literary history, in relation to the place granted to narration, which constitutes the major evolution of the genre in the 18th century.These different questions, raised throughout our work, will help understand the motives of a process inherent in biographies of writers, namely, going back and forth between life and works.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:35:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-02-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:07:07Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 rodrigues_la_dr_sjrp.pdf: 1265381 bytes, checksum: 95543bd0725d905dc0695843c5030ae8 (MD5) / Esta tese tem como objetivo principal o estudo da poesia no Memorial de Aires, de Machado de Assis. Em uma primeira etapa buscou-se refletir a questão da poesia no romance no âmbito geral da prosa romanesca: Mikhail Bakhtin refere-se a essa problemática no ensaio O Discurso no romance. Para ele, a poesia e o romance estariam em campos opostos: enquanto neste se constata uma tendência à fragmentação da linguagem (refletindo, direta ou indiretamente, a estratificação social); naquela, ocorre uma tendência à centralização da linguagem (refletindo os processos sociais mais duráveis). Em razão dessa particularidade a poesia no romance, na grande maioria das vezes, não desempenha um papel de relevo: ou é rechaçada, mediante a ironia, a sátira, a paródia e a análise crítica ou permanece sob a forma de núcleos isolados distribuídos ao longo do texto romanesco. Em alguns casos raros, como no romance Memorial de Aires, a linguagem poética não só é importante enquanto voz isolada, mas também teria uma função determinante na composição geral do estilo deste romance. / The present dissertation has, as a main target, the study of poetry in Memorial de Aires, by Machado de Assis. In its first part, we tried to reflect on the poetry in the novel, in the general scope of the novelistic prose: Mikhail Bakhtin refers to this subject in his essay Discourse in novel. As he considers, poetry and novel would be in opposite fields: while in the last one we confirm a tendency to a language breaking up (reflecting, direct or indirectly, the social stratification), in that one, it occurs a tendency to language centralization (reflecting the more durable social processes). Because of this particularity, poetry in novel, in its great majority, doesn t play a relevant role: either it is rejected by irony, satire, parody and critical analysis, or it remains in the form of isolated nucleus, distributed along the novelistic text. In some rare cases, as in the novel Memorial de Aires, the poetic language is not only important as an isolated voice, but also would have a determining function in the general composition style of this novel.