Cette thèse a pour objet l’examen des manifestations poétiques et poïétiques du corps dans la poésie de Jules Supervielle. Le texte est marqué par le sceau de la disparition et du manque, contre lesquels il s’érige pour tenter de combler les corps défaillants. Les recueils, agrégés au long du premier XXe siècle, présentent une écriture affectée à la fois par l’histoire mondiale et l’histoire individuelle. Le poète passe de l’acceptation d’une déchirure constitutive singulière à la mise au jour d’une résonance corporelle cosmique. En créant des images évolutives, en confrontant son propre corps au réel et en inventant une réalité poétique par l’imaginaire du rêve, il reconnaît la multiplicité de ses ancrages, et se relie à l’univers. Si le sujet installe ses assises grâce aux relations qu’il noue avec l’extérieur, il désire aussi connaître ses propres rouages en retournant son regard au-dedans. Notre étude interroge les différents états perceptifs du corps que les poèmes figurent, s’appropriant la métamorphose permanente et cherchant à circonscrire les troubles physiologiques. L’instabilité et le mouvement sont capturés par le texte qui, d’instant en instant, passe du corps au non-corps et tente de rapatrier les formes privées de corps dans la matière. L’analyse révèle que le corps se renouvelle en transgressant et en estompant les frontières. La dialectique entre le corps vivant et la forme évasive de l’âme des morts serait résolue par une ontologie poétique de l’entre-deux. Grâce au souvenir remémoré du divin dans une nature de laquelle Dieu s’est retiré, l’homme se réapproprie la responsabilité de sa continuité et de la continuité du monde, par la mise en œuvre de sa puissance de création. / This thesis holds its objective to study the poetic and poietic manifestations of the body in the poetry of Jules Supervielle. The text is imprinted with the mark of disappearance and absence, against which it arises to make amends for the defaulted bodies. This anthology, edited through the first half of the 20th century, presents a writing influenced by a history both universal and individual. The poet travels from the acceptance of a constitutive singular implosion, reaching out for an ever-evolving resonance of the cosmic body. By creating evolving images, by rubbing against "the real" at the expense of his own flesh and blood, by inventing a poetic reality with his dreamy fantasy, he has revealed his multiple extensions, as to find his way to be connected with the universe. If the subject owns his firm footing to his relationships with the outside world, he is equally eager to comprehend his own mechanism by winding his observation towards the inside. Our study inquires into the different perceptive depths of the bodies that the poems illustrate, by making use of the permanent metamorphosis, in order to come to terms with the physiological aberrations. Instability and movement are captured by the text which, from a moment to the other, pass from body to absence of body and tries to unify shapes without body into the matter. The analysis reveals that the body renews itself by breaking and borrowing boarders. The dialectic between the living body and the evasive shape of the soul of the dead would be resolved by a poetic ontology of the interspace and period in between. Thanks to the reminded recollection of the divine presence in a nature from which God took off, the mankind takes again the responsability of his continuity and the continuity of the world, by using his power of creation.

Ce travail se donne pour objectif d’engager une réflexion sur l’oeuvre de Claude Esteban,qui inclut la poétique, la théorie de la traduction, ainsi que la critique littéraire etartistique. Mettant l’accent sur l’instabilité de sa conception du langage, qui oscille entrele régime du signe et le régime du discours, on montre que la particularité de sa pratiqueréside dans une tension dialectique entre l’historique et le métaphysique. L’analyse de lapensée du langage, dont relèvent tous les systèmes de signifiance, permet de maintenir lasystématicité de l’oeuvre, mais aussi de dégager son mode de fonctionnement. Tout ensuivant la démarche tâtonnante de Claude Esteban, qui s’est manifestée dans le choix del’essai comme forme critique, on privilégie son point de vue historique sur l’art et lalittérature, qui s'attache à mettre en évidence la valeur propre des oeuvres, leur spécificité. / The study reflects on the work of Claude Esteban, including his poetics, translation theoryand literary and artistic criticism. Emphasising the instability of Esteban’s conception oflanguage, which fluctuates between a focus on signs and a focus on discourse, we showthat the specificity of his work lies in a dialectic tension between history andmetaphysics. An analysis of his approach to language – on which all systems of meaningare based – preserves the systematic nature of Esteban’s work while also revealing how itworks. Guided by Esteban’s own tentative approach, as evidenced by his choice of theessay as a critical form, we concentrate on his historical approach to art and literature,which underlines the inherent value and specificity of his works.

This practice-led research identifies parallels between drawing and writing as tools that wonder, articulate and remark experiences. The research devises a drawing/writing hybrid Drawing Vignettes that interweaves wonder and its articulation through various methods of remarking by bringing together four methods; drawing/writing, the use of sound, phenomenological bracketing and ekphrasis. In both theory and practice Drawing Vignettes unites drawn and written conventions, and appears in the thesis text as a drawing/writing hybrid. Through practice-led explorations the research questions the relationship between theory and practice, the nature of understanding and interpretation by fusing reading and looking activities through the Drawing Vignettes outputs. The research challenges writing and drawing conventions as distinct forms of theory and practice, and asks if by redrafting the boundaries of drawing and writing an original vocative poetic practice can emerge. The research aims to make explicit the relationships between the knower and the known by examining what is readable, understandable and how Drawing Vignettes is presented as a practice-led methodology that fosters the acquisition of knowledge through the participant s experience(s) and interpretation(s) allowing understanding to emerge via these exchanges. The research privileges Philip Fisher s (1998) wonder as a poetics of thought and Martin Heidegger s assertion of poetry as a projective utterance (1935) to examine how wonder impacts upon our observation(s), articulation(s) and interpretation(s) of experience(s) as a type of open-ended poetic dialogue. This investigation utilises debates from Nicolas Davey s theoria (2006) that revises the dualism of theory and practice, maintaining they are mutually engaged in dialogue. This research engages in various poetic dialogues to redraft theory practice boundaries, evaluating Drawing Vignettes as a critical revision that query s how philosphical exploartions can interpreate histories and contexts in various verbalised forms. Wonder is evaluated through this practice-led research as inherentley dialogic. It is reviewed as interweaving amongst hermenuitics, ambiguity, doubt and poetics. It is associated with knowledge generation through the hermeneutic circle , as a type of dialogue that circles back and forth between presumption and surprise and renders knowledge structures as incomplete. The research revises the embodied tacit knowledge generated through Drawing Vignettes, and philosophising is argued as an event that engages in wonder as both pensive and participatory. The embodied and autobiographical nature of inscribing, fundamental to a hybrid practice is employed as a method that allows the self to emerge, as a type of activity that traces life amplifying a sense of being in the act of viewing/speaking. The poetic attitude is a term developed by the research to describe a type of dialogic occurrence where an encounter with wonder takes place becomes projected using drawing/writing methods and relocated in the practice outcomes. The research asserts the four methods of Drawing Vignettes enables and perpetuates the poetic attitude where vocative practice outputs can be understood as a type of phenomenological text that revisits presuppositions by enveloping, documenting, analysing and perpetuating wonder. In turn Drawing Vignettes is reasoned as fostering understanding, as it articulates and traces experiences by describing and mapping their structures, empowering die sachen or matters to arise.

This doctoral dissertation aims to give a comprehensive and contextual account of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. The dissertation is organized around the central claim that Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in Chapter 22 of the Poetics, as well as his discussion of it in Book III of the Rhetoric, commit him to what I call a vertical theory of metaphor, rather than to a horizontal one. Horizontal theories of metaphor assert that ‘metaphor’ is a word that has been transferred from a literal to a figurative sense; vertical theories of metaphor, on the other hand, assert that ‘metaphor’ is the transference of a word from one thing to another thing. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation itself has five chapters. The first chapter sketches out the historical context within which the vertical character of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor becomes meaningful, both by (a) giving a rough outline of Plato’s critical appraisal of rhetoric and poetry in the Gorgias, Phaedrus, Ion, and Republic, and then (b) showing how Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics should be read as a faithful attempt to reform both activities in accordance with the criteria laid down by Plato in these dialogues. The second and third chapters elaborate the main thesis and show how Aristotle’s texts support it, by painstakingly reconstructing the relevant passages of the Poetics, Rhetoric, On Interpretation, Categories and On Sophistical Refutations, and resolving a number of interpretive disputes that these passages raise in the secondary literature. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters together pursue the philosophical implications of the thesis that I elaborate in the first three, and resolve some perceived contradictions between Aristotle’s theory of metaphor in the Poetics and Rhetoric, his prohibition against the use of metaphors in the Posterior Analytics, and his own use of similes and analogical comparisons in the dialectical discussions found in the former text, the De Anima and the later stages of his argument in the Metaphysics. In many ways, the most philosophically noteworthy insight uncovered by my dissertation is the basic consideration that, for Aristotle, all metaphors involve a statement of similarity between two or more things – specifically, they involve a statement of what I call secondary resemblance, which inheres to different degrees of imperfection among things that are presumed to be substantially different, as opposed to the primary and perfect similarities that inhere among things of the same kind. The major, hitherto unnoticed consequence I draw from this insight is that it is ultimately the philosopher, as the one who best knows these secondary similarities, who is implicitly singled out in Aristotle’s treatises on rhetoric and poetry as being both the ideal poet and the ideal orator, at least to the extent that Aristotle holds the use of metaphor to be a necessary condition for the mastery of both pursuits. This further underscores what I argue in the first chapter is the inherently philosophical character of the Poetics and the Rhetoric, and shows the extent to which they demand to be read in connection with, rather than in isolation from, the more ‘central’ themes of Aristotle’s philosophical system.

In this thesis I attempt to trace the development of the criticism of Old English poetic diction and figuration from the earliest general comments to the present detailed analyses. To do so, I have examined as many statements as possible on these two specific areas as well as many on Old English poetic style in general. Because diction and figuration were among the last aspects of Old English poetry to receive serious critical attention, it has not been easy to locate comments made prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter I covers most of these earliest comments, none of which is particularly valuable today. The Anglo-Saxon period left a few vague hints; the Middle English period left virtually none; and although the Renaissance was responsible for the preservation of most of the Old English poetic manuscripts, it was more concerned with the religion and history of the period than with the literature. The late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century witnessed a flurry of important general scholarship, but the rest of the eighteenth century made little significant comment. Chapter II shows how the study of philology, engendered largely by Continental scholars, was the single most important development in nineteenth century Old English poetic criticism and was responsible for the first adequately edited texts. However, most nineteenth century critics either did not go beyond philology to poetic language or devoted their attention to the historical and mythological background of the poetry, trends which were in keeping with the neo-classical and historical criticism of the nineteenth century. Chapter III shows how the study of Old English poetic style gained momentum as soon as English-speaking scholars approached the subject and isolated it from the general study of Old Germanic literatures. However, it was hampered somewhat by the lack of consistent and effective critical terms and methods. Perhaps the most useful accomplishments of this period (1881-1921) are the source lists and catalogues, which supply solid background material, and the noticeable improvement in attitude toward the poetry. Chapter IV shows how the interest in poetic language after the first was eventually was felt in a number of important studies of Old English poetic diction during the 1920's. On the assumption that Old English poems were conscious literary creations, critics began to study them for their literay merits and to pass some sort of judgment on their artistic achievement. In addition, the work of J. R. R. Tolkien was largely responsible for redeeming the literary reputation of Beowulf, and, by extension, much other Old English poetry. Chapter V shows how much was learned during the 1950's about the nature of Old English poetic diction. The oral-formulaic theory, once it was modified, provided a reasonable explanation for the development of many identical and similar lines in Old English poetry. Other diction studies, especially that of Brodeur, showed that in spite of traditional language, originality was more than possible, as witnessed in the compounds and variations of Beowulf. Other studies showed that much of the poetic diction which was earlier called metaphorical is really either literal or, if figurative, metonymical. Yet other studies found in Beowulf the figuration and symbolism of religious poetry. Thus by the 1960's critics were able to approach Old English poetry almost as confidently as they would approach any other period of English poetry. The two appendices to the thesis concern the development of attitude and comment about two important Old English poetic devices: the kenning and variation. Appendix A shows the growth of precision in the application of Old Norse poetic appellations, and appendix B shows the importance of variation as a key to Old English poetic style. Both these appendices support the general conclusion that methods and information in Old English studies are adequate enough now that the job of full poetic criticism is possible. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Cette thèse porte sur l’impuissance de l’ambition littéraire à transcrire fidèlement la barbarie absolue. A partir de la poétique de la disgrâce, elle interroge d’abord le rapport entre écriture et expérience extrême puis, met en exergue les stratégies narratives régissant les récits qui tentent une littérarisation d’expériences jugées indicibles. Elle est ensuite une réflexion sur le statut même de la littérature contemporaine. L’analyse poétique conduit à affirmer dans une première partie que les récits de la catastrophe sont construits autour d’un dilemme : l’indicible, fondé sur l’impuissance du langage rationnel à la nommer, et la nécessité malgré tout de dépasser les frontières de « l’impossible à dire ». Et c’est le renversement de l’écriture de la disgrâce en disgrâce de l’écriture comme procédé esthétique qui permet ce dépassement. La deuxième partie permet de constater la récurrence de certains invariants se présentant comme éléments pertinents de littérarité. C’est notamment le cas du recours à la désacralisation de l’écriture. Celle-ci engendre une littérature du vide, de l’incertitude. C’est ensuite la notion de fragmentation du sujet qui place véritablement nos œuvres tantôt dans la littérature postmoderne occidentale ou bien dans littérature de la postcolonie africaine. / This thesis deals with the unability of literary ambition to faithfully transcribe absolute barbarism. Using the poetics of disgrace, it questions the relationship between writing and extreme experience on the one hand, and brings out the narrative strategies governing the stories attempting a novelization of experiences judged unspeakable on the other. It is then a reflection on the very status of contemporary literature.The poetic analysis leads us to affirm in a first part that tales of catastrophe are built on a dilemma: the unspeakable; based on the powerlessness of rational language to name it and the necessity, despite it all, to transcend the frontiers of the “impossible to say”. And it is the reversal of the writing of disgrace into the disgrace of writing as an aesthetical means which allows this transcendence. The second part allows us to see the recurrence of some invariants presenting themselves as pertinent elements of writing. This engenders a literature of the void, of uncertainty. It is then the notion of the subject’s fragmentation which truly places our works either in western postmodern literature or in African postcolonial literature.

This thesis uses four works by the contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson (born 1950) to argue that it is in the embracing of failure and difficulty that modern poetics may negotiate formal erosion and the limits of language. The introduction addresses Carson’s divisive reputation, and uses two separate criticisms of her poetic skill to delineate her liminal position in the modern poetic landscape, and therefore demonstrate her potential as a valuable framework for discussing innovative form. Via an examination of the criticisms of Robert Potts and David Solway, I argue that Carson is neither high priestess of postmodernism nor a collagist of poorly produced forms. This illuminates two points: one, that she occupies a space outside several modern ideologies of poetic authenticity, expression and form, and two, that this position can be effectively used to interrogate those ideologies and investigate new possibilities for poetic creativity. In Chapter 1, Nox, Carson’s elegy for her brother Michael, is argued to experiment with traditional elegy form – but not in a mode that wholly follows Jahan Ramazani’s famous framing of 20th century elegy form as traumatically fractured. Nox is shown not to be merely subversive, but also interrogative of its own formal tradition, embracing the inherent contradiction within elegy: that absence could be rendered as presence, that a living, flawed language could make the dead speak. From this contradiction, I argue, Nox creates a solution: it occupies a position of formal non-forming, a return to the state of poesis, refusing to emerge as a completed poem or retreat into fragmentation but instead occupying a liminal space of continual creation. In the second chapter, this preoccupation with elegy’s paradox is shown to be part of a greater theme within Carson’s work. The failures of language in Carson are elucidated with reference to the sceptical 19th-century theorist Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner is argued to be the best theorist for the thesis’s framework because of his belief in the possibilities of language’s resurrection as a valid communicative medium. Through three texts, “By Chance The Cycladic People”, The Glass Essay and Just For The Thrill, Carson’s interrogation of this hope is shown to produce creativity from difficulty, creating monstrous form-combinations to render the silence beyond language’s limits as poetically productive. Carson’s texts, in their struggle with failure and their obsessive doubt, can be used to construct several means of negotiating the limits of form and the inherent fallibility of language. The conflict between the drive for authentic expression and the perceived failure of expressive mediums is one of the defining features of both Carson’s work and modern poetry in general. However, it is by inhabiting and challenging the fraught areas at the edge of meaning that poetry of the 21st century can, in the words of Carson’s influence Samuel Beckett, try again, fail again, fail better. Synopsis: The Traitor’s Symphony is an experimental novel in three voices, set in an unspecified totalitarian state known only as the Regime at some point in the twentieth century. It follows the career of David, a young composer who rises from tortured outcast to celebrated Regime talent through scheming, moral ambiguity, and a deal with the Professor, a translator and populist radio pundit. David trades the sexual attentions of Dion, a beautiful but brain-damaged boy, for the Professor’s help in rising through the ranks of the Regime’s musical system. The voices of the Professor and his doctor wife Anne, who have just lost their newborn son, alternate with David’s as the bargain binds them together in disaster. The narrative is inspired by the lives of collaborationist composers in various 20th century states, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Carl Orff, but is not focussed on any one figure. Instead, it takes various elements of their experience - the state apparatus of approval, the minute observation of ‘doctrine’ in musical content, and the humiliation and blacklisting of composers who did not produce acceptable content - as the starting point for a narrative exploring the complex relationship between art, artists and the modern totalitarian state. Research in this area was shaped by Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: listening to the twentieth century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and the work of Michael Kater, most notably Composers of the Nazi era: eight portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and supplemented by archival work in the Stasimuseum and Bundesbeauftragten in Berlin. More broadly, the novel focusses on the difficulties of grief, love and survival in totalitarian environments. Its setting, the Regime, was created by combining elements of daily life under the Stalinist Terror, The Democratic Republic Of North Korea, and Nazi and Stasi Germany, drawing on sources including Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and Chol-Hwan Kang’s The Aquariums Of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001). The Regime’s embedded paranoia, hyper-vigilance, rigorous propaganda, regulated femininity, cult-like leader worship and brutal reprisal for non-conforming citizens are constructed from these historical precedents. Each of the three voices is stylised as a poetic form, as a method of expressing the repression of the individual and the culture of fear in the Regime’s system. This formal dimension draws on modernist literature in its use of language as expression of identity, but also on Wittgensteinian doubt that true communication could ever exist between such personal webs of meaning. Both David and Anne must actively suppress their private pain, he the agony of torture and burden of being labelled a traitor, she the disorienting grief of her son’s death and the loss of her husband’s love. Their inner emotional states are reflected in the forms of their vocals: David’s fractured voice, with its distressed percussive rhythm, is the voice of a musician physically and mentally smashed, while Anne’s blank, frantic segments express the dislocation of her foreignness and the gulf that grief has created in her marriage. The Professor, in contrast, begins the novel in supreme command of language, with brief breaks into sensual chaos as the only manifestation of his hidden mourning. The vocal shifts reflect and form the narrative progression.

After being "work in progress" for nearly 23 years, Gunnar Ekelӧf’s long; "Waste Land" poem or quotation-mosaic A Mӧlna Elegy appeared in 1960. For the purposes of this study I have had access to the original manuscripts, notebooks and letters of Gunnar Ekelӧf. Part I As is also the case with T. S. Eliot's: The Waste Land, the critical appraisal of Gunnar Ekelӧf's open-form poem A Mӧlna Elegy has been marked by the dominance of a holistic approach to literature; the work has accordingly been described! either as chaotic and structureless and seen as reflecting Ekelӧf's evolving, contradictory views of art during the long period of genesis or the attempt has been made to reconcile the: chaotic impression which the poem makes with the traditional criterion of "textual, unity" by recourse to: the notion of musical structure or to the idea of the lyrical "I" as focal point and unifying principle. The first part of this: study has been devoted to: an examination of those extrinsic elements in Ekelӧf's world view and aesthetics which motivated his use of the open structure in A Mӧlna. Elegy: his aesthetics of the indistinct and interest in the: active reader role his aesthetics of the incomplete. Works by Egbert Faas, Umberto Eco and Fritjof Capra have provided the conceptual framework for the notion of the open-form, i.e. of Western art forms which make use of trains of thought common to Eastern mysticism and modern physics and to which the traditional notion of "organic unity" is not germane. Part II The second half of this study concerns itself with an exploration of the question of the supposed influence of T. S. Eliot on Gunnar Ekelӧf, the subject of considerable debate among Swedish critics; the centre of interest has been the possible influence of Eliot's Four Quartets on Ekelӧf's collection Ferry Song (1941) and, more importantly, the possible influence of The Waste Land on A Mӧlna Elegy. Several aspects of the Eliot-Ekelӧf interference hypothesis have been examined: the history of Eliot's supposed influence on Ekelӧf in critical circles; Ekelӧf's reception of Eliot-Ekelӧf’s attitude towards the concept of "influence"; his views on the question of his supposed dependency on Eliot; textual similarities in Ekelӧf's work which could conceivably be put forward in support of the Eliot-Ekelӧf influence hypothesis. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This essay investigates the relationship between trance and various musical and poetic expressions that accompany trance when it is interpreted as sacred. In other words, the aim of this investigation is to interpret how experiences of the entrancing power of the sacred come to expression with the sounds of music and poetry. I articulate such an interpretation through the following four sections: I) a discussion of the basic phenomenological and hermeneutic problems of interpreting what other people experience as sacred phenomena, II) an account of the hermeneutic context within which modern Western discourse interprets trance as madness that perverts the rational limits of the self, III) an interpretation of the expressions of trance that appear in the poetry of William Blake, and IV) an interpretation of expressions of trance that appear in the music of Afro-Atlantic religions (including Vodu in West Africa, Santería in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil).

The aim of this thesis was to clarify the reasons of the formal diversity that can be observed in selected films by director Jim McBride. The hypothesis is based on the fact that these movies are characterized by different tendencies of independent American cinema in the 50s and 60s. The aim of the work was to prove that similar diversity of stylistic devices was accepted and even supported in the ecosystem of American underground. The starting point for historical research and analysis was a poetics of cinema approach outlined by David Bordwell in Poetics of Cinema. From this perspective, the thesis examines the immanent and distant factors that may have influenced McBride's works. After an introduction of these theoretical starting points, working hypotheses connected with individual films and with the creative ecosystem were defined. Formal heterogeneity was demonstrated on Shirley Clarke's work and in Marie Menken's film Notebook. The chapters are followed by an analysis of three McBride's movies. A closer analysis of selected categories of film form confirmed the hypothesis that the films are really distinct and that their director interacted with various traditions and norms.