<p>The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between the spatial and individual structures in Paul Austers City of Glass. The interpretative discussion is focused on the novels metafictive aspects. The analyses consists that Quinn, the main character, is linked to the city environment because of his function as detective, flânuer and author. According to Baudelaire, Benjamin and Berman the two last positions are fundamental in the literary citystructure, as well as in the formation of individuality and modernity.</p>

My novel, Away, is mainly the story of a woman travelling alone, leaving all friends and relatives behind. She seeks out remote, beautiful and difficult places where, firstly, she has travelled to before and, then, different locations that she hasn’t known in the past. We discover that, through trauma, she has lost her sense of identity – she is in the midst of a psychological crisis that becomes clear only after the journey has been underway for some time, when circumstances force her to accept help from others. With the protagonist my aim was to portray a permanent and continuous possibility of ending, stretching endlessly. This idea is irretrievable from the notion of space, as conceived here. In Part I, I explore how not only this main character, but also, Fred embody space. Here, I examine the conception of space, taking in various perspectives raging from philosophy, geography, culture and literature studies, where we find an interdisciplinary approach to space. My contention, drawing on mainly Lefebvre’s and Massey’s investigations, is that space is produced and is simultaneously a product embodied by the characters. In addition, I analyse how a particular territory – the desert – enacts the nature of space, as defined before, in selected works by T. E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger and Paul Bowles. Also, I argue that this conception of space is explored in some narratives of Paul Auster - CG, MC and CLT - in part II. Further, I examine other features of space. I contend that Auster’s writing explores space as a realm upon which Auster’s characters engage in a process of construction and disintegration both of space and their identity. Therefore, here, space is considered as a sphere constituted by a process of an ever-opened, changing and ongoing interrelation with the characters and the text. Finally, although space is presented in this essay as the major tool for investigation through composition and critical analysis, other tools, intrinsically, and I argue inseparable in fact, I proceed to an investigation, in part III, of notions of time, identity, writing and narrator in my creative work. Beside these, I investigate particularly the relationships between characters. The thesis concludes by demonstrating that writing as space evolves in more subtle, more transient and labyrinthian ways through the reference to other writers whose writing has significantly influenced my creative work.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between the spatial and individual structures in Paul Austers City of Glass. The interpretative discussion is focused on the novels metafictive aspects. The analyses consists that Quinn, the main character, is linked to the city environment because of his function as detective, flânuer and author. According to Baudelaire, Benjamin and Berman the two last positions are fundamental in the literary citystructure, as well as in the formation of individuality and modernity.

La première partie de ce mémoire est une oeuvre de création qui joue avec les notions de focalisation et de voix tel que les représente Gérard Genette. Ce récit a principalement comme thèmes centraux le mensonge et les personnalités multiples qui peuvent habiter la psyché d'un homme. Il est suivi d'un essai qui a pour but d'analyser le lien de confiance que le lecteur et le narrataire peuvent avoir envers le narrateur dans Cité de verre de Paul Auster. Une analyse de la narration, de la focalisation et du discours intérieur dans ce roman constituera principalement cet essai. À la toute fin, nous pouvons conclure qu'aucun lien de confiance ne peut être établi entre les deux parties.

Cette thèse explore la genèse de l’écriture mémorielle dans l’œuvre de Paul Auster à travers un mouvement de reconstruction de la mémoire collective et personnelle. Partant de l’hypothèse que le mécanisme de la reconstruction de la mémoire collective et de la mémoire individuelle est le résultat de l’expansion et de la réduction de l’espace mémoriel, nous analysons dans une démarche croisée entre un premier mouvement dirigé vers l’extérieur et regroupant le collectif et un deuxième vers l’intérieur et regroupant le personnel. En se référant à la dialectique mémorielle paradoxale personnel/collectif, intérieur/extérieur, ouvert/enfermé, nous avons tenté de définir comment le discours mémoriel, transcendant la simple notion de l’individualité unique, s’associe à un espace collectif par une interaction sans cesse établie entre le « moi » et l’« autre ». Notre recherche invite à vérifier si l’expansion de l’espace mémoriel, par le texte parallèle, l’intertextualité et les multiples renvois métatextuels à une tradition littéraire antérieure américaine et européenne, à un vaste registre de genres (journal intime, littérature de voyage et tradition littéraire judaïque) permet de construire une mémoire collective. Le passage du collectif à l’individuel et la reconstruction de la mémoire personnelle s’apparente à l’exploration de l’espace intérieur du sujet favorisé par la réminiscence des souvenirs d’enfance et la quête filiale, des origines, de l’engendrement, de la transmission générationnelle et des substituts paternels. / This thesis questions the genesis of memory writing in the work of Paul Auster following a movement of reconstruction of collective and personal memory. On the basis of the assumption that the mechanism of the reconstruction of collective memory and individual memory is the result of the expansion and the reduction of memory space, we examine the crossing between a first movement directed towards the outside and gathering together the collective and a second one directed towards the interior and gathering together the personal. While referring to the paradoxical memory dialectics of personal/collective, interior/external, opening/seclusion, we tried to define how the memory speech, transcending the simple notion of isolated individuality, joins a collective space through a constant interaction established between the “self” and the “other”. Our research prompts us to check if the expansion of memory space, through the parallel text, intertextuality and the multiple metatextual references to the American and European former literary tradition, and to a vast register of literary genre (diary, travel literature and Judaic literary tradition) makes it possible to reconstruct a collective memory. The movement from the collective to the individual and the reconstruction of personal memory are connected with the exploration of the individual’s interior space supported by the reminiscence of childhood memories and filiation, the search for origins, fathering, generational transmission and surrogate fathers.

Les romans de Powers, Auster et Wideman sont travaillés par l’image et hantés par l’histoire. Au fil des pages, photographes, peintres, spectateurs visionnaires ou témoins aveugles signifient la toute-puissance d’une image qui, bien souvent, scelle la rencontre du regard et du passé. L’entrée dans l’image est aussi entrée dans l’histoire événementielle, et l’histoire quant à elle ne se donne à voir que sous forme d’image, photographique, picturale ou langagière. Cependant, l’image, qu’elle soit littérale ou littéraire, oppose une temporalité propre au temps de l’histoire : conjonction précaire du passé et du présent, simultanéité de temporalités disjointes, l’image, par son hétérogénéité même, disloque le cours de l’histoire. Dans les six romans de Powers, Auster et Wideman qui constituent le corpus de cette thèse, l’image apparaît alors comme le lieu de la conversion du temps chronologique en temps imaginaire ; par le truchement de l’image, le temps des horloges est suspendu tandis qu’afflue celui de la fiction. En reconfigurant le temps, l’image politise l’écriture des trois écrivains : parce qu’elle est en excès de tout discours historiciste, elle fait exploser les mythes fondateurs de l’Amérique et les postulats d’une histoire orientée. Elle démonte le discours du progrès chez Powers, brouille le code des couleurs chez Wideman, et vide le symbole de sa force consensuelle chez Auster. Elle ouvre un temps convulsif à l’intérieur du temps chronologique, et engage, par sa forme même, le regard qui se pose sur elle. Parce qu’elle est force explosive et fictionnante, l’image engendre alors une communauté qui ne communie plus autour de mythes et de symboles, mais s’éprouve en tant que fiction ; l’image apparaît ainsi comme une image « en reste », un résidu et une réserve qui désœuvre la communauté, défait toute clôture narrative et totalité organique, et réinvente les imaginaires du commun. / Auster’s, Power’s and Wideman’s novels are wrought by images and haunted by history. Page after page, photographers, painters, visionary onlookers, or blind witnesses testify to the might of images that force the gaze to confront the past. Entering an image also means entering history and history, in its turn, reveals itself under the form of photographic, pictorial, or verbal images. However, the image, whether literal or literary, pits its own temporality against the time of history : a tenuous conjunction of past and present, a simultaneous combination of disconnected temporalities, the image, by its very heterogeneity, disrupts the flow of history. In the six novels by Paul Auster, Richard Powers, and John Edgar Wideman that make up the corpus of this dissertation, the image then is the crux where chronological time is converted into imaginary time; through the image, clockset time is suspended while the time of fiction flows in. By rearranging time, the image politicizes the writings of these three authors: because it exceeds historicist and positivist discourses, the image blows apart the founding myths of America and the premises of a biased history. In Powers’s novels, it debunks the discourse of progress, in Wideman’s it blurs the code of colours , and drains the symbol of its consensual strength in Auster’s. The image opens up a convulsive time within chronological time and by its sheer form, commits the gaze that rests on it. Because of its explosive and fictional strength, the image begets a community that no longer communes around myths and symbols but experiences itself as fictional ; a lingering image, a remnant and a supply of meaning, it makes the community inoperative, as it undermines narrative closure and ruins any notion of an organic whole, thus crafting new forms of poetic commonality.

Les trois oeuvres de notre corpus déclinent les données d'un vivre-ensemble tissé de solitude, d’une existence qui est coexistence. La solitude affecte des personnages qui constituent les témoins de l'humaine condition. L’oubli qui les hante est également solitude. Dès lors, la mémoire constitue l’antidote communautaire à une amnésie menaçante, et l’intertexte permet d’unir les solitudes par la matérialisation d'une communauté humaine aux prises avec l’altérité du réel. Cette communauté s'exprime de manière privilégiée dans ces trois récits qui donnent libre cours aux tensions et contradictions d'un réel toujours étranger à l'homme. Murakami, Auster et Quignard reflètent cette solitude communautaire dans des récits ouverts au dèmos qui accueillent cette altérité à laquelle le sacré et les mythes donnent voix. Chez les trois auteurs, c’est le problème de l'absolument autre et de sa traduction mythique qui permet de comprendre ce qui unit les hommes, mais aussi ce qui en eux – et dans le réel –, résiste à la socialité. Ce problème est donc éminemment communautaire. Présente dans les trois ouvrages, la musique, expression du génie humain, est également solitude. Elle traduit dans les oeuvres une présence/absence du souvenir, donne voix à l’indicible, renvoie à une moralité infinie, ou reste liée à l’animalité. Quant à la présence de l’auteur ou du narrateur dans les textes, le lecteur est confronté à trois manières différentes de donner voix à la communauté humaine, que ce soit par le deuil du lyrisme auctorial, en dotant au contraire sa voix d'une forte expressivité, ou à travers une voix narrative qui gagne en puissance au fil de l'ouvrage, illustrant ainsi l'engagement graduel du personnage dans le texte. La dimension historique, mémorielle et politique des communautés représentées, l’effort vers l’être-pour, qui constitue à la fois une théorisation du partage du sensible et une forme non militante de l’engagement personnel et collectif, sont également analysés dans ces trois oeuvres, qui mettent en évidence l’impossibilité d’une solitude non peuplée. / The three novels under scrutiny confront the very fact of existence as coexistence; they express solitude, considered as an unquestionable fact of life. Solitude affects characters who represent all mankind. The oblivion which haunts the protagonists is also an expression of solitude. Memory then becomes the common antidote to an impending amnesia, and intertextuality provides a way to bring solitudes together in a human community confronted to the strangeness of reality. Giving a voice to human community is the aim of these three contemporary novels, which express the tensions and contradictions of a reality filled with an undeniable otherness. Murakami, Auster and Quignard reflect on this common solitude in narratives that are open to that very strangeness, which is conveyed by mythology and the presence of sacred people or objects in the novels. For the three writers, it is the question of otherness and its mythical transcription that allows to understand what brings men together, and the things which, within people and reality, resist to socializing. Therefore, otherness must be considered as an eminently communal element in the novels. Music, an expression of human genius, is also a product of solitude. It expresses the presence/absence of things past, the unspeakable, refers to the infinity of morality, or else remains linked with animality. The reader is confronted to three different ways of expressing human community in the narratives, whether by accepting to give up one's lyricism, or on the contrary by using a very expressive style, or else by allowing the narrative voice to gather momentum throughout the text, to match the gradual social commitment of the protagonist. Therefore music, memory, the historical and political dimension of the depicted communities, the efforts of the characters towards involvement, a non-militant form of commitment, emphasize the fact that solitude, in these novels, is essentially communal.

Paul Auster¡¦s The Invention of Solitude is not merely an autobiography, but an attempt to render such a genre to challenge writing itself by trying to write what is of no possibility to be written. In addition, Auster further adds elements of photography in The Invention of Solitude, which on the one hand enhance the genre itself (as an autobiography with photos attached as solid evidences to the written words), and on the other hand, by doing so, the author as a matter of fact deconstructs everything he has been trying to construct. By adding photographs and descriptions of the photographs very consciously, he actually, beyond the ostensible purpose of trying to lend credibility to the autobiographical work, tries to challenge the solidity of such work. Lots of researches have been done on Paul Auster, for whom has already recognized world-widely as an important contemporary American writer, most of them focus on his renowned New York Trilogy (1987),The Music of Chance (1990), or The Brooklyn Follys (2005), while little researches have been done to The Invention of Solitude¡V¡Voften referred to as a memoir of Auster. The book is structured with ¡§Portrait of an Invisible Man¡¨ and ¡§The Book of Memory;¡¨ the former is written right after the sudden death of the author¡¦s father Samuel Auster and the latter is Auster¡¦s own account on matters that later have become his re-occurrent themes throughout his works. I study the utilization of involving photographs in fictional autobiography by looking at the two photographs Paul Auster has reproduced in The Invention of Solitude. Namely, how photography and fiction put together to ¡§renew¡¨ each other (Louvel 31). In chapter one I discuss autobiography and photography, the intertextuality between photographs and texts, and the selection of the two photographs in The Invention of Solitude (including different arrangements of the two photographs in various editions). In chapter two, I mainly focus on Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes¡¦ reading on photographs; I aim to conclude that each of them talks about one particular essence of photography respectively only with different terms¡V¡Vas aura and punctum¡V¡Vthe endeavor is to illustrate and attest to a certain and unique quality of human that can never be portrayed any how and by any means. Auster¡¦s usage of putting together the words and the photos is also a means to pursuit the same untraceable human quality; he testifies the unseen by presenting something to be seen. The Invention of Solitude requires reader to treat it with the way of reading photographs and pictures; a pictorial reading of words is of necessity in tackling the work, just as in Liliane Louvel¡¦s words, to treat ¡§the image as a means to study fiction through the lens of what I call the ¡¥pictorial third¡¦¡¨ (31). In chapter three, I delve into the anxiety and hunger for portrayal, linking which to the act of writing that functions as a healing process for the writer. I then concentrate on the text, demonstrating how this text itself can possibly be decoded with ways analyzing a picture. In its form and way of writing, the composition of The Invention of Solitude is just like the early procedure of long exposure in taking photographs, the distance and aura have both remained through the writing and the given photographs. In addition, the text is far more than simply combination of words, each word has been rendered as if an element of photography; that is, words can be read with multiple layers of meanings that are all linked with photographs. And I would explore this point through the reading of ¡§room¡¨ in the book. Besides, I¡¦ve involved Susan Sontag, Henri Van Lier, John Berger, Edward W. Said and Thierry de Duve in the three chapters, serving to converse with my argument. Chapter four includes the film Smoke as the subject, the film not only contains photographs as a heavy ingredient and one of the major themes; what¡¦s more, the sequence of weighting smoke also best serves as the footnote, penetrating Benjamin, Barthes and Auster.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis examines Paul Austers extremely neglected early work: his poetry. Five books were published: Unearth (1974), Wall writing (1976), Effigies (1977), Fragments from cold (1977) and Facing the music (1980), available only at antiquarians and restrective universities libraries in the United States, as well as at the New York Public Library. Studies around Austers poetic oeuvre are restricted to papers, reviews, translators introduction, and a thesis that focus on his poetry to produce new analyses and interpretations of Austers novelistic works. The aim of this thesis is to gather this scattered material and provide new parameters of study around his poetry. Divided into three chapters, the first one maps the literary magazines where Auster published his poems at first, the translations of his poems and critical fortune; the second examines Austers five books according to three specific topics authorship, language, I and other themes related to them; the third analyzes White Spaces, text considered by the author as the bridge that leads him to prose and in this thesis as a singular writing in which Auster consolidates his literary project, since poetry, previous to prose, yet to come. Maurice Blanchot, Karlheinz Stierle and, principally, Auster, lay the foundation of the investigation. Other theorists who contribute to the understanding of the subject will be called to build the sui generis comparativism put into effect here / This thesis examines Paul Austers extremely neglected early work: his poetry. Five books were published: Unearth (1974), Wall writing (1976), Effigies (1977), Fragments from cold (1977) and Facing the music (1980), available only at antiquarians and restrective universities libraries in the United States, as well as at the New York Public Library. Studies around Austers poetic oeuvre are restricted to papers, reviews, translators introduction, and a thesis that focus on his poetry to produce new analyses and interpretations of Austers novelistic works. The aim of this thesis is to gather this scattered material and provide new parameters of study around his poetry. Divided into three chapters, the first one maps the literary magazines where Auster published his poems at first, the translations of his poems and critical fortune; the second examines Austers five books according to three specific topics authorship, language, I and other themes related to them; the third analyzes White Spaces, text considered by the author as the bridge that leads him to prose and in this thesis as a singular writing in which Auster consolidates his literary project, since poetry, previous to prose, yet to come. Maurice Blanchot, Karlheinz Stierle and, principally, Auster, lay the foundation of the investigation. Other theorists who contribute to the understanding of the subject will be called to build the sui generis comparativism put into effect here

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis examines Paul Austers extremely neglected early work: his poetry. Five books were published: Unearth (1974), Wall writing (1976), Effigies (1977), Fragments from cold (1977) and Facing the music (1980), available only at antiquarians and restrective universities libraries in the United States, as well as at the New York Public Library. Studies around Austers poetic oeuvre are restricted to papers, reviews, translators introduction, and a thesis that focus on his poetry to produce new analyses and interpretations of Austers novelistic works. The aim of this thesis is to gather this scattered material and provide new parameters of study around his poetry. Divided into three chapters, the first one maps the literary magazines where Auster published his poems at first, the translations of his poems and critical fortune; the second examines Austers five books according to three specific topics authorship, language, I and other themes related to them; the third analyzes White Spaces, text considered by the author as the bridge that leads him to prose and in this thesis as a singular writing in which Auster consolidates his literary project, since poetry, previous to prose, yet to come. Maurice Blanchot, Karlheinz Stierle and, principally, Auster, lay the foundation of the investigation. Other theorists who contribute to the understanding of the subject will be called to build the sui generis comparativism put into effect here / This thesis examines Paul Austers extremely neglected early work: his poetry. Five books were published: Unearth (1974), Wall writing (1976), Effigies (1977), Fragments from cold (1977) and Facing the music (1980), available only at antiquarians and restrective universities libraries in the United States, as well as at the New York Public Library. Studies around Austers poetic oeuvre are restricted to papers, reviews, translators introduction, and a thesis that focus on his poetry to produce new analyses and interpretations of Austers novelistic works. The aim of this thesis is to gather this scattered material and provide new parameters of study around his poetry. Divided into three chapters, the first one maps the literary magazines where Auster published his poems at first, the translations of his poems and critical fortune; the second examines Austers five books according to three specific topics authorship, language, I and other themes related to them; the third analyzes White Spaces, text considered by the author as the bridge that leads him to prose and in this thesis as a singular writing in which Auster consolidates his literary project, since poetry, previous to prose, yet to come. Maurice Blanchot, Karlheinz Stierle and, principally, Auster, lay the foundation of the investigation. Other theorists who contribute to the understanding of the subject will be called to build the sui generis comparativism put into effect here