Ce travail arpente le domaine de ce qu’Albert Thibaudet nommait « la critique des artistes » pour montrer que, au cours de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, ce genre de critique a constitué un véritable laboratoire permettant de sortir des impasses auxquelles avait conduit la vision autotélique de l’œuvre proposée par la critique formaliste et par la néo-avant-garde. Dans la première partie de l’étude on s’interroge sur l’évolution de la critique formaliste, en envisageant le tournant linguistique des années 1960 comme l’aboutissement naturel d’une révolution culturelle qui a eu lieu à la fin du XIXe siècle. En menant une analyse comparée entre la France et l’Italie, on observe les deux critiques formalistes en-dehors de leur rapport de filiation, et on brosse un modèle transnational qui montre qu’elles partagent la même conception de la littérature postulée par la néo-avant-garde. La deuxième partie du travail est consacrée à l’analyse d’une tendance relevable dans la critique des écrivains à partir de l’après-guerre, où une étude purement intrinsèque de l’œuvre d’art est mise en discussion. On propose une analyse comparée de la critique littéraire de Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Philippe Muray, Tommaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini et Pier Vittorio Tondelli, afin de souligner que leur pratique critique ne s’est pas limitée à une déclaration personnelle de poétique, mais elle a ouvert une voie alternative à l’exaspération des positions théoriques formalistes, en anticipant ou en prônant le dépassement d’une vision autoréférentielle de l’œuvre qui a caractérisé la littérature de la fin du XXe siècle aussi bien en France qu’en Italie. / My dissertation covers the field of what Albert Thibaudet called “the critique of artists” in order to show that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this form of criticism has given readers a different perspective on literature in comparison to that of the formalists and the neo-avant-garde. In the first part of my study, I examine the evolution of formalist criticism in the twentieth century, considering the linguistic turn of the 1960s as the natural outcome of a cultural revolution which took place at the end of the nineteenth century. By conducting a comparative study between France and Italy, I attempt to outline a transnational model which shows that the two formalist critiques share the same understanding of the literature postulated by the neo-avant-garde. The second part of my thesis is devoted to the study of one of the main tendencies in the critique of the writers since the Second World War, a tendency that called into question a purely intrinsic study of the work of art. Here, I propose a comparative study of the literary critique of Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Philippe Muray, Tommaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pier Vittorio Tondelli, in order to underline that their critical practice has not limited itself to a personal declaration of their poetic views, but it has truly opened up an alternative approach to formalist theoretical positions. They refused to speak of literature as a secluded world, and by doing so they anticipated one of the most important features of the literature of the end of the twentieth century, both in France and in Italy.

Os romances Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), de Gustave Flaubert, e La Vie mode demploi (1978), de Georges Perec, são lidos, nesta dissertação, a partir do tema da biblioteca, que se desdobra (assim como essas obras) em três vias que se entrecruzam: virtual, imaginária e real. As bibliotecas virtuais são construídas a partir de diversos registros e referências intertextuais deixadas por escritores em anotações, cadernos, correspondência, etc., que são tomadas como documentos da gênese de sua escrita. Já as bibliotecas imaginárias são aquelas tematizadas nos livros, ou seja, são encontradas em obras que ficcionalizam o espaço e a dinâmica das bibliotecas. As bibliotecas reais dos escritores, por sua vez, são formadas por volumes que fizeram parte de seu acervo pessoal. Esta pesquisa propõe refletir sobre as práticas de leitura e escrita de Georges Perec e Gustave Flaubert paralelamente à análise das obras La Vie mode demploi e Bouvard et Pécuchet. Essa reflexão resulta da observação de alguns vestígios de suas bibliotecas virtuais e reais e das relações entre aquelas três faces da biblioteca. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação pretende apresentar diversos arranjos que as múltiplas peças dessa biblioteca caleidoscópica podem formar. / In this dissertation, Gustave Flauberts Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and Georges Perecs Life a users manual (1978) are analyzed through the theme of the library, a theme that has (such as in the novels) three dimensions which interconnect: a virtual, a real and an imaginary one. The virtual dimension of the library is formed by the intertextual references and notes left by the writers in their writing process documents such as their notebooks and letters. The imaginary dimension of the library takes the form of the figuration of the library in the books that fictionalize the space and the dynamics of the library. Finally, the real dimension of the library takes the form of the books that were part of the writers personal libraries. Because of these three dimensions, this dissertation not only analyses the text of novels but also reflects about Perecs and Flauberts writing and reading practices. This is possible through the observation of the traces of the virtual and the real dimensions of the library and through the interconnection of three dimensions mentioned. In this sense, this dissertation aims at presenting some of the various arrangements that can be formed by the multiple pieces of this kaleidoscopic theme.

Cette thèse veut explorer l’idée de l’existence d’un roman de la non-linéarité, à travers un inventaire de la critique et l’analyse comparée de quatre ouvrages considérés comme appartenant à cette tradition (The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman, de Laurence Sterne ; Pale fire, de Vladimir Nabokov ; La vie mode d’emploi, de Georges Perec ; House of leaves, de Mark Z. Danielewski).Dans le premier chapitre, est postulée la thèse de deux traditions dans l’histoire du roman : la tradition du roman réaliste, et une tradition caractérisée par l’utilisation de formes non linéaires. L’analyse des études sur la tradition réflexive du roman, sur la théorie du chaos appliquée à la littérature, sur les marges textuelles, sur la lecture et sur l’intertextualité seront pris en compte pour soutenir cette thèse.Sur la base de ces questionnements, le deuxième chapitre esquisse une définition du roman de la nonlinéarité, qui comprend un répertoire des procédés et des thèmes communs à cette tradition, ainsi qu’une réflexion sur ses approches du monde et de l’identité humaine.Le troisième chapitre laisse la place à l’analyse des textes du corpus. Les quatre romans sont analysés chacun pour ses spécificités, et aussi dans la perspective de vérifier le postulat d’une tradition d’un roman de la non-linéarité. En s’appuyant sur de nombreux exemples extraits des romans pris en considération, l’analyse s’articule en huit sections : le problème du commencement ; l’intertextualité ; la complexité du récit de vie ; les questions de l’interruption, de la procrastination et de l’absence ; les approches dutemps ; les approches du langage ; le thème du jeu ; l’impossibilité de la fin. / This thesis aims to explore the idea of the existence of a novel of nonlinearity, through an inspection of the criticism and the comparative analysis of four works considered as belonging to this tradition (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne; Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov; Life, a User’s Manual (La vie mode d’emploi), by Georges Perec; and House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski).The first chapter postulates the thesis of two traditions in the history of the novel: the tradition of the realist novel, and a tradition distinguished by the use of nonlinear forms. In order to support this thesis, I’ll take into account studies about the reflexive tradition of the novel, about chaos theory as applied to literature, about the margins of the text, about the reading experience, and about intertextuality.On the basis of this examination, the second chapter outlines a definition of the novel of nonlinearity, which includes a repertoire of the literary devices and themes common to this tradition, and a reflection about its perspectives upon the world and human identity.The third chapter is dedicated to the analyses of the texts included in the corpus. The four novels are analyzed for their distinctive features, and also in the aim of verifying the premise of the existence of a novel of nonlinearity. Drawing on numerous examples selected from the novels, these analyses are structured in eight sections: the problem of beginning; intertextuality; the complexity of life narratives; the issues of interruption, procrastination and absence; the approaches to time; the approaches to language; the theme of the game; and the impossibility of an ending.

Os romances Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), de Gustave Flaubert, e La Vie mode demploi (1978), de Georges Perec, são lidos, nesta dissertação, a partir do tema da biblioteca, que se desdobra (assim como essas obras) em três vias que se entrecruzam: virtual, imaginária e real. As bibliotecas virtuais são construídas a partir de diversos registros e referências intertextuais deixadas por escritores em anotações, cadernos, correspondência, etc., que são tomadas como documentos da gênese de sua escrita. Já as bibliotecas imaginárias são aquelas tematizadas nos livros, ou seja, são encontradas em obras que ficcionalizam o espaço e a dinâmica das bibliotecas. As bibliotecas reais dos escritores, por sua vez, são formadas por volumes que fizeram parte de seu acervo pessoal. Esta pesquisa propõe refletir sobre as práticas de leitura e escrita de Georges Perec e Gustave Flaubert paralelamente à análise das obras La Vie mode demploi e Bouvard et Pécuchet. Essa reflexão resulta da observação de alguns vestígios de suas bibliotecas virtuais e reais e das relações entre aquelas três faces da biblioteca. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação pretende apresentar diversos arranjos que as múltiplas peças dessa biblioteca caleidoscópica podem formar. / In this dissertation, Gustave Flauberts Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and Georges Perecs Life a users manual (1978) are analyzed through the theme of the library, a theme that has (such as in the novels) three dimensions which interconnect: a virtual, a real and an imaginary one. The virtual dimension of the library is formed by the intertextual references and notes left by the writers in their writing process documents such as their notebooks and letters. The imaginary dimension of the library takes the form of the figuration of the library in the books that fictionalize the space and the dynamics of the library. Finally, the real dimension of the library takes the form of the books that were part of the writers personal libraries. Because of these three dimensions, this dissertation not only analyses the text of novels but also reflects about Perecs and Flauberts writing and reading practices. This is possible through the observation of the traces of the virtual and the real dimensions of the library and through the interconnection of three dimensions mentioned. In this sense, this dissertation aims at presenting some of the various arrangements that can be formed by the multiple pieces of this kaleidoscopic theme.

This dissertation offers readings of novels by Pierre Guyotat, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and other lesser-known French authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century, analyzing the representation of the “appelés d’Algérie,” the last citizens of France to be mobilized in a wartime draft. Dating back to the Third Republic, military service played a key role in turning both metropolitan and colonial populations into Frenchmen, though clearly not under the same conditions or in the same way. A historically informed account of military service’s role in citizenship formation can provide a useful analytic frame for clarifying literary engagements with contemporary French “identity-talk,” i.e. political and discursive deployments of identity and identity politics, as well as debates around laïcité, universalist assimilationism, and “communautarisme.” In early literary responses to the Algerian War, the character of the conscript serves to criticize the rising tide of consumerism and Americanization in postwar France. In novels by Daniel Anselme and René-Nicolas Ehni, draftees participate in a homosocial republicanism in which “fraternité” trumps both atomized individualism and the normative heterosexual couple, a locus of consumption. In novels by Perec and Modiano, resistance to conscription enables a critique of universalist citizenship, as the figure of the insubordinate or ambivalent conscript provides an opportunity to reckon with Jewish identity and French anti-Semitism. My analysis addresses the unequal and uneven distribution of political rights based on “identity” factors as well as the asymmetrical deployment of the term “communautarisme.” Certain of Guyotat’s texts are perceived to respond politically and aesthetically to the Algerian War, even though they refuse the conventions of realism, verisimilitude, and even representation. Using Foucault to read Guyotat, my analysis of his work provides an opportunity to address twentieth-century French debates concerning engaged and autonomous art, as well as the relationship of radical politics to radical form. I turn in my last chapter to recent novels by the prize-wining French novelists Alexis Jenni, Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, and Alice Ferney. Set in part during the Algerian War, these novels draw explicit parallels between colonial violence and race-based violence in France today. These rhetorical parallels can obscure historical contingency and complexity, such as the evolving construction of the concept of “race.” Likewise, these novels contrast a virile, homogenous military and an effeminate, fractured republic and can be read as parables for the rise of the Front National in contemporary France. My analysis shows how these works can both participate in and critique particular racialized and gendered views of the French republic.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise en recherche-création cherche à explorer de deux façons singulières les possibilités littéraires de la construction (ou de la déconstruction) d’un objet saisi comme une totalité. La création s’écrit selon une contrainte stricte : laisser des matériaux produire du récit afin d’en découvrir méthodiquement le vocabulaire, la symbolique et les résonances historiques. Ce sont encore les matériaux qui dictent l’ordre des textes selon leur propre chronologie. L’essai quant à lui, procède d’une recherche semblable par l’analyse de textes choisis de trois auteurs modernes : Georges Perec, François Bon et Francis Ponge. Par la diversité des genres qu’ils expérimentent, par leurs méthodes d’écriture singulières et par la richesse de leurs corpus, ils constituent un terrain privilégié pour des études de cas variées ainsi que pour une synthèse pertinente. Ces deux parties se conjuguent étroitement, dans une expérience ouverte de la littérature. / The following master’s thesis, in both theory and creative writing, aims to explore by two different paths the literary possibilities of the construction (or deconstruction) of an object considered as a totality. The creative writing is bent by a strict rule: to allow chosen materials to awaken a narrative universe where their vocabularies, symbolisms and historical meanings will be revealed. Those same materials determine the order in which the texts are listed. The essay is aiming at similar goals, but proceeds by analysis of three modern authors: Georges Perec, François Bon and Francis Ponge. By the vast number of literary genres they experiment on, by their unique styles and by the richness of their corpuses, they prove to be perfect subjects for both isolated analysis and a common synthesis. The two parts work closely together to provide an open literary experiment.

This thesis identifies the existence and significance of a rhetorical gesture that has circulated widely since at least the nineteenth century: the comparison between war and sport. The introduction outlines the background for this rhetoric through a genealogy of the phrase, 'the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton', in nineteenth-century writing. Part one of the thesis examines the metaphors and cultural practices of energetics in European sporting life until the Second World War. The first chapter presents a cultural history of 'sporting aviation' between the Wright brothers' first European flight in 1908 and the declaration of war in 1914, arguing that the new technology of the aeroplane was initially understood through a tension between sporting and bellicose associations. The second chapter performs a close analysis of F.T. Marinetti's writings and Umberto Boccioni's paintings to reveal the role of sport in Italian Futurism and its significance for our understanding of its infamous glorification of warfare. Chapter three examines the militarist displays at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and their enduring cultural legacy. Focusing on the role of crowds, rhythm is shown to be at the centre of how martial symbolism was embedded in the Games' sporting displays. Framing the transition into part two, the fourth chapter reads Georges Perec's use of the Olympics as an allegory for both the Second World War and the Holocaust in W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975) beside a number of post-war conceptualisations of 'play' and 'game'. The chapter identifies a re-organisation of the play concept according to an emerging concern with information, one which, in Perec, also articulates an alternative register for war's cultural memory. From here, the thesis' second part identifies the emergence of a metaphorical nexus of computation, war, and sport in post-war American culture. Chapter five argues that Don DeLillo's End Zone (1972) and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) satirise the logic of nuclear strategy by employing the formal properties of information theory in their language, collapsing the distinctions between war and sport when each is subjected to computational representation. The final chapter analyses the 'military shooter' videogame, and the new form of sport it has produced - 'e-sports' - considering these games as a material instantiation of the convergence between the discourses of military and sporting culture. Across the case studies presented in these six chapters, a transition is identified from metaphors concerned with war and sport's energetic qualities to those concerned with the processing and abstraction of war and sport as information. Rather than conceive of this transition as an epistemic break, however, the thesis identifies continuities across the principles to be found in cultural energetics and informatics.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise en recherche-création cherche à explorer de deux façons singulières les possibilités littéraires de la construction (ou de la déconstruction) d’un objet saisi comme une totalité. La création s’écrit selon une contrainte stricte : laisser des matériaux produire du récit afin d’en découvrir méthodiquement le vocabulaire, la symbolique et les résonances historiques. Ce sont encore les matériaux qui dictent l’ordre des textes selon leur propre chronologie. L’essai quant à lui, procède d’une recherche semblable par l’analyse de textes choisis de trois auteurs modernes : Georges Perec, François Bon et Francis Ponge. Par la diversité des genres qu’ils expérimentent, par leurs méthodes d’écriture singulières et par la richesse de leurs corpus, ils constituent un terrain privilégié pour des études de cas variées ainsi que pour une synthèse pertinente. Ces deux parties se conjuguent étroitement, dans une expérience ouverte de la littérature. / The following master’s thesis, in both theory and creative writing, aims to explore by two different paths the literary possibilities of the construction (or deconstruction) of an object considered as a totality. The creative writing is bent by a strict rule: to allow chosen materials to awaken a narrative universe where their vocabularies, symbolisms and historical meanings will be revealed. Those same materials determine the order in which the texts are listed. The essay is aiming at similar goals, but proceeds by analysis of three modern authors: Georges Perec, François Bon and Francis Ponge. By the vast number of literary genres they experiment on, by their unique styles and by the richness of their corpuses, they prove to be perfect subjects for both isolated analysis and a common synthesis. The two parts work closely together to provide an open literary experiment.

My dissertation demonstrates how representations of schizophrenic characters in novels can combat widespread misuses of psychiatric terms and help readers empathize with mentally ill people if we read these novels with some understanding of psychiatry and the psychoanalysis that influenced them. I undertake a critical genealogy of the schizophrenia concept's migration from the mental health professions to fiction, concentrating on the period from the German invasion of Paris in June 1940 to the events of May 1968, with some attention to contemporary uses of the schizophrenia concept by cultural theorists. Experimental novelists writing during the apogee and aftermath of National Socialism from the 1940s to the 1970s represent schizophrenia as they understood it to express the painful emotions produced by World War II's challenge to the value of experimental writing. In the postwar fiction of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Georges Perec (1936-1982), imitating schizophrenia results in careful disclosures of disintegrating life-worlds: in Beckett's case, the dissolution of the James Joyce circle and the communities of modernist exiles it exemplified, which the German invasion of Paris destroyed; in Perec's case, the deaths of his parents in the defense of France and the Holocaust, and the annihilated six million Jews including his mother. Reading Beckett and Perec's novels develops readers' abilities to empathize with both schizophrenic people and the loved ones of Holocaust victims. While those who avoided the concentration camps like Perec did not experience their horrors firsthand, losing relatives and other loved ones transformed their lives, just as losing two thirds of its Jewish population devastated European culture despite reticence to acknowledge the Holocaust's monstrous effects in the postwar years. Late modernist fiction can thus both help readers understand the Holocaust's cultural impact and foster the skills necessary to understand experiences of severe mental disorder. Such empathic understanding is more humane than romanticizing or stigmatizing schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and it helps us register the Holocaust's degradation of humanity anew rather than walling off this event in the past or regarding it solely as a Jewish issue. Late modernist fiction provides a more precise, caring alternative to the romanticizing/stigmatizing binary perpetuated by postwar cultural theorists because, from the 1930s to the 1970s, the fiction gradually transitions from reinforcing that binary to enabling empathy for traumatized and mentally ill people. Such fiction anticipated recent phenomenologies of schizophrenia - real experiences of distress and impairment rather than socially constructed concepts of madness - and traumatic shame, an emotional experience of oneself or one's community as inadequate in response to failure, especially the Holocaust as a failure of European culture and modernity. Both traumatic shame and severe mental disorder can make the body conspicuous, alienate people from their cultures, and disintegrate structures of salience and belonging that make sustained relationships and projects possible. Recent existential-phenomenological theories of mental disorder enable reintegrating schizophrenia representation in fiction into the history of literary modernism, especially its concern with historical forces disrupting the minds of individuals. These theories explain changes in mentally ill people's sense of possibilities for developing themselves and relating to others, from the way they experience their bodies to the way they use language. Hence I use these theories to demonstrate how knowledge of schizophrenia enabled post-Holocaust novelists to travesty and transform earlier novelists' uses of fictional minds to interrogate cultural change. / English

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