Esta dissertação analisa o universo discursivo das obras de Raymond Carver, focando-se especialmente no silêncio e em como ele cria mecanismos de significação nos contos do autor. O objetivo principal é analisar a presença recorrente, nos contos de Carver, de personagens que podem ser classificados, culturalmente, como losers. Para embasar este trabalho, amparo-me nas teorias da Análise do Discurso Francesa e em seus pressupostos acerca do sujeito, história e língua. A questão do silêncio é analisada tomando como base as teorias desenvolvidas por Orlandi. Espera-se concluir que os personagens de Raymond Carver, no decorrer da carreira do autor, evoluem, passando de excluídos, sem voz e sem poder de discurso — características marcantes na fase minimalista; para uma fase de maior autonomia discursiva e inclusão social — mais frequente na fase final da sua carreira. / This dissertation analyzes the discursive universe of the fictional works of Raymond Carver, focusing specially in the role of silence and on how it creates mechanisms of signification in the short stories of the author. The main goal of this dissertation is to analyze the recurrent presence, in the short stories of Raymond Carver, of characters that can be classified, culturally, as ―losers‖. To support this paper, I use the theories of French Discourse Analysis and its presuppositions about language, subject and history. The issue of silence is analyzed with the endorsement of the theories developed by Eni Orlandi. I expect to conclude that the characters of Raymond Carver, throughout the career of the author, evolve, passing from excluded subjects who have no voice and no discursive authority — characteristics that are evident in the minimalist phase of the author; to a phase where the characters have a more significant discursive autonomy and social inclusion — characteristics that are more frequent in the final phase of Carver‘s career.

Ce travail propose l’analyse compositionnelle du roman Le Diable au corps, écrit et publié par Raymond Radiguet en 1923. Nous serons amenés à dévoiler les éléments diédigétiques du récit par les méthodes traditionnelles narratologiques, pour en suite pouvoir mettre en oeuvre un second type d’analyse dévellopée par Sthéphane Lojkine et son groupe de recherche en France. Nous exposerons, alors, les pas évolutifs du genre romanesque et son esthétique sous la lumière de la théorie de scène romanesque et dispositifs de représentation. Cette méthode comprend la scène du roman comme un mécanisme vital pour l’assimilation du récit et essaie de dévoiler ses moindres opérations qui se mettent en fonctionnement dans la construction du sens de l’oeuvre. Le style d’écriture de Radiguet, son roman comme un produit exceptionnel comparé aux courants esthétiques de l’époque, nous avait offert un matériel excellent pour l’application des théories des dispositifs, comme nous proposons de démontrer ici. / Este trabalho propõe a anàlise composicional do romance Le Diable au corps, escrito e publicado por Raymond Radiguet em 1923. Seremos impelidos à apurar os elementos diegéticos da narrativa através dos métodos narratológicos tradicionais, para em seguida podermos realizar um segundo tipo de análise desenvolvida por Sthéphane Lojkine e seu grupo de pesquisa na França. Demonstraremos, então, os passos evolutivos do gênero romance e sua estética sob a luz das teorias de cena romanesca e dispositivos de representação. Este método concebe a cena de romance como um mecanismo vital para a assimilação da história e tenta precisar com minúcia seus processos internos colocados em funcionamento na construção de sentido da obra. O estilo de escrita de Radiguet, principalmente seu romance comme um produto excepcional comparado às publicações que seguiam as correntes estética s da época, se nos ofertou como um excelente material para a aplicação das téorias dos dispositivos tal como nos dispusemos à verificar aqui.

Esta dissertação analisa o universo discursivo das obras de Raymond Carver, focando-se especialmente no silêncio e em como ele cria mecanismos de significação nos contos do autor. O objetivo principal é analisar a presença recorrente, nos contos de Carver, de personagens que podem ser classificados, culturalmente, como losers. Para embasar este trabalho, amparo-me nas teorias da Análise do Discurso Francesa e em seus pressupostos acerca do sujeito, história e língua. A questão do silêncio é analisada tomando como base as teorias desenvolvidas por Orlandi. Espera-se concluir que os personagens de Raymond Carver, no decorrer da carreira do autor, evoluem, passando de excluídos, sem voz e sem poder de discurso — características marcantes na fase minimalista; para uma fase de maior autonomia discursiva e inclusão social — mais frequente na fase final da sua carreira. / This dissertation analyzes the discursive universe of the fictional works of Raymond Carver, focusing specially in the role of silence and on how it creates mechanisms of signification in the short stories of the author. The main goal of this dissertation is to analyze the recurrent presence, in the short stories of Raymond Carver, of characters that can be classified, culturally, as ―losers‖. To support this paper, I use the theories of French Discourse Analysis and its presuppositions about language, subject and history. The issue of silence is analyzed with the endorsement of the theories developed by Eni Orlandi. I expect to conclude that the characters of Raymond Carver, throughout the career of the author, evolve, passing from excluded subjects who have no voice and no discursive authority — characteristics that are evident in the minimalist phase of the author; to a phase where the characters have a more significant discursive autonomy and social inclusion — characteristics that are more frequent in the final phase of Carver‘s career.

Cette thèse concerne la pensée de trois auteurs qui s’interrogent quant à la manière dont les philosophes politiques devraient procéder pour en arriver à comprendre et à juger les phénomènes politiques de manière adéquate : Raymond Geuss, Chantal Mouffe et Pierre Manent. Plus spécifiquement, elle se propose d’étudier les critiques que ces derniers dirigent à l’endroit de l’approche dominante en philosophie politique contemporaine et qui est à leur avis le mieux exemplifiée par l’œuvre de John Rawls. Aux yeux de ces derniers, cette approche, qui consiste essentiellement à s’engager dans une réflexion abstraite sur la nature de la justice définie comme l’ensemble des droits politiques dont les citoyens devraient légitimement pouvoir jouir, souffre d’un important manque de réalisme, c’est-à-dire qu’elle reflète très peu la délibération dans laquelle les citoyens et les hommes politiques doivent concrètement s’engager pour faire face aux problèmes politiques réels. Dans un premier temps, l’auteur expose les objections que Geuss, Mouffe et Manent formulent contre la philosophie rawlsienne et il présente les fondements de la pensée de ces trois auteurs. Il s’efforce ensuite de vérifier si leur critique du normativisme abstrait en philosophie politique nous permet toujours de penser un certain fondement aux jugements politiques.

This dissertation examines booksellers in multiple roles as cultural agents in the small press field. It proposes various ways of understanding the work of booksellers as actively shaping the production, distribution, reception, and preservation of small press works, arguing that bookselling is a small press act unaccounted for in existing scholarship. It is structured around the idea of “contributive” bookselling from Nicky Drumbolis, wherein the bookseller “adds dimension to the cultural exchange […] participates as user, maker, transistor” (“this fiveyear list”). The questions at the heart of this dissertation are: How does the small press, in its material strategies of production and distribution, reshape the terms of reception for readers? How does the bookseller contribute to these processes? What does independent bookselling look like when it is committed to the cultural and aesthetic goals of the small press? And what is absent from literary and cultural records when the bookseller is not accounted for? This dissertation covers a period from 1952 to the present day. I begin by positing Raymond Souster’s “Contact” labour as an influential model for small press publishing in which the writer must adopt multiple roles in the communications circuit in order to construct and educate a community of readers. I then examine the bookseller catalogue as a bibliographic, critical, and pedagogical genre of publication that mediates productive encounters between readers and books. I next position the material, affective, and effective labour of the bookseller within the small press gift economy. Finally, I theorize the bookstore as a potential small press archive that functions as a viable counterweight to institutional collection and preservation. My reconsideration of the labour of the bookseller realigns relations between production, distribution, reception, documentation, and preservation of small press publications, making possible a more complete accounting of the histories of the book and of the small press in Canada.

Raymond Aron is widely recognised as France's greatest twentieth-century liberal, but the specifically liberal quality of his thought has not received the detailed historical analysis that it deserves. His work appears to fit so well within widely accepted understandings of post-war European liberalism, which has been defined primarily in terms of its anti-totalitarian, Cold War orientation, that its liberal status has been somewhat taken for granted. This has been exacerbated by an especially strong perception of a correlation between liberalism and anti-totalitarianism in France, whose late twentieth-century renaissance in liberal political thought is viewed as the product of an 'anti-totalitarian turn' in the late 1970s. While the moral authority accumulated through decades of opposition to National Socialism and Soviet communism made Aron into an anti-totalitarian icon, his early contribution to the rediscovery of France's liberal tradition established his reputation as a leader of the renaissance in the study of liberal political thought. Aron's prominence within this wider renaissance suggests that an historical treatment of his thought is overdue, but while the assumptions underpinning his reputation are not baseless, they do need to be critically scrutinised if such a treatment is to be credible. In pursuit of this end, two main arguments are developed in the present thesis. These are, first, that Aron's liberalism was more a product of the inter-war crisis of European liberalism than of the Cold War and, second, that his relationship with the French liberal tradition was primarily active and instrumental rather than passive and receptive. The first argument indicates that Aron's liberalism developed through a dialogue with and partial integration of important strands of anti-liberal crisis thought during these inter-war years; the second that earlier liberals with whose work he is frequently associated - notably Montesquieu and Tocqueville - had no substantial formative influence on his political thought. These contentions are interrelated in that Aron's post-war interpretation of his chosen liberal forebears was driven by a need to address specific problems arising from the liberal political epistemology that he formulated before the Second World War. It is by establishing in detail the link between Aron's reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville and these earlier writings that the thesis makes its principal contribution to the existing literature on Aron, but several other original interpretations of his work are offered across its four thematic chapters on 'Political Epistemology', 'Anti-totalitarianism', 'The End of Ideology' and 'Instrumentalizing the French Liberal Tradition'. Regarding Aron's relationship with the wider late twentieth-century recovery of liberal political thought in France, it contends that the specific liberal renaissance to which he contributed most substantially emerged not as part of the anti-totalitarian turn, but in hostile reaction to the events of May 1968. This informs a broader argument that French liberal renaissance of these years was considerably more heterogeneous than is often assumed.

This thesis challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. Critical, especially feminist, scholarship mostly regards the femme fatale as a sexist construction of a male fantasy and treats her as an expression of misogyny that ultimately serves to reaffirm male authority. But this thesis proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. As such, I focus on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale because of the greater degree of agency she demonstrates. This 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and full culpability. This thesis reveals and explains the agency of the criminal femme fatales in American Hardboiled crime fiction between the late 1920s and the end of World War II in the works of three authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The criminal femme fatales in the narratives of these authors show a subversive power and an ability to act - even though, or perhaps only if, this action is a criminal one. I show that these criminal femme fatales exhibit agency through their efforts to challenge not only the 'masculine' genre and the criminal space that this genre represents, but also to undercut the male protagonist's role and prove his failure in asserting control and dominance. Hammett's narratives provide good examples of how the criminal femme fatales function on a par with male gangsters in an underworld of crime and corruption. Chandler's work demonstrates a different case of absent/present criminal women who are set against the detective and ultimately question his power and mastery. Cain's narratives show the agency of the criminal femme fatales in the convergence between their ambition for social mobility and their sexual power over the male characters. To explain how these female characters exhibit agency, I situate this body of literature alongside contemporaneous legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I argue that the literary female criminal is a fundamentally different portrayal because she breaks the 'mad-bad' woman dichotomy that dominates both legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I show that the criminal femme fatales' negotiations of female agency within hardboiled crime fiction fluctuate and shift between the two poles of the criminalized and the medicalized women. These criminal femme fatales exhibit culpability in their actions that bring them into an encounter with the criminal justice system and resist being pathologized as women who suffer from a psychological ailment that affect their control. The thesis concludes that the ways in which the criminal femme fatales trouble normative socio-cultural conceptions relating to docile femininity and passive sexuality, not only destabilize the totality and fixity of the stereotype of the femme fatale in hardboiled crime fiction, but also open up broader debates about the representation of women in popular culture and the intersections between genre and gender.

This dissertation politically analyses the principles of literary evaluation (here called "axiology") argued and applied by the English critics Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton. The paradoxical fact that all three claim to be working within a Marxist framework while producing mutually divergent rationales for literary evaluation prompts a detailed examination of Marx and Engels. Moreover, since Caudwell and Eagleton acknowledge Leninism to be Marxism, and, further, since Eagleton and I both in our own ways argue that Trotskyism--as opposed to Stalinism--is the continuator of Leninism, the evaluative methods of Lenin and Trotsky also become relevant. Examined in light of that revolutionary tradition, however, and in view of the (English) critics' high political self-consciousness, the latter's principles of "literary" evaluation reveal definitive political differences between each other and with Marxism itself, centrally over the question of organised action. Thus, each of the chapters on the English critics begins with an examination of the chosen critic's purely political profile and its relationship to his general theory of literature. Next, I show how the contradictions of his "axiology" express those of his politics. Finally, with Hardy as a focus, I show the influence of each critic's political logic on his particular "literary" assessment of individual authors and texts. The heterogeneity of these critics' evaluations of Hardy, the close correspondence of each critic's general evaluative principles to his political beliefs, and the non-Marxist nature of those beliefs themselves all concretely suggest that none of the three English critics is strictly a Marxist. I do not know whether a genuinely Marxist axiology is inevitable; however, I do admit such a phenomenon as a logical possibility. In any case, I argue, this possibility will never be realised unless aspiring Marxist axiologists seek to match their usually extensive knowledge of literature with an active interest in making international proletarian revolution happen. And, since it can only happen if it is organised, the "Marxist" axiologist without such an orientation will be merely an axiologist without Marxism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Structures of feeling represent the interaction between personal lived experience and fixed social values and meanings, which are found in interpretations of works of art. Studying various interpretations of any play in performance can provide a point of access into a culture because the choices made in the production can be compared to each other and to the written text and then reveal how the theatrical company views particular issues within their own time period. This study looks at productions of The Winter's Tale between 1981 and 2002 at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Using numerous versions of this play not only increases the depth of our understanding of the play but also reveals how the actors and directors interact with British culture. Each production reveals a director's vision for the production as well as his or her own experience within the culture. Some issues and ideas that are reflected in these interpretations include both optimism and cynicism with regard to the political situation and public figures, an increase in spectacle, and secularization.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.