Au début des années 1890, Oscar Wilde choisit Paris comme terre d’élection et entreprend de s’y faire un nom. Bientôt connu comme l’auteur du Portrait de Dorian Gray et de Salomé, pièce d’inspiration symboliste écrite en français, la presse le chronique abondamment. En 1896, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, porte Salomé à la scène et lui offre les conditions d’une nouvelle réception parisienne. En 1902, Richard Strauss voit la pièce représentée à Berlin et s’en empare pour en faire le livret allemand d’un opéra auquel il donne, en parallèle, une version française. Dans un contexte socio-Culturel en mutation et dans un climat politique tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne, Salomé de Strauss arrive à Paris en 1907, accompagnée d’une réception critique exceptionnelle qui ne faiblira pas jusqu’à son entrée au Répertoire de l’Opéra en 1910.Salomé, d’Oscar Wilde à Richard Strauss, se trouve ainsi adoptée à plusieurs reprises par Paris, littéralement portée par les réceptions qu’elle y a reçues, jusqu’à devenir, en ses premières années, malgré des caractéristiques nationales étrangères plurielles et marquées, une œuvre où résonne un fort accent français. Elle peut être appréhendée comme une illustration des discours journalistiques et revuistes parisiens de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle, dans une perspective verticale – sur une période d'une vingtaine d'années – et horizontale, à travers trois éclairages critiques. Telle que les écrits la montrent ou la façonnent en ses différents avatars, elle est peut-Être aussi une tentative réussie d’art total, héritière superlative du mythe de Salomé revisité en une œuvre-Tiroir, littéraire, dramatique, musicale. / In the early 1890s, Oscar Wilde chose Paris as his adopted land, aiming at becoming famous. Soon known as the author of The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Salomé, a play inspired by the Symbolist movement and written in French, he triggered much curiosity on the part of the critics. In 1896, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, brought Salomé to the stage and provided the conditions of a new Parisian reception. In 1902, Richard Strauss saw the play represented in Berlin and used it to compose the German libretto of an opera of which he also, simultaneously gave a French version. Against the backdrop of a socio-Cultural context of change and political tension between France and Germany, Strauss’s Salome was performed in Paris in 1907, accompanied by a huge critical reception that would not weaken until it entered the Repertoire of the Opera in 1910. From Oscar Wilde to Richard Strauss, Salomé was thus adopted on several occasions by the Paris, literally sustained by the receptions that it received there, becoming, in spite of its several, marked foreign national characteristics, a work resounding with a strong French accent. Salomé’s critical reception can be seen as an illustration of the journalistic speech in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a vertical perspective - over a period of twenty years - and horizontal, through three critical perspectives. Revealed by this kind of writing or shaped by it into its different types of metamorphosis, this play may also be a successful attempt at total art, superlatively embodying the myth of Salomé in its multiple literary, dramatic and musical dimensions.

Cette étude s’intéresse à l’espace mental comme nouveau terrain d’exploration du drame britannique contemporain, et examine les manifestations d’un mouvement qui « met en pièces » les régions inexplorées des pensées inconscientes et les contrées impénétrables du traumatisme. Puisant dans les découvertes de la psychanalyse et des sciences cognitives, inspiré par le changement de paradigme de la mécanique quantique et ses interrogations sur le rôle et la nature de la conscience, ce théâtre non plus tant « in-yer-face » que « in-yer-head » s’éloigne de la sensibilité des années 1990. Les pièces de Crimp, Kane, Churchill, Cooper, Frayn, Stephens, Payne, Haddon, Ravenhill, Neilson et d’autres déconstruisent et reconstruisent le personnage comme la somme virtuelle de tous ses possibles. Le mode d’existence spéculatif, diffracté et pluriel du sujet renouvelle les définitions du réalisme psychologique et du réalisme théâtral. Ce travail étudie les modalités de cette « psychopoétique quantique » autour de concepts clés comme la probabilité ou l’incertitude, et montre comment des métaphores issues de la théorie quantique comme la dualité onde-particule ou les mondes multiples servent à illustrer l’indétermination de la psyché en évoquant les mécanismes de défense et autres symptômes qui constituent la réalité subjective d’esprits affectés par le traumatisme, la psychose, le stress ou la maladie neurologique. Nous montrons qu’en explorant la nature de la conscience, du soi et de la réalité ainsi que la condition des femmes, ces pièces posent des questions philosophiques sur le libre arbitre et la possibilité de choix dans un monde devenu plus incertain et imprévisible que jamais. / This study asserts that the human mind has become the new frontier in contemporary British drama, and interrogates and assesses manifestations of this movement which stages uncharted regions of thought and the dark territories of traumatic mindscapes. Drawing on theories from psychoanalysis and cognitive science, and inspired by the paradigm shifts of quantum mechanics and its interrogations on the role and nature of consciousness, this new theatre moves from “in-yer-face” to “in-yer-head” and away from the sensibility of the “nasty nineties.” Plays by Crimp, Kane, Churchill, Cooper, Frayn, Stephens, Payne, Haddon and others deconstruct and reconstruct the character as thevirtual sum of all her possibilities. In these mental spaces, the subject’s speculative, diffracted and plural mode of existence redefines psychological realism and stage realism. Examining the modalities of a quantum “psychopoetics” around key concepts such as probability and uncertainty, I show how metaphors borrowed from quantum theory based on the double slit-experiment, the wave-particle duality, the wavefunction collapse, the observer effect, quantum decoherence, quantum entanglement, and the many-worlds interpretation are used to emphasise the intrinsic indeterminacy of our minds. They evoke a number of psychological defense mechanisms and other symptoms that constitute the subjective reality of disturbed minds affected by trauma, psychosis, stress or neurological disease. By exploring the nature of mind, the self, and reality, and the condition of women, these plays address philosophical questions about free will and choice in a world that has become more uncertain and unpredictable than ever.

Souvent conceptualisée comme l’envers ou l’opposé de la raison, la folie, presque toujours synonyme de débordement, semble vouée à outrepasser toute limite définitoire ou conceptuelle posée par la pensée rationnelle. Cette pulsion de délimitation ou de classification inhérente à la rationalité, trouve dans le genre l’une de ses expressions les plus représentatives. Partant du constat que la folie ne cesse de transgresser les frontières traditionnelles de genre, ce travail étudie les liens entre les représentations littéraires de la maladie mentale et les questions de genre sexué (« gender ») comme littéraire, dans un corpus composé de romans, nouvelles et pièces de théâtre de six auteurs (Janet Frame, Jenny Diski, Sarah Kane, Ian McEwan, Anthony Neilson et Will Self), publiés entre 1951 et 2004. Animées par une dynamique toujours renouvelée de subversion des catégories établies, ces oeuvres invitent à une réflexion sur le rapport particulier qu’entretient la folie à la frontière, qui de simple ligne de démarcation ou de séparation se fait point de contact, puis espace à part entière. À travers leurs représentations de la folie, les récits étudiés privilégient le plus souvent, en effet, une esthétique et une épistémologie de l’entre. Cette réflexion s’articule donc principalement autour des images et des usages de la liminalité dans ces histoires de fous et de folles qui, au fil de leur (re)définition de l’appartenance et de l’identité des textes et des individus, esquissent une cartographie mobile des « contrées à venir » dont Deleuze et Guattari font la destination de toute écriture. / Traditionally conceptualised as the underside or the outside of reason, madness most often rhymes with excess; as such, it continually threatens to transgress all definitional or conceptual limits set by rational thought. Indeed, at the core of rationality is an impulse to delimit and classify, of which categories of genre and gender are quintessential examples. Starting from the observation that depicting madness regularly entails crossing, questioning and redefining genre and gender boundaries, this work investigates how literary representations of madness relate to the classification and conceptualisation of gender and genre in a selection of novels, short stories and plays by six different writers – Janet Frame, Jenny Diski, Sarah Kane, Ian McEwan, Anthony Neilson, and Will Self – published between 1951 and 2004. With the subversion of established categories as their central aim and dynamics, these works call for an exploration of the specific way in which depictions of madness, by using the border as one of their core motifs, impact the conceptualisation of borders. No longer a mere demarcation or dividing line between spaces, or simply a meeting point, the border becomes a full-blown space for individuals and texts to inhabit. Indeed, through their representations of madness, the borderline stories under study seem to embrace and promote both an aesthetics and an epistemology of the in-between. This work therefore focuses on the images and uses of liminality in stories of madmen and madwomen that, by remapping textual and sexual identities, have begun to chart these “lands to come” which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are the true destination of all writing.

Acknowledging performance as a process through which gender identities are constituted, the thesis explores attempts in women's theatre to subject these very constructs to creative deconstruction. It offers a study of plays by Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels and Timberlake Wertenbaker. Setting their work in the context of prevailing discourses of representation, the analysis delineates the ways in which plays by women interrogate the Western tradition of meaning and perception. The thesis proposes theatrical performance as a strategic engagement with the very means by which women's position is constituted. Therefore, it argues that in women's dramatic work, the possibility of resistance, of agency and choice occurs in the playful adaptation of dominant discourse, allowing for new figurations of subjectivity. Exploring the difficulties and limitations involved in this strategy, the study evaluates how plays by women release a potential for transgression which dislocates the structures of representation.

Although Willa Cather's My Antonia and Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs have been highly regarded by numerous literary critics, neither text conforms to conventional expectations for narrative content or structure. Episodic in construction, the novels lack such traditional narrative ingredients as conflict, action, drama, and romance. Furthermore, explicit connections between episodes and stories related within the narratives are not drawn for the reader. Formalist and structuralist critics have approached the problem of structure in Cather and Jewett's works by employing conventional literary tools of analysis, by "unearthing" the narrative elements that we as readers and critics have come to expect: identifiable structure, a plot complete with conflict and resolution, and characters that develop. Likewise, many feminist critics have sought to uncover in Cather and Jewett's work the ideal elements for a woman's text such as the employment of a feminine method of writing. Unfortunately, both approaches utilize interpretive templates that would pin down meaning and thus "solve" the texts' seeming peculiarities. Instead of prescribing structure according to accepted conventions or ideals, this study attempts to describe the narrative construction of My Antonia and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I argue that these texts are not structures in a traditional linear fashion, but rather are "conversations" among a variety of "readers" -the narrator, other characters, and the actual readers of the text - who attempt to construct an understanding of the world around them, or the meaning of the overall story. The chapters in this thesis explore this dialogue present in Cather and Jewett's work; the various participating, as well as their proposed constructions. Both Cather and Jewett, through their innovative narrative techniques, dramatize the human need to make sense of life, our capacity to create meaning, and at the same time the fallibility of such constructions. By employing a form which resists conventional strategies of explanation, Cather and Jewett encourage an interpretative approach that favors cumulative readings, a certain responsiveness, and an allowance for indeterminacy.

The first decade of this century marked a moment of hypervisibility for lesbians and bisexual women on British television. During this time, however, lesbian hypervisibility was coded repeatedly as hyperfemininity. When the BBC and ITV adapted Sarah Waters’s novels for television, how, I ask, did the screen versions balance the demands of pop visual culture with the novels’ complex, unconventional – and in some cases subversive – representations of lesbianism? I pursue this question with an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from queer and feminist theories, cultural and media studies, and film adaptation theory. Chapter Two looks back to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC 1990). I examine this text – the first BBC television serial to feature a lesbian protagonist – to establish a vocabulary for discussing the page-to-screen adaptation of queer identities throughout this dissertation. Chapter Three investigates Waters’s first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) and its complex intertextual relationship with Andrew Davies’s serialized version (BBC 2002). I also examine responses to the serial in the British press, tracing the ways in which dominant cultural forces seek to domesticate non-normative instances of gender and sexuality. Chapter Four examines Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) in relation to Peter Ransley’s adaptation (BBC 2005) to situate adaptations of Waters’s retro-Victorian texts amid the genre of television and film adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I argue that Ransley’s serial interrogates the notion of Austen as a “conservative icon” (Cartmell 24) and queers the Austen adaptation genre itself. To conclude this study I address Davies’s television film (ITV 2008) of Waters’s second novel Affinity (1999). In this chapter I examine how the adaptation depicts the disruptive lesbian at the centre of the text. I argue in particular that by casting an actress who does not conform to dominant televisual norms of femininity, the adaptation is able to create a powerful audiovisual transgendered moment which adds to the novel’s destabilization of Victorian hierarchies of gender and class. This chapter considers, finally, how Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity have contributed to lesbian visibility on British television. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-27 11:26:42.504

This practice-led research was initiated in response to a series of violent encounters that occurred between my fragile installations and viewers. The central focus of this study was to recuperate my installation practice in the wake of such events. This led to the development of a ‘responsive practice’ methodology, which reframed the installation process through an ethical lens developed from Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology. The central propositions of this research are the reconceptualisation of ‘violent encounters’ in terms of difference whereby I accept viewers responses, even those which are violent, destructive or damaging, and secondly that the process operates as a generative excess for practice through which recuperative strategies can be found and implemented. By re-examining this process as it unfolded in the three phases of the practical component, I developed strategies whereby violated, destroyed or damaged works could be recuperated through the processes of reconfiguration, reparation and regeneration. Therefore my installations embody and articulate vulnerability but also demonstrate resilience and renewal.

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Adelaide, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 504-529).

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Adelaide, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 504-529)

Shīʿī aḥādīth, particularly on women, are an immensely understudied area. Studies on Shīʿī aḥādīth on women usually centre on Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ, and little research explores pre-Islamic sacred female figures in Shīʿī aḥādīth. At the same time, there an urgent interest in Shīʿism as well as women in Islam, and a desire for new methods to be applied as well as new questions to be asked. This thesis will analyse Shīʿī aḥādīth about women in pre-Islamic sacred history who appear in the Qurʾān (focusing on Eve, Sārah, Hājar, Zulaykhā, Bilqīs, and the Virgin Mary), and apply the methodologies of ideological criticism and feminist hermeneutics (to be explained in Chapter 1) to explore the subtexts about the essential nature and role of women communicated through these narrations. In addition to exploring the roots of these ideas, it will compare them against the contemporary Shīʿī ideology of gender referred to as the ‘separate-but-equal’ ideology to explore how well this ideology corresponds to Shīʿī narrations. (What constitutes an ‘ideology’ will be explored in Chapter 1.) Rather than attempting to derive the ‘authentic’ teachings of the Prophet or the Imāms, this study will take a stance of inauthenticity with respect to narrations and treat narrations as socio-cultural artefacts representing the diversity of views and beliefs of the Shīʿī community. This distinguishes it from other works which either attempt to derive the ‘authentic’ teachings of the Prophet, or else which presume that all narrations equally reflect what the Prophet and Imāms actually said. This avoids the sticky question of which narrations are actually ‘true’ and allows them to be treated equally as cultural artifacts in negotiating a Shīʿī ideology of gender. Because this study focuses on sacred female figures shared with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it allows for the exploration of how ideas about women from outside the Islamic tradition were integrated into the Shīʿī corpus through isrāʾīlīyāt, particularly through the intertextual synthesis of pre-Islamic material (such as the Bible) with post-Prophetic notions (such as normative paradigms of jurisprudential discourse). Two trends will emerge from these narrations. The first heavily reinforces patriarchal norms, such as women’s seclusion, the need for male authority, and male guardianship over women. These narrations reflect jurisprudential discourse and are largely found in two of the four most prominent books of Shīʿī ḥadīth, al-Kāfī and al-Faqīh. However, in the second, other narrations form a ‘counter-narrative’ in which women and men are portrayed as equals; these narrations invoke the imagery of esoteric Shīʿism and focus on the narrative of wilāyah (loyalty to and love of the Prophet, Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ, and the Shīʿī Imāms). Since both sets of narrations address uniquely Shīʿī concerns, such as the Imāmate, it can be deduced that these differing portrayals of women reflect competing concerns in the early and mediaeval Shīʿī communities with respect to determining Shīʿī identity and orthodoxy, and may also reflect the spread of and resistance to Arabization. Lastly, because many narrations attributed to Imam ʿAlī convey strikingly different views about women, the penultimate chapter will explore whether Imam ʿAlī was misogynistic through a comparison of two foundational Shīʿī texts: Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays al-Hilālī (c. 100 AH) and Nahj al-Balāghah (c. 400 AH).