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"Nearer Than the Eye" est un court roman (147 pages) en anglais dont le sujet est une famille québécoise anglo-francophone demeurant à Québec pendant les années 1990. Une mère dévote a des visions d'anges et dialogue avec une relique qu'elle porte dans sa poche, tout en s'inquiètant de sa sœur toxicomane et de sa fille qui sombre dans un monde de sexe et de la drogue. La femme s'en culpabilise à cause d'un secret enfoui dans son passé, avec lequel elle n'a pas encore fait la paix. En deuxième partie, une dissertation commente la façon dont la culture religieuse québécoise et la foi catholique influencent mon écriture en comparant mon roman avec Wise Blood de Flannery O'Connor, notamment en examinant sa pensée sur la fiction catholique. Je fais référence aux éléments de la grotesque et du réalisme magique applicables aux deux ouvrages, tout en faisant un lien avec la théologie catholique.

This essay discusses the becomings of the character Saya in the visual novel Saya no Uta (2003), developed by Nitroplus. Being perceived as either girl or monster, Saya is trapped between these notions, within the endless becomings of her conceptualisation. Using the idea of becomings developed by Gilles Deleuze in Logic of Sense (1969) this essay aims to understand how Saya could be perceived through her becomings. Compared to the character of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, which is a prevalent subject through Logic of Sense, Saya shows many similarities with Deleuze's unofficial heroine. Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) is used to understand the underlying machinic desires of Saya, and how she becomes a productive force through consumption of the notions that try to define her. The dichotomy of girl and monster is further explained using Rosi Bradiotti's Nomadic subjects (1994), where the monster not only becomes a manifestation of the grotesque, but also a subject of the monstrosity within its discursive concept. The ambivalence of the monster is the duality between the abhorrent and the adored. The analysis shows that Saya, whether she is released to the world or not, renders the dichotomy useless in relation to the force of the materiality that somehow persists through, whatever its meaning, and what it ultimately is subjected to.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise porte sur une poétique de l’excès dans Orlando de Virginia Woolf et Nightwood de Djuna Barnes comme une stratégie combattant la tendance qu’a le modernisme à dévaloriser l’écriture des femmes comme étant trop ornementale. J’expose comment Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, et Wyndham Lewis tentent de récupérer la notion du détail afin d’affirmer une poétique masculin. Je fais appel également aux oeuvres de l’architecte autrichien Adolf Loos qui souligne sa dénonciation de l’ornement comme régressif. Dans Orlando et Nightwood, je considère l’excès associé au corps. Je soutiens que, dans ces textes, les corps dépassent les limites de la représentation moderniste. Je considère aussi comment Orlando et Nightwood font apparaître la narration comme ornement et écrivent excessivement l’histoire et le temps. Pour conclure, je propose une façon de lire l’excès afin de reconceptualiser le potentiel de production de la signification dans des textes modernistes. / My thesis explores a poetics of excess in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as a strategy through which the authors combat modernism’s devaluation of women’s writing for being overly ornamental, detailed, and/or artificial. I examine how the critical writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis attempt to reclaim the notion of detail for a masculine-oriented poetic project, and I look at how Austrian architect Adolf Loos’s work condemns ornament as backward and regressive. In treating Orlando and Nightwood directly, I consider the novels’ excessive and ornamental construction of bodies and how these bodies exceed the limits of existing modernist paradigms for representation. I also discuss narration as ornamentation in Orlando and Nightwood and how these novels excessively inscribe history and time. My conclusion proposes a practice of reading excess that rethinks this concept and its potential for producing meaning in modernist texts.

La thèse propose une lecture comparée de l’emploi du grotesque dans les théâtres français, polonais, belge francophone, germanophone, italien et espagnol. L’analyse comparée des écritures dramatiques comme du discours littéraire permet de dégager les spécificités du grotesque et de sa réception dans les diverses aires culturelles. La première partie est consacrée à la mise en place théorique de la notion dans les arts, des arts décoratifs à l’art dramatique, de la Renaissance au vingtième siècle. Une attention particulière est portée à la danse grotesque, jusque-là peu étudiée, ainsi qu’aux divergences entre les discours critiques occidental et oriental. La seconde partie constitue le cœur du travail par l’étude comparée des procédés grotesques selon trois axes : la déformation, la démesure et l’hybridité. Celle-ci permet de mettre en valeur les fonctions dramatiques de l’emploi de la marionnette et de la pantomime ainsi que l’inspiration des arts du cirque, de la foire et du cabaret. La troisième partie analyse l’hypothèse du genre dramatique grotesque en Europe au vingtième siècle. Une fois établi le cadre théorique de la réflexion sur le genre et au regard de la production dramatique la plus contemporaine, l’étude s’achève sur la détermination de la place du grotesque dans la création artistique comme dans la critique littéraire actuelle. En remettant en cause la périodisation traditionnelle du théâtre européen du siècle dernier, la thèse entend rendre sa place au grotesque dans la critique dramatique contemporaine comme mise en forme du difforme. / This thesis proposes a comparative reading of the use of grotesque in French, Polish, French-speaking Belgian, German-speaking Italian and Spanish theatre so as to determinate the specificities of the grotesque and its reception in different cultural areas. It focuses in the first part on the theory of the notion in arts, from decorative to dramatic art, from Renaissance to the twentieth century. Special attention is given to the grotesque dance, which has been thus far insufficiently studied, and to the discrepancies between western and eastern critical discourses. The comparative analysis of the grotesque is conducted along three axes: deformation, excessiveness and hybridity. It emphasises the function of marionette, pantomime and the inspiration of circus, carnival and cabaret. The last part of the thesis concentrates on the hypothesis of a grotesque dramatic genre in Europe in twentieth century. Once established the theoretical basis of the reflexion upon genre, and in view of contemporary dramatic production, the thesis closes with the determination of the place of the grotesque in the creation and in the criticism. By calling into question traditional periodisation of European twentieth theatre, this thesis aims at giving its place to the grotesque in contemporary dramatic criticism as the shaping of the misshapen.

L'Amérique est une nation masculine, et ce depuis ses origines. Partie intégrante de l'identité américaine, le mythe du self-made man se trouve toutefois en contradiction avec une réalité plus contrastée, ce qui provoque une certain sentiment de malaise chez l'homo americanus. Dans la littérature et le cinéma américains, ce malaise masculin s'exprime en partie par le biais de l'esthétique grotesque. Entre 1969 et 1980, l'industrie du cinéma américain connaît de profonds changements. À la même époque, le pays vit une série de bouleversements politiques et sociaux, liés à la lutte pour les droits civiques des Noirs, des femmes et des homosexuels et aux scandales qui ébranlent les institutions américaines à cette période. La production et la réception d'un certain nombre de films controversés à l'époque reflètent l'instabilité de l'hégémonie masculine blanche et hétérosexuelle. Celle-ci est mise en question à travers une série de tropes liés au grotesque : le corps difforme et pénétrable, sexualité et violence, religion et folie. A travers les prismes multiples de la civilisation américaine et des études culturelles, des études de genre (gender), la littérature et le cinéma, la présente étude tente d'explorer l'articulation entre cinéma d'adaptation, malaise masculin et grotesque aux États-Unis dans les années soixante-dix à travers six adaptations filmiques. / From its very beginnings, America has been a masculine nation, built on the myth of the "Self-Made Man. "This hegemonic position is often in contradiction with a far more nuanced reality, resulting in feelings of malaise among white heterosexual American males. Throughout the history of American literature and film, this malaise has been expressed in part via the aesthetics of the grotesque. During the period between 1969and 1980, changes in the film industry, coupled with the social and political upheaval of the sixties and seventies, led to the production of a series of controversial films which reflected the instability of hegemonic masculinity at the time. The choices involved in the production of these films and the way they were received by the American public reflect an intense feeling of masculine malaise, linked to the undermining of an American "masculine mystique." In the films studied, hegemonic masculinity is called into question via a number of tropes, including the grotesque and penetrable body, sexuality, violence, madness and religion. Through the multiple prisms of culture studies, gender, literature and film, this study attempts to examine the links between a generalized feeling of masculine malaise in the seventies and the aesthetics of the grotesque in six film adaptations produced between 1969 and 1980.

Alors que les individus dans la société contemporaine sont unis non par une propriété mais par un devoir et par une dette, par un manque, par une limite prenant la forme d’une charge pour celui qui en est affecté, la postmodernité rend à la mort et à l’absence toute sa densité. À travers la répétition, entre jubilation et désespérance, les artistes figurent la temporalité de l’épreuve par une écriture qui travaille l’instant. Ils racontent ces évènements infimes qui sont les plus fragiles, les plus précaires, ayant pourtant une forte efficacité. Il s’agira ici d’étudier les nouvelles postures devant l’événement historique, quand l’artiste se tient au plus singulier. / While individuals in contemporary society are united not by property but by a duty and a debt, a lack, by a limit taking the shape of a responsibility for the one who is affected, postmodernism returns to death and absence all its density. Through repetition, between jubilation and despair, the artist represents the temporality of the event. His writing works the moment. He tells these tiny events that are the most fragile, the most precarious, having nevertheless a strong efficiency. This thesis will try to study the new postures in front of the historic event, when the artist stands in the most singular.

This study aims to examine the norm-breaking body in Sara Stridsbergs literary fantasy Drömfakulteten (2006) or The Faculty of Dreams (English translation, 2019) which explores Valerie Solanas’ life. Solanas is known for the feminist text SCUM Manifesto (1968, Swedish translation, 2003) and for shooting the artist Andy Warhol.  Solanas has a very distinct separation between body and mind that is apparent in the novel. She ignores her body and whishes not to be aware of it. She only ever thinks about her manifesto, which becomes her mind. To explore the norm-breaking body, my essay is based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque body. In this work, I also present different theories that have been inspired by the grotesque, for instance; the female grotesque and the gurlesque. While the grotesque focuses more on the body as a biological organism, the female grotesque and gurlesque focus more on how the female body and femininity is perceived in society and how they break the societal norms. The women are making a “spectacle of themselves”, in Mary Russo’s words. I want to apply these theories on the protagonist, Valerie Solanas, and analyze how the grotesque and norm-breaking body is portrayed in the novel. To further the exploration between body and mind I have the decided to analyze the meaning of the manifesto for Solanas, and also the narrator’s role in how her body is described to the reader.

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This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach. Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions. In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.