Cette thèse est une recherche interdisciplinaire entre care et littérature, basée sur l'hypothèse d'un lien d'interdépendance entre les deux perspectives. Mon travail s’appuie sur l'idée que la littérature peut être un instrument particulièrement adéquat de recherche sur le travail et la relation de care justement parce que les romans racontent des histoires ordinaires. En effet, le care n’est pas un principe ontologique général, il est lié à des situations particulières, concrètes. De même, les récits littéraires de Slow Man de John M. Coetzee et Maria de Lalla Romano, sur lesquels va porter mon analyse, inversent la condition d'invisibilité sociale qui dans notre société touche les travailleuses de care. Dans les romans et les ouvrages sociologiques analysés les femmes care-givers occupent la scène principale : elles sont des héroïnes, non pas dans le sens de l'héroïsme universel masculin, mais de celui qui émerge des récits de care au prisme du genre. Enfin l'analyse des romans Maria et Slow Man a aussi nourri la réflexion sur le Unheimliche. En effet, le personnage de la care-giver est source d'inquiétante étrangeté, parce qu'elle est une femme, et que son travail consiste à s'occuper de ce qui est familier, mais aurait dû rester caché : la vulnérabilité humaine. De plus, très souvent la care-giver est une femme étrangère qui trouble l’espace de la domesticité et de l’intime. À travers la double perspective de la critique littéraire féministe et de l’éthique du care nous proposons une nouvelle lecture genrée de l’inquiétante étrangère familière au niveau des représentations sociales, littéraires et symboliques. / This thesis is an interdisciplinary research between care and literature, based on the assumption of an interdependence between the two perspectives. My work relies on the idea that literature can be a research instrument particularly suitable on work and care relation, precisely because novels can recount ordinary stories. Indeed, care is not a general ontological principle, it is related to specific situations, concrete. Then, literary narratives Slow Man by John M. Coetzee and Maria by Lalla Romano, basis of my analysis, reverse the condition of invisibility that affects care workers in our society. In novels and sociological works analyzed, care-givers occupy the main stage : they are heroines, not in the sense of universal male heroism, but in one that emerges from the care stories read from a gender perspective. Finally, the analysis of novels Maria and Slow Man has also inspired reflection on the Unheimliche. The character of the care-giver is a source of uncanny, because she is a woman, and that her job is to take care of what is familiar, but should have remained hidden: the human vulnerability. Moreover, very often the care-giver is a foreign woman who disturbs the space of domesticity and intimacy. Through the double perspective of feminist literary criticism and ethics of care we propose a new gendered reading of the uncanny in social representations, literary and symbolic.

Mémoire en recherche-création / Ce mémoire a pour objectif d’explorer les différents moyens cinématographiques mis en place par le cinéaste américain David Lynch afin de comprendre comment ce dernier parvient à transporter son audience dans un monde fantastique et bien sûr, étrange. En nous appuyant sur les premières définitions freudiennes de ce que représente l’inquiétante étrangeté (Das Unheimliche), nous explorerons les codes et images récurrentes dans la cinématographie lynchéenne qui font des films du réalisateur des œuvres aux caractères étranges, après avoir étudié en détail les éléments qui nous permettent de classer les œuvres de l’auteur dans la catégorie des œuvres fantastiques. / This thesis aims to explore the different cinematographic means implemented by David Lynch in order to understand how he manages to transport his audience in a fantastic and of course, strange world. By informing ourselves about the first Freudian definitions of what represents the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), we will explore the recurrent codes and images in Lynchian cinematography which make the director’s films works uncanny, right after having studied in detail the elements that allow us to classify the author’s works in the fantastic genre section.

When having travelled one returns to, or revisits, a place. Unaware of the personal transformation that has occurred, one realizes the change when confronted with familiar things. In a desire to understand what objects and places mean to people, the project An actual house looks at three objects from a childhood home: a staircase, a window and a curtain and their relation to memory and autonomic consciousness. It reflects upon the importance of memory and imagination in art, architecture, and design - memory as well as imagination as a tool to create a different future. This art-practice-based work uses a hybrid form method. Exploring phenomenology trough writing, creating objects from memory and conveying the work to a perceptible form in a curated exhibition. It wants to contribute to a discussion on the relation between humans, objects and places in time.

Concluding on this note, the thesis argues that reading The Lord of the Rings in this way renders postcolonial concepts accessible to a whole generation of readers already familiar with the series, and points to the possibility of examining other contemporary texts, or even further analysis of Tolkien's to reveal more postcolonial sensitivities engendered in the texts.; This thesis examines J.R.R. Tolkien's texts The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King from a postcolonial literary perspective. By examining how these texts, written at the decline of the British Empire, engage with the theoretical polemics of imperialism, this thesis takes a new look at these popular and widely regarded books from a stance of serious academic interest. The first chapter examines how certain characters, who are Othered temporally in the realm of Middle-earth, manage to find a place of narrative centrality from the defamiliarized view of Merry, Pippin, Samwise, and Frodo, uncannily reoccurring throughout the narrative in increasingly disturbing manifestations. From there, the thesis moves on to uncanny places, examining in detail Mirkwood, Moria, Dunharrow, and the Shire at the end of The Return of the King. Each of these locations in Middle-earth helps Tolkien to explore the relationship between colonizer, colonized, and fetishism; the colonizer(s) disavow their own fears of these places by fetishizing the pathways they colonize for their safe passage. Since their paths are unsustainable colonially, these fetishes cannot fulfill their function, as the places are marked with unavoidable reminders of wildness and uncontrollability which cannot successfully be repressed for long. Ending this chapter with a discussion of the hobbit's return to the Shire, the argument moves into the next chapter that discusses the small-scale colonization that takes place in the heart of Frodo himself, making the Shire he used to know firmly unavailable to him. The Ring, in this case, is the colonizer, doubling, fracturing, and displacing Frodo's selfhood so that he becomes unfamiliar to himself. The uncanniness that this produces and Frodo's inability to heal from his experience with the Ring, this thesis argues, echoes the postcolonial themes of irreconcilability and the fantasy of origin.

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This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.

The focus of this study is the two autobiographical novels Den högsta kasten (1997) and Djävulsformeln (2000) by Swedish author Carina Rydberg. Both novels generated lively public debate regarding how they ought to be read and understood, what genre they belonged to, and the ontological status of the narrating “I”. The aim is to investigate why the protagonist, Carina, is perceived as unintelligible by many readers and explore how she can be understood in relation to what constitutes an intelligible identity from a literary and cultural perspective. The novels, as well as their protagonist, are approached from the perspective of genre theory, the argument being that Carina’s unintelligibility is directly dependent on what genre she is read in relation to. In the first part of the thesis the ambiguities of autobiographical texts are discussed, and the narrative and protagonist are analyzed in relation to the autobiographical genre. In the second part of the thesis the consequences of reading the texts as examples of the Gothic with emphasis on monstrosity, the uncanny and sexual transgression are examined. The two readings demonstrate how interpretations of text and character are highly influenced by the reader's expectations connected to genre. Rydberg’s transgression of the norms of genre, gender, and identity leaves the reader with a contradictory set of genre-specific expectations, which in turn makes it difficult to understand and accept the protagonist. The main theme of both novels is Carina’s unsuccessful attempts to reconcile what she sees as two separate, essentially incompatible identities: woman and author. The final chapter includes a comparative study in which Rydberg’s novels are linked to works by other Swedish female writers, both past and contemporary, to demonstrate that the conflict of woman versus author is a common problem for female writers. The thesis closes with a discussion about the possibility of placing Rydberg in a specifically female literary tradition and demonstrate how a feminist analysis can make the unintelligible intelligible.

This thesis explores the notion of ‘experimental voice’ in avant-garde performance, in the way it transgresses conventional forms of vocal expression as a means of both extending and enhancing the expressive capabilities of the voice, and reframing the social and political contexts in which these voices are heard. I examine these avant-garde voices in relation to three different liminal contexts in which the voice plays a central role: in ritual vocal expressions, such as Greek lament and Māori karanga, where the voice forms a bridge between the living and the dead; in electroacoustic music and film, where the voice is dissociated from its source body and can be heard to resound somewhere between human and machine; and from a psychoanalytic perspective, where the voice may bring to consciousness the repressed fears and desires of the unconscious. The liminal phase of ritual performance is a time of inherent possibility, where the usual social structures are inverted or subverted, but the liminal is ultimately temporary and conservative. Victor Turner suggests the concept of the ‘liminoid’ as a more transgressive alternative to the liminal, allowing for permanent and lasting social change. It may be in the liminoid realm of avant-garde performance that voices can be reimagined inside the frame of performance, as a means of exploring new forms of expression in life. This thesis comes out of my own experience as a performer and is informed both by theoretical discourse and practical experimentation in the theatre. Exploring the voice as a liminal, transgressive force requires analysis from an experiential perspective.

My visual art practice explores the point at which a sense of bodily humour and revulsion may intersect in the world of the monstrous-feminine: the female grotesque, presented as my own obese (and post-obese) body. This exegesis is a written elucidation of my visual art practice as research. As an artist I create performative photographic images featuring taboo or otherwise 'inappropriate' subject matter, situations, materials and behaviours including bodily fluids, offal, internal organs and my own post-obese body. Through these modes of working, I establish and investigate the subjectivity of flesh: Why are we repulsed by the female grotesque? How can this flesh be used to subvert readings of the female body? My research is informed by those understandings of the female body, sexuality and difference described in the work of feminist theorists including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Ruth Salvaggio and Elizabeth Grosz. I explore the work of influential artists such as Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. In this context, I present my own visual art practice as a point from which the monstrous-feminine can be given voice as sentient, intelligent flesh.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:19:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Edson Manzan Corsi.pdf: 892608 bytes, checksum: 7241984b3e1a9a6410ecca4287ae543c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-12-10 / This thesis has as its object of study three modalities of the uncanny as they appear in the poetry of Irish writer William Butler Yeats. They are: the incidence of the Double, the contact with the Deads, their way of operation in the metaphysical sphere as well as in the world of the Living, and the Animist way of thinking which embraces the omnipotence of thought. We believe that this is possible to be theoretically thought and analyzed through the ideas presented by Sigmund Freud in his essay titled The uncanny ( Das Unheimliche ), edited in 1919. In order to help our discussion of the problem, we used some considerations from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For example, what he exposes in his seminar dedicated to the anxiety and in his essay on the mirror stage . Many important ideas and concepts from literary critics such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Tzvetan Todorov, Emil Staiger, Joseph Warren Beach, Ezra Pound, among others, were also used as basis for the development of our discussion on the theme of the strangeness (uncanny) in the frontiers between literature and psychoanalysis. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche also helped us to understand the concept that Yeats developed and used of tragic joy and the relationship of the poet with the tragic thinking, discussed by the German philosopher and which influenced the work of the Irish writer. This influence made possible, in the poetry Yeats wrote, appear an aspect of absurdity, of ambition for being assimilated in the chorus of the tragedy visible, for instance, in the chapter about the Double and that we can find in his most important poems. / Esta dissertação tem, como objeto de estudo, três modalidades do estranho na poesia do escritor irlandês William Butler Yeats. São elas: a incidência do Duplo, o contato com os Mortos, o modo de operação deles, tanto no âmbito metafísico quanto no mundo dos Vivos, e o modo de pensar Animista que abarca a onipotência de pensamento. Acreditamos que isso é possível de ser teoricamente pensado e estudado a partir das ideias apresentadas por Sigmund Freud, em seu ensaio O estranho ( Das Unheimliche ), publicado em 1919. Para auxiliar nossa discussão do problema, utilizamos algumas considerações do psicanalista francês Jacques Lacan. Por exemplo, o que ele expõe em seu seminário dedicado à angústia e no seu ensaio sobre o estádio do espelho . Muitas ideias e conceitos importantes de críticos literários como T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Tzvetan Todorov, Emil Staiger, Joseph Warren Beach, Ezra Pound, entre outros, foram também utilizados como base para o desenvolvimento de nossa discussão sobre o tema do estranho, nas fronteiras entre a literatura e a psicanálise. O pensamento de Friedrich Nietzsche também ajudou-nos a entender o conceito que Yeats desenvolveu e usou de alegria trágica e a relação do poeta com o pensamento trágico, discutido pelo filósofo alemão e que influenciou a obra do escritor irlandês. Isso possibilitou, na poesia que Yeats escreveu, aparecer um aspecto de absurdidade, de ambição por assimilar-se ao coro da tragédia visível, por exemplo, no capítulo sobre o duplo e que podemos encontrar em seus mais importantes poemas.