Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The PhD. dissertation Written Voice examines how Walt Whitman and Henry Miller through books, confined textual products of modernity, strive to awaken the reader to a more perceptive and courageous life, provided that the reader is willing to suspend hermeneutics of suspicion and approach Leaves of Grass and Tropic of Cancer with hermeneutics of hunger. This is examined from linguistic, anthropological and theological vantage point of oral theory (M. Jousse, M. Parry, A. Lord, W. Ong, E. Havelock, J. Assmann, D. Abram, C. Geertz, T. Pettitt, J. Nohrnberg, D. Sölle, etc.). This work thus compares Leaves (1855) and Tropic of Cancer examining their paratextual, stylistic features, their genesis, the phenomenology of their I's, their ethos and story across the compositions. By "voluntary" usage of means of oral mnemonics such as parallelism/bilateralism (Jousse) - along with present tense, imitatio Christi and pedagogical usage of obscenity - both authors in their compositions attack the textual modern discourse, the posteriority, nostalgia and confinement of literature, restore the body, and aim for futurality of biblical kinetics. It is the reader's task, then, to hermeneutically resurrect the dead printed words of the compositions into their own "flesh" and action. The third part of the thesis...