How do we understand our encounter with ambivalent or visceral aesthetic feelings—textual environments, moods, and atmospheres—if they do not solely belong to the representation of individual or collective emotions? This dissertation proposes a concept of “the feeling of form” to approach these aesthetic feelings as formal dynamics, such as restless orientations and rhythmic intensities. How can literary forms have feelings, and where—or is it necessary—to locate the textual body and the subject of these feelings? The goal of my dissertation is not to show what specific neurological procedures are involved in the emotive-cognitive entanglement between the text and the reader, but to understand “form” as a verb—forming, shaping, mediating, transmitting—whose dynamics and actions manifest the narrative form’s visceral aesthetic feelings, and to examine how such feelings bear significant cultural and political currency. Reading formal dynamics as aesthetic feelings also invites us to adjust our usual gaze at “form” away from categories coined by various formalisms, such as “genre,” “structure,” “focalization,” or “style.” In doing so, we are able to reimagine these categories as part of the dynamics of formal reorientations, rhythms, and syntactic intensities, and to open ourselves up to the impersonal agency and criticality of literary forms. Based on these convictions, my dissertation argues that reading for the feeling of form allows us to experience how literary forms transmit and regenerate volatile experiences of history in ways that complicate, supplement, or subvert the explicit representation of historical events and temporality in a literary text. In this dissertation, I focus on the relationship between the feeling of form and the experience of various histories in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–1934), Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s single-volume novel The Unconsoled (1995). Chapter One traces how nauseous form in Parade’s End allows us to experience wartime and postwar anxiety through Christopher Tietjens’s self-revolting and incoherent consciousness. Chapter Two examines how the deterioration of rhythm in A Scot’s Quair transmits a historical experience of gradual suffocation intricately linked with Scotland’s political and ecological disasters. In a brief Coda, I conclude my project by looking at how The Alexandria Quartet and The Unconsoled manifest weakened and depleted feelings of form, and how these feelings prompt us to rethink the relationship of the feeling of form to European heteronormative ideology and the ethics of community formation. The Unconsoled (1995), in particular, serves as a twofold limit case of the feeling of form: first, as a limit case of the futile feeling of form, and second, as a limit case of the distinction between the novel form and the novel series form. This twofold limit case speaks to its own historical experience of futility at the end of history, and responds to the aesthetic and ideological legacies of early twentieth-century experimental novel series. / Graduate / 2021-05-12

Influenced by post-Lacanian psychoanalytic feminist theory and Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, this project examines three fictional brooding male writers from three separate periods of twentieth-century Ireland and Britain and their performances of authenticity, authority, and exceptionalism as artist figures. By tracing a sociohistorical arc and conducting close literary analyses, this project argues that the myth of white male artistic genius is derived from the power and privilege of a cult of individuality that can be used to excuse and justify harmful behaviour and that comes at the exclusion and expense of those outside this highly specific version of hegemonic masculinity. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted undermine the myth of male artistic genius by exposing the artificial and theatrical nature of the notion of “authenticity” and the posture of being countercultural when one is part of a dominating elite.

Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through the material world as a way of articulating their political, cultural, and social dissatisfactions, and to imagine the future. Drawing in part from Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Jacques Derrida’s texts on spectrality and mourning, I investigate how the material world becomes the means through which nations and individuals express their guilt and desires, mourn losses, cut their losses, articulate the present, and anticipate the future. A study of the material world in these novels thus yields insights into how literary texts respond to history, both overtly and implicitly, foregrounding the importance of physical spaces and things in the larger narratives of national and personal history. My dissertation offers a new understanding of the way twentieth-century literature navigates its history through materiality, destabilizes subject-object distinctions, and exposes the often-unexpected power of the non-human world.

Dans l’œuvre de l’auteur moderniste Bryher, l'identité est une quête dont l’aboutissement se situe hors cadre et hors-champ. Depuis la fêlure d’un soi en décalage par rapport à l’ordre géographique et social dominant, jusqu’à l’ouverture d’un espace autre, propice à la vie et à l’expression, l’image de l’interstice caractérise l’espace dans le texte et l’espace du texte. Fragmentaires et elliptiques, les récits se concentrent, dans l’intervalle entre la crise latente et l’urgence du non-retour, sur les parcours excentriques de personnages s’éloignant d’un centre normatif.À la fois récit de voyage, Künstlerroman et poésie en prose, la fiction autobiographique de Bryher permet au double fictif de l’auteur d’encoder des références saphiques dans les descriptions de paysages pour survivre à un univers domestique édouardien oppressant. Ses fictions historiques sont des témoignages imaginaires redonnant voix aux exilés, aux parias et aux vaincus, que les mutations territoriales et les changements de paradigme dus à des bouleversements cataclysmiques ou insidieux conduisent à émigrer pour ne pas s’aliéner à eux-mêmes, voire, pour certains, à embrasser la mort par idéalisme ou par imprudence. Dans les mémoires de l’auteur comme dans sa production fictionnelle, la quête d’une identité propre passe par de multiples positionnements. Ils sont d’ordres discursifs et dialogiques (au sein de l’espace relationnel et du biographique), mais aussi géographiques et cognitifs (puisque les configurations mentales peuvent être cartographiées en une topologie du soi), et enfin sociaux et culturels (avec pour enjeu l’ouverture d’une troisième voie alliant pratique et poétique de l’espace). / In her work, the modernist author Bryher construes identity as a quest ending beyond the frame of the narrative and beyond regulations. The simile of the interstice epitomises both narrative spaces and space in the texts, ranging from the figure of a split self at odds with the dominant geographical and social order, to the opening of an alternative space of freedom where life and expression become possible. The fragmentary and elliptical narratives recount the excentric trajectories of characters withdrawing from coercitive centres in times of transition from looming threats to catastrophic points of no return. A piece of travel writing, of poetic prose and a Künstlerroman at the same time, Bryher’s autobiographical fiction shows her fictive persona encoding sapphic meanings in landscape descriptions so as to emancipate herself from, and outlive, an oppressive Edwardian domestic life. Historical fictions voice the testimonies of the exiles, the outcast and the conquered, who emigrate to preserve their individual integrity, or happen to die for their beliefs or through mere carelessness. They experience crisis situations in times of cataclysmic or insiduous change, which provoke territorial mutations and paradigmatic shifts. In the writer’s memoirs as in her fiction, the quest for a proper identity is operated through several acts of positioning, on linguistic and narrative levels (within dialogical spaces and biography), on geographical and cognitive ones (since mental configurations can be mapped in topologies of the self), and eventually on social and cultural ones (with the opening of a third way, between a practice of the space and a poetics of the space).

Allant d’une autobiographie où la fictionnalisation du vécu confine à l’invraisemblable, à des biographies imaginaires où des personae de l’auteur construisent librement la figure de leurs « biographiés », Anthony Burgess jongle avec les pactes de vérité et la fabulation-affabulation. Les vertiges cognitifs des métabiographies postmodernes affleurent en filigrane, mais à la mélancolie de l’impossible résurrection textuelle du sujet biographique, les biofictions érudites de Burgess substituent la prolifération d’existences virtuelles, de mythes, fantasmes et simulacres, pour mieux mettre en question les formes institutionnelles du genre, savantes et commerciales. Au cœur de l’entreprise [auto]biofictionnelle de Burgess, se dessine une tension contradictoire entre un désir de restituer ces « vies » dans leur réalité charnelle, individuelle, démythifiée, et l’inclination mytho-poétique du romancier qui leur impose le filtre de sa vision du monde catholique et manichéenne. Le Marlowe, le Shakespeare, le Mozart, le Napoléon, le Keats de Burgess ne sont-il que des spectres romanesques, dont les référents historiques ont été vampirisés par le romancier-biographe ? Les biofictions de Burgess, où se rencontrent, en même temps que plusieurs subjectivités artistiques, divers modes d’appréhension de l’écriture et de la vie [essai critique, chronotope biographique, flux de conscience moderniste, citation intertextuelle], réaffirment le caractère indissociable de la vie, de la création et de l’oeuvre. Sa quête romantique-humaniste qui cherche à restaurer la singularité existentielle de ses prédécesseurs conteste de l’intérieur la textualité thanatographique moderne. / In his autobiography, where his fictionalizing his « real life » borders on the unbelievable, as well as in his fictional biographies, where authorial personae freely create the figures of their biographees, Anthony Burgess juggles his way between authorial truth commitments and blatant invention. The epistemological void revealed by postmodernist metabiographies is not thoroughly absent, but Burgess’s erudite « biofictions » eschew such melancholy brooding on the impossibility to resurrect the biographee, and, instead, celebrate virtual possibilities of existence, myths, fantasies and simulacra – and, doing so, deflate the naïve seriousness of academic or popular versions of the genre. At the core of Burgess’s literary experiments in the [auto]biographical mode lies a contradictory tension between his desire to fully convey the bodily, individual, de-mythified reality of these lives, and the novelist’s mytho-poetical tendency to filter them through the lens of his Catholic and Manichean worldview. Are his Marlowe, Shakespeare, Mozart, Napoleon and Keats but spectral fictional figures, whose historic real selves have been cannibalized by the idiosyncrasy of the novelist-biographer ? Burgess’s « biofictions » are a confluence of several artistic selves, but also of several ways to comprehend the relationship between life and writing [critical essay, biographical chronotope, modernist flow of consciousness, intertextual quotation], thus reasserting the organic connection between life, creation, and the work of art. His romantic-humanist quest for the singular existential selves of his artist predecessors challenges, from within the text, modern thanatographic textuality.

Dans l’univers fictionnel, à la fois sombre et comique, de Henry Green, les personnages sont isolés, coupés des autres et d’eux-mêmes, enfermés dans leur propre corps et leur conscience, mais aspirent malgré tout à fonder une famille et appartenir à une communauté. De son côté, la communauté existe essentiellement sous forme de fantasme ou dans les discours publics, mais son pouvoir normatif n’en reste pas moins dangereux, car le groupe détruit l’individualité et exige que l’on se conforme à ses règles, que l’on adopte ses valeurs et que l’on accomplisse ses rituels dépourvus, chez Green, de sens. Pendant la Deuxième guerre mondiale, moment où Green écrit ses romans les plus aboutis, l’impératif d’appartenir à une communauté nationale réduit au silence les voix personnelles et substitue à l’expérience privée un récit collectif issu des presses de la propagande. Entrer dans l’histoire revient à se renier en tant qu’individu, à se taire : la destruction de l’intimité, le silence, l’oubli menacent les personnages greeniens. Le conflit entre une volonté de s’affirmer en tant qu’individu et un désir de se fondre dans la masse se reflète dans l’esthétique atypique de Green, qui se nourrit des topoi littéraires de son époque tout en se démarquant du traitement qu’en font ses contemporains. L’écriture se fait intertextuelle, plurielle, idiosyncratique, alors que le romancier mêle accents régionaux et langue archaïque, emprunte des idiomes à des langues vernaculaires et littéraires, divisée et fragmentée, lorsqu’il décrit les effets de la guerre sur la psyché. / In the dark and comical fictional world of Henry Green, the characters are isolated, cut off from themselves and from others, locked into their own body and mind, but they nevertheless yearn to build a family and to belong to a community. As far as communities are concerned, they exist solely in the characters’ fantasms or in public discourses, but their normative power remains dangerous: groups destroy individuality and demand that members conform to collective rules and adopt the same values. They require that one participate in rituals that are, in Green’s novels, deprived of any meaning. During the Second World War, when Green writes his best novels, belonging to a national community becomes compulsory. This silences personal voices and substitutes a collective narration written by British propaganda to private experience. Entering history means that individuals should not contradict the official version and have to deny themselves: the destruction of intimacy, silence and forgetting therefore threaten Green’s characters. The conflict between a will to establish oneself as an individual and the desire to melt into masses is reflected in Green’s atypical esthetic, which feeds on literary commonplaces of the times while setting itself apart from the meanings normally attached to them. The writing is characterized by intertextuality. It is plural, idiosyncratic, as the author mingles regional accents and an archaic speech, and borrows idioms from vernacular and literary languages, divided and fragmented, when he records the effects of the war on the psyche.