At some point in our lives, we have all experienced physical and emotional pain. We all also try to find meaning in such suffering, first within ourselves, but also through sharing these experiences with those who are close to us. In literature, authors who write autobiographies blur the boundaries between the public and private spheres when they invite readers into their personal world. Georges May and Philippe Lejeune, leading critics of the genre, have concluded that autobiographers not only try to make sense of their own lives, but through their writing, they also seek forgiveness and human compassion. My doctoral thesis explores how an important contemporary literary genre, the French autobiographical comic book (also known as the graphic novel), approaches the topic of health and disease and links it closely with questions of identity formation. Within the theoretical framework proposed by Laurent Berlant, who founded a now thriving branch of contemporary cultural studies known as “Intimacy Studies,” the central aim of my thesis is to demonstrate how these French graphic novels have become an important literary and cultural site for examining the social and artistic significance of a form of writing in which private health concerns are made public. In speaking of intimacy, emotions such as love and other kinds of interpersonal bonds typically come to mind. However, my study of a corpus of ten French-language autobiographical comic books indicates that health concerns and representations of a variety of physical, emotional and mental afflictions are topics of focus in this genre. Authors share their life stories and discuss their relationships with others, but they also share very personal details about their physical and mental states. This sort of intimacy is, I argue, a product of the medium itself. Comics are a hybrid genre in which written texts and images coexist. Comic artists who take their own lives as the subject of their art draw pictures of themselves over and over again. In the autobiographical comics I study, when illness and other afflictions strike the body, this suffering is rendered graphically on the page. These artists are also preoccupied by their inner lives. Both their writing and visual art allow them to portray the inner turmoil they endure in their private life. Comic book scholars, whose studies have proliferated over the past several decades, have largely overlooked how important the portrayal of health is in the development of the genre. This is somewhat surprising given the extent to which the underground graphic novelists who emerged in the United States in the 1960s found ways to defy the Comic Code Authority by challenging cultural norms. These artists openly rejected the rules and conventions of mainstream comics, which typically focused on the exploits of super heroes or talking animals. Instead, they found artistic inspiration in their everyday lives and here is where politics and the art of expressing intimacy intersect. Underground comics were certainly infused with a spirit of rebellion, but the artists who participated in this movement sought first to reinvent the genre itself. Little by little, they delved into their inner lives and began to address some of the most taboo subjects of the day, including topics relating to the most personal aspects of their bodily existence. The daring these early underground comic writers showed in examining the unspoken aspects of personal life and relations went a long way toward establishing the genre as a recognized art form, opening the way for a subsequent generation of comic writers to tackle other serious topics such as war and genocide. Knowledge of the contributions that American underground artists had made to the comic book genre eventually reached Europe in the 1990s. At the time, French artists were also growing tired of their own superhero story lines and disenchanted with the mass-production model that defined the Franco-Belgian comics industry. In response to these conditions, a small group of comic book artists formed a company called L’Association (The Association) which became the first independent comic book publishing house of its kind. They paved the way for many other such enterprises and their formula for success is now being replicated in the mainstream publishing houses these independent-minded artists fled several decades ago. Part of that formula is the inspiration these artists drew from American cartoonists who began in the 1960s to share intimate aspects of their personal lives with their readership. What I have discovered thus far is the frequency with which French autobiographical comics take up and place the subject of ill health and life-threatening disease at the center of the stories they tell. Broaching the topic of ill health is not unique to the comics genre, but is rather a feature of modern autobiographical writing in general. As medical knowledge and scientific understanding have advanced in the modern era, the field of literature has worked to reclaim narratives from the medical world. But unlike other forms of literary expression, comic books offer more freedom of expression and possess a greater capacity to reflect the complexity of human identity and existence. This is especially the case with representations of human suffering. Images can configure what writing fails to grasp, allowing comic artists to express feelings and convey anguish that words can hardly express. The autobiographies I examine were produced by authors who have lived through, survived, or were in some way personally touched by a grave health crisis. Their use of the comic book genre allows them to make sense of the often life-shattering events they, or those who live in close proximity to them, have lived. I am particularly interested in the way in which these authors recount the crisis moment in their lives, how they understand the ways it affected them, and how they were able, or not, to recover from the experience. I show that our state of health, both physical or mental, has a profound effect on our identity, and how we perceive and tell stories about this dimension of our lives is crucial to forming a sense of self, particularly in a contemporary digitalized world that is now flooded with information and images once considered too private for public consumption. I demonstrate how the nine graphic autobiographies I have chosen to study are intimate expressions of vulnerable selfhood, showing how these public portraits of human weakness are a particularly postmodern way of reconstituting one’s identity in the social world. Modern and contemporary theories of human subjectivity teach us that the self is always fragmented. When we are sick, however, the task of finding a sense of stability in ourselves and in the world is even more daunting. Illness proves to be such a dominant theme in the comic book tradition, I argue, because it is a reminder of our own mortality. In the works I am studying, it is the experience of pain and the specter of death that often prompts the authors’ reflection on the self and on life. All of the works I am examining share a common feature. They exhibit a constant tension between the anxieties of revealing a deep personal vulnerability and the desire to make their suffering meaningful, which is a crucial aspect of these authors’ quest to recover and to reconstitute a sense of self in the aftermath of a debilitating illness. Informed by the insights of intimacy studies, psychoanalysis, comics studies and visual studies, I will show how the nine works I examine participate in the process of meaning-making and how the comics genre allows them to do so in particularly inventive and contemporary ways.

Annexe de la monographie / Anhang der Monografie: 'Analyse sémiologique des personnages dans les récits graphiques:Tableaux 1–7

Nous présentons une solution pour la création d'un corpus numérisé en utilisant une approche crowdsourcing pour annoter des bandes dessinées (BD). Les encodages XML qui en résultent aident également les chercheurs, les éditeurs, les bibliothécaires et les conservateurs de collections BDs. Pour atteindre notre objectif de recueil de données, nous développons un moteur de crowdsourcing en ligne pour annoter les BDs. Les tâches sont conçues pour reproduire l'expérience de lecture des pages des BDs, en demandant aux participants d'identifier et d'annoter les éléments structurels (cases, splash-pages) et de contenu (personnages, lieux, événements, onomatopées, objets, lignes de mouvement) des BDs. Notre approche fournit aux chercheurs en humanités numériques (digital humanities) la possibilité de bâtir un corpus structuré et annoté, aujourd’hui manquant. Cela permet d’accélérer la recherche liée à la BD et à la théorie de l'art séquentiel. Les bibliothécaires et les conservateurs de collections des BDs disposeront d'un contenu structuré qui pourrait permettre la création d'artefacts spécifiques, tels que des dictionnaires de BDs, des indices de recherche ou des dictionnaires d'onomatopée. Du point de vue de l'édition, les standards actuels pour les BDs numériques se chargent exclusivement de la couche de présentation (c'est-à-dire, rendre tout simplement une publication sur l'écran d'un dispositif numérique). Mais la nature artistique de la BD et le grand potentiel des BDs numériques nous permettent d'aller au-delà de la simple présentation du contenu. À cet égard, nous contribuons avec des améliorations aux standards sémantiques (CBML) et de présentation (EPUB). / We address the difficulty of creating a digitised corpus by using a crowdsourced approach for annotating comic books. The resulting XML-based encodings assist researchers, publishers and collection curators equally. To achieve our data collection goal, we develop an online crowdsourcing engine for annotating comics. The tasks are designed to mirror the page reading experience, with participants asked to identify and annotate structural (panel layout, splash pages, meta-panels) and content (characters, places, events, onomatopoeia) elements of comic books. Our approach provides Digital Humanities (DH) scholars with a (currently missing) structured, annotated corpus; this enables and accelerates research related to comics and sequential art theory. Curators and collectors of physical or online comics collections are provided with a structured content which could enable the creation of artefacts such as comic books dictionaries, search indices and dictionaries of onomatopoeia. From a publishing perspective, current standards for digital comics are taking care exclusively of the presentation layer (i.e. rendering a publication on the screen of a device). But the artistic nature of comics and the great potential digital comics have already showcased allow us to go beyond simple content presentation. To this respect we present our contributions with enhancements to current semantic (CBML) and presentation (EPUB) open standards that will allow publishers and digital comics authors to create an improved reading experience.

Dans quelle mesure la bande dessinée peut-elle être un outil approprié dans le processus d’enseignement-apprentissage de l’espagnol comme langue étrangère ? À partir d’un panorama sur la réalité de la bande dessinée dans le cadre de l’enseignement et l’apprentissage des langues, j’ai développé les théories et les concepts nécessaires pour aller plus loin dans l’étude du fonctionnement de la bande dessinée et dans la réflexion sur la langue et sa didactique. J’ai mené une étude approfondie de cinq ouvrages représentatifs autour de la thématique « La bande dessinée et la mémoire iconoverbale du franquisme ». L’application d’une grille d’analyse didactique à partir d’un triple critère, médiagénique, linguistique et culturel a démontré l’intérêt d’une étude globale de la bande dessinée tenant compte de sa spécificité dans le cadre d’un programme de langue et de culture. La richesse éducative de ce médium ouvre la possibilité de rendre complémentaires l’enseignement linguistique et, transversalement, l’éducation artistique, littéraire, historique et culturelle ce qui enrichit indiscutablement le processus d’enseignement-apprentissage de l’espagnol langue étrangère. / To what extent can the comic be an appropriate tool in the learning and teaching process as a result of a holistic study that takes into account the specificity of the medium? Starting from an overview of the reality of the comic in the framework of the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language, the study discusses the necessary theories and notions to deepen into the idea of the comic as an autonomous means of cultural expression and into the reflection on language and language teaching. The study analyses five representative works around a common theme: «The comic and the iconoverbal memory of Francoism». Through the elaboration and application of a data collection protocol which includes the triple dimension – mediagenic, linguistic and cultural the study concludes that, provided its specificity is taken into account and a holistic approach is adopted, this medium constitutes an appropriate resource in the teaching and learning of language and culture. The characteristics of the comic allows to teach and learn linguistic content and simultaneously cover interdisciplinary context related to art, literature, history and culture, which undoubtedly enriches the process of the learning and teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.

Qu’est-ce qu’un héros de bande dessinée ? Comment fonctionne-t-il ? Pourquoi est-il ainsi ? Ce sont là les trois questions principales que nous entendons traiter dans les pages de cette thèse. C’est principalement l’étude de la relation entre le lecteur et le héros qui va nous permettre de répondre. Cette relation, nous la nommons identification, elle est à la fois reconnaissance et projection. C’est dans ce double mouvement – du héros vers le lecteur, du lecteur vers le héros – que nous trouverons notre objet. Notre cheminement nous amènera à définir le héros tant de façon diachronique, en nous attardant sur son origine et son évolution historique (avec une attention particulière pour les productions et les réflexions de Rodolphe Töpffer), que de façon synchronique en le comparant aux héros d’autres médiums. Définissant le héros par son fonctionnement identificatoire, nous étudierons celui-ci en analysant les stratégies graphiques mises en œuvre par les auteurs de bandes dessinées pour que celui-ci se produise. Cela nous permettra enfin de tirer des conclusions esthétiques et éthiques de ce fonctionnement, et de préciser la nature de l’expérience de la bande dessinée. Ce travail de recherche fera donc appel, pour être mené à bien, à des outils provenant des domaines variés que sont l’analyse plastique, la sémiologie, l’esthétique, la philosophie, les études littéraires, etc. / What is a comic book hero? How does it work? Why is it so? These are the three main issues that we intend to cover in the pages of this thesis. This is mainly the study of the relationship between the reader and the hero that will allow us to respond. This relationship, we call identification, it is both recognition and projection. It is in this double movement - the hero to the reader, the reader to the hero - that we find our purpose. Our journey will take us to define the hero so diachronically, but to focus on its origin and historical development (with particular attention to the production and reflections Rodolphe Töpffer) as synchronically by comparing the heroes of other mediums. Defining the hero by identificatory function, we will study it by analyzing the graphic strategies implemented by the authors of comics for it to happen. This will allow us finally to draw aesthetic and ethical conclusions of this operation, and to specify the nature of the experience of the comic. This research will therefore appeal to be completed, tools from various fields such as plastic analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, philosophy, literary studies, etc.

(in English): The present thesis titled Translation of francophone comics deals with the subject matter of comics translation, while applying both a theoretical and an empirical approach. Particular attention is paid especially to translations from French into Czech. Regarded the fact that Czech science has only scarcely studied the subject so far, the present thesis is conceived as a global introduction to the subject matter with particular focus on some of its partial aspects. The introduction to the theoretical part of the present study defines the main characteristic features of comics as a medium, as these features are closely linked to the particular challenges raised by its translations. The key chapters of the theoretical part go further to the core of the principal subject and focus on setting a general theoretical framework for translation analysis of specific problems linked with comics translations. The most common challenges faced by a comics translator are identified based on the defined characteristics of the Ninth Art and systemized in three main groups defined as technical, cultural and linguistic aspects of translation. While translating comics from French into Czech, the translator's work is also influenced by the radical differences in approaches to the Ninth Art in the Czech...

De nos jours, les avatars et les réécritures du mythe du Graal puisent leur source d'inspiration dans la Littérature puisque la première mention littéraire de ce schème apparaît à la fin du XIIeme siècle dans Perceval ou le conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes. De par des origines ambivalentes (païennes et chrétiennes), le Graal s'est ancré dans l'imaginaire collectif comme un mythe rédempteur ou tout du moins, étant un idéal à atteindre. Si la quête médiévale chevaleresque demande une rigueur incomparable et une pureté d’âme et de corps pour mériter la révélation des mystères du Saint Calice aujourd’hui, les héros de la littérature populaire et de la culture de masse accèdent à ses secrets par le vecteur d’en-quêtes simplifiées. La dévaluation du mythe s'effectue à mesure des transferts qui s’opèrent dans différents genres, supports et médias mais également dans la réception que la société a du mythe du Graal. De Saint Graal à Graal, de Littérature à paralittérature, de la Bible à la télévision, ce travail cherche à mettre en évidence les différents aspects de ces transferts et tente de prouver qu'il existe des résonances et des points d'articulation entre ces domaines par l'interface du Graal. Dans ce sens, le motif sert aussi de porte-à-faux à une culture et à une littérature dites « mineures » qui peuvent toutefois, sous l'effet du Graal, devenir scientifiques et apporter de nouvelles pistes de réflexion sur le mythe, la société et la Littérature. / Nowadays, avatars and re-writings of the myth of the Grail take their inspiration from Literature because the first literary mention of the scheme appears at the end of the twelfth century in Perceval ou le conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes. Thanks to its ambivalent (pagan and christian) origins, the Grail anchored in the collective imaginary as a myth of redemption or, at least, an ideal to reach. If the chivalric medieval quest requires a remarkable rigor and the body and soul purity to deserve the revelation of the Holy Vessel mysteries, in our days, mass culture heroes have an access to its secrets by simplified “quest-igations”. The devaluation of the subject occurs through transpositions in different genres, mediums and medias but also in the way society receives the Grail legend. From Holy Grail to Grail, from Literature to mass culture, from the Holy Bible to TV shows, this study tends to show the aspects of these transpositions and tries to prove that there are echos and exchanges between these mediums via the Grail. Following that point of view, the theme functions also as a overhang for what some call “minor” culture and literature that can, however, under the Grail influence, become scientific and bring new pieces of reflection concerning the myth, society and Literature.

No description available.

Ce travail s’attache à étudier la profession de dessinateur-illustrateur en France et en Belgique francophone de 1945 à 1968. La profession a longtemps été étudiée sous le seul prisme de la bande dessinée ou du dessin de presse politique. Grâce à une approche prosopographique et à l’étude de 400 trajectoires professionnelles, nous montrons que le métier de dessinateur est polyvalent dans les années 1950 et 1960, touchant autant à l’illustration qu’au dessin politique ou à la bande dessinée. Les dessinateurs sont dépendants du marché et multiplient les lieux depublication comme les pratiques graphiques, en particulier au sein des illustrés. Nous avons privilégié ce support pour appréhender la pratique professionnelle des dessinateurs du corpus. La polyvalence des dessinateurs et leur dépendance vis-à-vis du marché a des conséquences directes sur la manière dont ils construisent et définissent leur métier, en termes d’auto-représentation, de sociabilités comme de revendications. Le statut de journaliste devient unpoint d’ancrage pour nombre d’entre eux, apparaissant comme le meilleur moyen de bénéficier des acquis sociaux qui concernent la société salariale de la France et la Belgique des Trente Glorieuses. Dans le même temps, certains aspirent malgré tout au statut d’indépendant. Les dessinateurs endossent également leur rôle de journalistes dans leurs productions graphiques : leur travail pour la presse et les ouvrages à grand tirage fait d’eux des observateurs visuels de la société des Trente Glorieuses, dont ils transmettent les valeurs, les innovations et les questionnements. C’est dans ce contexte que s’imposent, parfois conjointement, le dessin absurde et la bande dessinée, sans pour autant qu’il s’agisse déjà de spécialisations professionnelles. / This dissertation documents the cartoonist’s trade in France and francophone Belgium from 1945 to 1968. Although this career has been traditionally addressed through the prism of comic art or political cartooning, this study based on a prosopographic approach and the analysis of 400 professional trajectories demonstrates that in the 1950s and 1960s, the trade was a multi-faceted one, in so far as cartoonists were equally likely to produce illustration art, political cartoons, or comics. Their dependence on the market typically brought them to rely upon multiple accounts and graphic techniques, particularly in comic magazines—the medium most closely analyzed in this study to comprehend their professional practices.The cartoonists’ versatility and dependence on the market directly conditioned how they perceived and defined their jobs in social, political, and legal terms. For most of them beingidentified as journalists became a recurring goal as the best means to take advantage of the same benefits and rights as wage-earners in post-World War II France and Belgium. Yet a minorityvalued self-employment. In their graphic productions many cartoonists fulfilled functions similar to those of journalists.Both in the mainstream press and mass-produced books they observed and recorded the values, innovations, and collective interrogations of their national societies in the postwar decades. It was against this background that comics and nonsense cartooning became established graphicforms, although they were often practiced by the same individuals.

Bédéiste, cinéaste, scénariste et illustrateur, Enki Bilal est un artiste contemporain de nationalité franco-yougoslave. De 1998 à 2007, celui-ci s’inspire des guerres qui déchirent sa Yougoslavie natale pour rédiger la Tétralogie du Monstre, un cycle de bande dessinée futuriste qui traduit une vision du monde propre aux années 1990-2000. Marquant une rupture dans le parcours de Bilal, cette œuvre propose une projection fictionnelle d’événements correspondant au postmodernisme social anticipé par Jean-François Lyotard et décrit par Jean Baudrillard. Avec cette thèse, nous démontrons comment l’auteur, en s’intéressant aux différents enjeux propres à ces deux décennies, s’engage dans un dialogue avec les grands penseurs de la postmodernité et cherche à représenter les différentes idées de « morts » – fin des grands récits – qui sont au cœur de leurs discours. À l’aide des notions de postmoderne, de posthistoire et de posthumain, nous avons analysé la question de la mort des idéologies politico-religieuses, la mort de la science et la mort de l’art dans l’œuvre de Bilal.