Orientador: Giséle Manganelli Fernandes / Banca: Maria Elisa Cevasco / Banca: Álvaro Luiz Hattnher / Resumo: O escritor norte-americano Raymond Carver (1938-1988) é considerado uma das principais vozes responsáveis pelo boom do conto na década de 1980 nos Estados Unidos e pelo desenvolvimento de técnicas narrativas do minimalismo literário. Suas histórias condensadas, desprovidas de ornamentação e caracterizadas por uma sintaxe despojada, paratática colaboram para a composição de um retrato límpido do cotidiano de suas personagens, que, em geral, representam os trabalhadores menos favorecidas das classes operárias. A presente dissertação estuda a maneira pela qual os textos de Carver criticam o mito do Sonho Americano e, a partir da publicação do volume Cathedral (1983), como a ficção do autor sofre uma transformação de estilo, culminando com os jogos pós-modernos da indeterminação na fase final de sua carreira. / Abstract: The American writer Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is regarded as one of the major voices responsible for the short story boom in the 1980s in the United States of America as well as for the development of narrative techniques of literary Minimalism. Carver’s condensed, unadorned stories, which are also characterized by a paratactic, and not complex syntax, contributes to the composition of a limpid portrayal of everyday life experienced by his characters that generally represent the poorest people of working class. The present thesis analyses the way Carver’s texts criticize the myth of the American Dream and, after the publication of the volume Cathedral (1983), how his fiction undergoes a change of style, culminating with the post-modern games of indeterminacy in the last phase of his career. / Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2005-02-16Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:59:47Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 sobreira_rs_me_sjrp.pdf: 1038632 bytes, checksum: 30397b2542f6feaac73a9e10f4263b69 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O escritor norte-americano Raymond Carver (1938-1988) é considerado uma das principais vozes responsáveis pelo boom do conto na década de 1980 nos Estados Unidos e pelo desenvolvimento de técnicas narrativas do minimalismo literário. Suas histórias condensadas, desprovidas de ornamentação e caracterizadas por uma sintaxe despojada, paratática colaboram para a composição de um retrato límpido do cotidiano de suas personagens, que, em geral, representam os trabalhadores menos favorecidas das classes operárias. A presente dissertação estuda a maneira pela qual os textos de Carver criticam o mito do Sonho Americano e, a partir da publicação do volume Cathedral (1983), como a ficção do autor sofre uma transformação de estilo, culminando com os jogos pós-modernos da indeterminação na fase final de sua carreira. / The American writer Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is regarded as one of the major voices responsible for the short story boom in the 1980s in the United States of America as well as for the development of narrative techniques of literary Minimalism. Carver s condensed, unadorned stories, which are also characterized by a paratactic, and not complex syntax, contributes to the composition of a limpid portrayal of everyday life experienced by his characters that generally represent the poorest people of working class. The present thesis analyses the way Carver s texts criticize the myth of the American Dream and, after the publication of the volume Cathedral (1983), how his fiction undergoes a change of style, culminating with the post-modern games of indeterminacy in the last phase of his career.

Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la notion d’événement comme motif organisateur de la fiction de Don DeLillo. En effet, l’assassinat du président J. F. Kennedy et les attentats du 11 septembre sont des phénomènes qui résistent infatigablement au « réel », et à toute traçabilité ontologique ou phénoménologique. À ce titre, ils excèdent la pensée et exigent une réponse nécessaire de l’auteur et de son écriture face à leur irruption. Ils représentent une incursion excessive dans le « réel » et se manifestent sous la forme du surplus. Mais l’événement n’est pas simplement un surplus de réalité, il est aussi un surplus de sens, entendu comme inadéquation du signe à ce qu’il désigne. Il s’agira de montrer dans un premier temps que l’événement se montre excessivement dans le retrait de sa monstration. Nous aborderons cette dialectique du voilement et du dévoilement à travers le prisme de l’Histoire en tenant compte de sa dimension non seulement phénoménologique et traumatique mais également à partir de la notion d’altérité que l’événement sous-tend. Ce paradoxe une fois révélé, nous nous pencherons sur la question du temps car l’événement remet en question l’origine qui le fait advenir et ne prend sens seulement que lorsqu’il est advenu. Il dérègle de facto la temporalité qui avait cours. Il sera alors question de mettre en lumière le dérèglement des instances du temps « classique » : passé, présent et futur. Nous nous focaliserons sur la question du ressassement en nous intéressant, par ailleurs, à la manière par laquelle les concepts de temps, d’événement et d’altérité fonctionnent de conserve. Enfin, nous aborderons l’événement en tant qu’événement-récit en accentuant notre étude sur le terrorisme et la terreur, notions indissociables de la fiction delillienne, en ce qu’ils fournissent des modèles de totalité et de totalisation que l’écriture de l’événement s’emploie — éthiquement — à défaire. En ce sens, l’événement prendra la forme d’un contre-événement. Il s’agira par conséquent de décrypter les événements de texte que DeLillo propose comme moyen de résistance à toute totalisation. Enfin, nous considèrerons certains personnages comme des événements dans la mesure où ils réassertent le caractère événemential de l’individu. / This dissertation wishes to reflect upon the notion of event as an organizing principle in Don DeLillo’s fiction. The assassination of J. F. Kennedy and 9/11 are events that unflinchingly resist the real, or any kind of ontological and phenomenological traceability. They exceed understanding and demand a necessary response from the author and his writing. They represent the intrusion of an excessive reality within “the real” and manifest themselves in the guise of a surplus. But the event is not just a surplus of reality, it is also a surplus of meaning as it posits the inadequacy of the sign and its referent. We will first show how the event shows itself in the very way it shuns its own exposure. This dialectics of veiling and unveiling will be scrutinized through the lenses of History considered both in its phenomenological and traumatic dimensions but also as far as it relates to alterity or otherness. Once the paradox is revealed, we will consider the issue of time for the event defies the origin that makes it happen and makes sense only after it has happened. It thus shatters the temporal continuum commonly understood as past, present and future. We will then focus on the issue of a-temporality and show how time, event and alterity are inextricably linked together. We will finally look at the event understood this time as narrative by focusing our attention upon terror and terrorism as they provide models of totality the writing of the event attempts — ethically — at breaching and undoing. In this sense, the event wille be considered as a counter-event. It will be worth deciphering the textual events DeLillo proposes as a means of resisting totalization. We will also apprehend some key characters as events in their own rights as they reassert the evential dimension of the subject.

Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif d’étudier l’une des modalités particulières de la réception de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson : la réserve. A la lecture de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson, des béances apparaissent, signes d’un évidement d’une partie du texte antérieur au début du récit. Le lecteur fait alors l’expérience du manque. En quête d’un tout qui serait à reconstituer, ainsi que d’une unité rassurante et pourtant si illusoire, le lecteur entreprend de tenter de combler les creux du texte grâce à son imagination. Il produit des interprétations, mais celles-ci reposent sur des univers qui apparaissent comme déréférencés, et dont les points de repère s’effacent. Il fait ainsi une expérience de lecture de l’incertitude, tant les univers présentés par le texte sont instables, criblés d’anomalies linguistiques. Ses interprétations sont aussi source d’équivoque, mettant ainsi en échec de manière permanente toutes ses tentatives de résolution. Or, ces trébuchements successifs sont aussi facteurs de l’expression d’une prolifération interprétative qui fait retentir celle, diégétique et linguistique, qui est à l’origine des ambiguïtés du texte. Ainsi, l’échec des tentatives du lecteur de suppléer au manque donnent lieu à un deuxième temps de l’expérience de lecture, au sein de laquelle il est invité à faire résonner, dans la chambre d’écho que constituent l’œuvre, toutes les potentialités du texte. Le lecteur produit ainsi, au moyen de son imagination, une forme d’excès au texte qui vient suppléer, par substitution, celui qui ne s’écrit plus qu’en creux des espaces blancs. La prolifération langagière et le jaillissement perpétuel du sens que ce nouvel excès autorise assurent une expérience de lecture du foisonnement qui se superpose à celle, initiale, de la perte. / This dissertation focuses on one of the more singular modes of reception in Brian Evenson’s body of work: reticence. While reading Brian Evenson’s works, the reader is made aware of gaps, that seem to point to the existence of a missing part of the text, hollowed out from the narrative before it has even started. The reader then experiences a form of deficiency that he identifies in the text as coming from what is missing. As he tries to reconstruct the text and to make it whole once again, as illusory as that concept might be, the reader attemps to fills the gaps through the workings of his imagination. He then produces interpretations, but those rest on constructed worlds that see their rare landmarks being gradually erased. His reading experience is imbued with uncertainty, mainly because the worlds the stories are set in are unstable and populated with linguistic anomalies. Moreover, his interpretations generate more uncertainty, thus thwarting his attempts to resolve the ambiguities of the text permanently. However, while stumbling on the elusive meaning and the prevailing ambivalence, he discovers that the proliferation of his interpretations brings forth that of the narrative and linguistic proliferation at the root of the many ambiguities of the text. Thus, the failed attempts of the reader to fill the gaps in the text give way to a second reading experience, during which he must ensure that all the potential intepretations are summoned in the text. With the help of his imagination, the reader thus produces a form of textual excess that must substitute itself to the one that he can barely sense in the white spaces of the text. The proliferation of language and the perpetual surging of meaning that this new excess allows insure a reading experience of proliferation superimposed on top of the initial experience of loss.

While the term sadomasochism might conjure cursory images of whips, chains, and leather-clad fetishists, this thesis delves deeper into sadomasochistic theory to analyze dynamics of power and powerlessness represented by a chosen sample of literary relationships. Using two contemporary works of vampire literature—Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series—I examine how power is structured by and between male and female characters (and vampires and humans), and particularly emphasize the patriarchal messages these works' regressive sexual politics engender. Psychoanalysis and feminist theory are employed to support my overarching argument following the gendered dynamics of male sadism and female masochism (and vampire sadism and human masochism), as this dyad reflects men's and women's "normalized" roles of power and powerlessness, respectively, in today's society. Sadomasochistic relationships as depicted in this literature are created through mutual contracts or, what I refer to as, sociocultural sadomasochism to reflect the gendered power imbalances inherent in patriarchy. By concluding with readers' responses to these franchises, this thesis further attempts to determine why such unequal and oppressive relationships are desirable. Since vampires as Gothic figures embody what specific cultures dread yet desire, this literature possesses frightening implications—gender roles are conservative and masculinity is privileged in fiction and, by extension, in twenty-first-century American culture.

Géographe picaresque à cheval sur les côtes atlantique et pacifique, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior signe une œuvre orientée vers l’origine défectueuse et la trajectoire entropique du continent américain, sept générations après la grande migration puritaine à laquelle son ancêtre William fut l’un des premiers à participer. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur la façon dont le roman pynchonien cherche à circonscrire les figures de cette latence de la grande faute américaine, un « vice caché, » puisque tel est le titre de son avant-dernier roman, pour retrouver la prairie perdue et composer un contre-espace au sein de la fiction. Ouverte à toutes les modulations historiques, la notion de fantasmagorie occupe une œuvre où le flâneur, dans un dernier geste de résistance politique, est mené à déchiffrer la crise d’une surface surcodée par la déformation optique et les reflets trompeurs de la ville. En traversant les reflets de cette cité sur la colline, Pynchon met à jour une stratigraphie de l’Amérique, une géologie de la faute, où les lignes de faille et brèches dialoguent avec les mythes fondateurs et achèvent de fracturer la géographie idéalisée du continent, signalant la nature défectueuse de son espace mais aussi de son temps, traversé par la crise. Face à l’insuffisance des récits fondateurs et aux spasmes de l’Histoire, l’écriture pynchonienne réagit en s’enroulant autour de nouvelles modalités narratives, pour faire émerger, entre les lignes, les bifurcations et les incertitudes d’un récit historique écrit au « Subjonctif. » / As a picaresque cartographer standing astride the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. stresses the flawed origin and entropic trajectory of the American continent, seven generations after the great Puritan migration to which his forebear William participated. This dissertation aims to recast the way his work defines these latent figures of the American fault, an “inherent vice,” for such is the title of his penultimate novel, in order to recover the lost prairie of the past and recompose an idealized counter-space within the realm of fiction. This work will consider how the notion of phantasmagoria inhabits a cityscape overcoded by optical devices and deceitful distortions that can only be resisted by the flâneur’s politics of loitering. By exposing the dreamworld of this city upon a hill, Pynchon delves into the depths of the continent and starts a stratigraphic study of America: geological fault-lines engage in a dialogue with deficient founding myths and fracture the revered geography of the continent, signaling the defective nature of its space but also of its time, permeated by the cracks of the crisis. To face the failure of founding narratives and the spasms of History, Pynchon’s work unfolds new modalities that, while not essential to narrative, disrupt reading procedures and suffuse his historical novels with the forking paths and counterfactuals of the “Subjunctive” form.

La catastrophe qui a frappé les États-Unis au matin du 11 septembre 2001 est considérée comme l’une des plus spectaculaires du 21ème siècle. Dès lors, se pose la question de son écriture. Si le monde entier en a été témoin, que peut donc nous apporter la littérature ? Pour répondre à cette question, il conviendra de s’intéresser à l’écriture de la ville après la catastrophe, afin de comprendre comment la béance laissée par la destruction des tours du World Trade Center à New York pourrait être narrée et justifiée. Parce que la catastrophe est tout d’abord physique, géographique, et intervient au cœur même de la ville, elle impose une réappropriation, une relecture et une réécriture de l’espace public. S’étendant au-delà de la question de l’espace urbain, la catastrophe se pense aussi en termes de temps, entre autres à cause de l’expérience traumatique qui en découle : impossible en effet de dissocier temps et trauma. La catastrophe contamine présent, passé et futur, opérant alors un dérèglement temporel. Ce questionnement sur la temporalité mène à une remise en question de l’immédiateté de certaines réponses, notamment politiques, et pousse à s’interroger sur les contre-récits fictionnels qui participent d’une réflexion sur cette temporalité altérée. La littérature post-11 septembre s’apparente donc à une écriture de la survivance, mais aussi à une écriture du questionnement et de la remise en cause de certaines positions, trop immédiates, face à la catastrophe. / The catastrophe that hit the United States of America on the morning of September 11, 2001 is regarded as one of the most spectacular events of the 21st century. Consequently, the possibility of writing about this event has to be questioned. Indeed, if the whole world got to witness this event, what more can literature tell us about it? To answer this question, the way the city of New York has been written about following the catastrophe needs to be considered, so as to understand how the hole left by the destruction of the World Trade Center could be narrated and justified. Insofar as the catastrophe is first and foremost physical and geographical and affects the core of the city, it makes it necessary for writers to reappropriate, re-read and re-write the public space. Beyond the issue of urban space, the catastrophe also needs to be tackled in terms of time, because of – among other factors – the traumatic experience that stems from it, as time and trauma cannot be separated. The catastrophe contaminates the present, the past and the future, inducing temporal disorder. Post-9/11 literature pertains to a writing of survival, but is also a literary form that questions certain positions for being too immediate following the catastrophe.

No description available.

<p>This project presents a case study of postmodern trauma, working at the boundaries of the humanities and computer science to produce an in-depth examination of trauma writing in David Foster Wallace’s novel <i>Infinite Jest</i>. The goal of this project is to examine the intricacies of syntax and language in postmodern trauma writing through an iterative process I refer to as <i>broken reading</i>, which combines traditional humanities methodologies (close reading) and distant, computational methodologies (Natural Language Processing). Broken reading begins with close reading, then ventures into the distant reading processes of sentiment analysis and entity analysis, and then returns again to close reading when the data must be analyzed and the broken computational elements must be corrected. While examining the syntactical structure of traumatic and non-traumatic passages through this broken reading methodology, I found that Wallace represents trauma as gendered. The male characters in the novel, when recollecting past traumata or undergoing traumatic events, maintain their subject status, recognize those around them as subjects, and are able to engage actively with the world around them. On the other hand, the female characters in the novel are depicted as lacking the same capacities for subjectivity and action. Through computational text analysis, it becomes clear that Wallace writes female trauma in a way that reflects their lack of agency and subjectivity while he writes male trauma in a way that maintains their agency and subjectivity. Through close reading, I was able to discover qualitative differences in Wallace’s representations of trauma and form initial observations about syntactical and linguistic patterns; through distant reading, I was able to quantify the differences I uncovered through close reading by conducting part of speech tagging, entity analysis, semantic analysis, and sentiment analysis. Distant reading led me to discover elements of the text that I had not noticed previously, despite the occasional flaw in computation. The analyses I produced through this broken reading process grew richer because of failure—when I failed as an interpreter, and when computational analysis failed, these failures gave me further insight into the trauma writing within the novel. Ultimately, there are marked syntactical and linguistic differences between the way that Wallace represents male and female trauma, which points toward the larger question of whether other white male postmodern authors gender trauma in their writings, too. This study has generated a prototype model for the <i>broken reading </i>methodology, which can be used to further examine postmodern trauma writing.</p>

My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful because their work deals with the South Asian diaspora, in England and the United States, respectively. After setting up a theoretical framework, I critique reviews and essays that privilege hyphenated, "Indian," or "South Asian" identity, and the resultant reading paradigm that fixes these authors into an ethnic minority category. I then trace aesthetic and thematic content of short stories from both Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories to demonstrate how these stories resist this ethno-cultural pigeonholing. My analysis exposes how ethnic and multicultural identity politics supplant aesthetic criticism and transform ethno-cultural identity into an aesthetic object, even if done as a celebration of hybridity or liminality as a putatively liberating space (hyphenated identity as embodying that space). Though my purpose is not to undermine the meaningful artwork and criticism instantiated in or about the "in-between" spaces of American culture, I demonstrate that an over-emphasis on ethnicity and culture (culture "other" than the majority culture in the U.S.) in fact stifles the opening of the American literary canon. Ethnicity and culture become ways of limiting the hermeneutics available to literary criticism because they become the only ways of reading, instead of one lens through which American literature is read.