An interrogation of architecture's prevailing myths, and a practice for how to live and die well as an architect in the Anthropocene epoch.  It is an effort to combine joyful representation and speculation (because architecture is both too serious and not nearly serious enough), with philosophy, for still possible pasts, presents and futures. For this it leans mainly on the ideas of Donna Haraway, Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, to present a methodology called Nomad Storytelling. A methodology that aims to move between a multiplicity of adjacent sites as to care for them in appropriate ways, with the intention of contributing to the idea of relationally unmaking the environmental urgencies of the 21th century. It consists of 8 chapters dealing with juridical care, letting be as care, humour and shaming, fabulous speculation, non-quantifiable architecture as dissent and graphic design as a crucial part of remembering what the cost of architecture is beyond the monetary, in the end suggesting the idea of architect-as-worm and compost architecture. It’s about not telling another killer story, because they always end with apocalypse or dystopia, and instead tell stories of gathering and fabulous futures, as Ursula K. Le Guin called it. Because it matters which architectures architect architecture and which lines line lines.

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

Cette thèse, intitulée Le pohète initié : Illumination et esthétique ésotérique dans l’œuvre de Gellu Naum, analyse trois œuvres importantes de Gellu Naum, le roman Zenobia, les proses La voie du serpent et Medium, ainsi que le rapport entre la poésie picturale de Gellu Naum et la peinture narrative de Victor Brauner. Les œuvres de Gellu Naum que nous analysons possèdent des points communs synthétisés dans la figure de l’illumination, qui signale l’existence d’un régime de connaissance refondé. L’illumination se base sur des théories ésotériques et surréalistes et s’ouvre également sur une nouvelle interprétation du sacré, dénouée de tout caractère religieux. L’illumination institue et entretient un climat mystique à travers les écrits de Gellu Naum et les productions plastiques de Victor Brauner et consolide en même temps leurs doctrines esthétiques. Pour Gellu Naum, l’illumination est le but suprême de l’existence. Elle a affaire avec la capacité de voir avec les yeux du dedans. Dans ce registre ésotérique, la possibilité d’arriver de l’autre côté, c’est-à-dire dans la part invisible de la réalité, stratifiée jusqu’à son niveau archaïque, est réelle et révélatrice. Selon Gellu Naum, l’artiste doit mettre son œil à l’état sauvage pour décrire l’état transcendantal dans lequel résident ses héros; ceci en essayant de contrecarrer un grave bouleversement historique, puisque le totalitarisme roumain a éclipsé à tout jamais l’espace de l’existence. L’écriture de Naum porte les traces noires de cette incidence néfaste. Pour Victor Brauner, l’illumination a une fonction initiatrice. Elle cristallise l’art du peintre et l’éclaire tout au long de sa quête identitaire. L’illumination entretient et provoque une catharsis aux connotations inattendues dans la production artistique, s’articulant avec une consécration de l’ésotérisme. Partant d’une perspective interdisciplinaire, la thèse se divise en trois parties, Le roman Zenobia et la question de la pensée illuminée, L’état transcendantal et ses variables ou De la logique occulte de l’écriture et Les expressions de la poésie picturale et de la peinture narrative à travers les œuvres de Gellu Naum et de Victor Brauner, chacune d’entre elles analysant la figure de l’illumination et établissant aussi les invariantes esthétiques des deux Surréalistes. Dans leur quête de nouvelles formes de représentations artistiques, Gellu Naum et Victor Brauner ont recours à un surréalisme essentiellement cognitif. Les deux font appel à la rationalité, à la lucidité accrue, ce que les Surréalistes rejetaient parfois avec véhémence. / This thesis, entitled The Initiated pohet : Illumination and Esoteric Aesthetics in Gellu Naum’s work, analyzes three important literary productions by Gellu Naum, the novel Zenobia, his writings The Serpent’s Way and Medium, as well as the relationship between Gellu Naum’s pictorial poetry and Victor Bruner’s narrative painting. Gellu Naum’s works analyzed in this study have many similarities synthetized in the trope of illumination. The notion of illumination is based on esoteric and Surrealist theories, opening an interpretation of the sacred devoid of religious substance. Illumination develops a mystical climate throughout Gellu Naum’s writings and Victor Brauner’s art productions and consolidates their aesthetic doctrines. For Naum Gellu, illumination is the ultimate goal of existence. It has to do with the ability to see with the eyes within, revealing a blinding and terrifying alternative to the factual world. Within this esoteric tone, the possibility of reaching the other side – the invisible, advancing deep to the archaic level – is real and revealing. According to Gellu Naum, the artist must reach the wild state in order to describe the transcendental state infusing his heroes. This perspective counteracts a severe historical turmoil, since Romanian totalitarianism severely abbreviated life conditions. Naum’s writings bear the dark traces of this negative impact. For Victor Brauner, illumination has an initiation function. It crystallizes the painter's art throughout his quest for identity. Illumination causes and maintains catharsis, with unexpected connotations in the art production. It articulates a form of esotericism that only rarely infuses the Surrealist movement in the West. Advancing an interdisciplinary approach, my thesis is divided into three parts: The novel Zenobia and the Notion of "Illumination Thinking" The Transcendental State and Its Variables or The Occult Logic of Writing and Expressions of Pictorial Poetry and of Narrative Painting in the Works of Gellu Naum and Victor Brauner. These chapters analyze the figure of illumination and establish the aesthetic invariants grounding the works of the two Surrealists. In their quest for new forms of artistic representations, Gellu Naum and Victor Brauner employ a mainly cognitive form of Surrealism. Both appeal to rationality, to cruel lucidity, which often Surrealists strongly rejected.

La contre-utopie est une branche de la science-fiction qui, à l’opposé de l’utopie, s’attache à décrire non plus des mondes idéaux mais des sociétés cauchemardesques. Bien qu’ancien, le genre ne prend réellement son essor qu’à la fin du XIXème et au XXème siècle et accompagne donc les développements de la société industrielle pour lui renvoyer l’image de ses défauts.Cette thèse se propose de lire certaines des images forgées par contre-utopies à partir d’un schème scientifique, celui de la thermodynamique, soit cette discipline qui, à partir de l’étude de l’économie des machines à vapeur, a servi de tremplin à la révolution industrielle au XIXème siècle. Parce qu’elle a pour but de tracer une physique de la valeur économique, le recours à la thermodynamique va nous servir à analyser l’économie des contre-utopies et à tracer par ce biais les contours d’une théorie critique des sociétés décrites.S’intéressant à la contre-utopie dans la perspective d’une critique du monde industriel, les œuvres retenues pour le corpus, tant cinématographiques que littéraires, sont avant tout issues d’Amérique du nord (États-Unis), d’Europe (France, Grande-Bretagne) et du Japon et produites au cours du XXème siècle, siècle où les effets de l’industrialisation des sociétés dévoilent leur caractère néfaste. En examinant avec de nombreux exemples à l’appui comment la contre-utopie procède à une transposition politique de principes physiques, cette thèse a pour objectif de mettre en évidence les leçons de philosophie morale et politique que l’on peut retirer du genre tout en envisageant sous un angle nouveau les rapports entre science et science-fiction. / Counter-utopia is a branch of science-fiction which, contrary to utopia, describes either ideal worlds but nightmarish societies. Although ancient, the genre really takes off at the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth century, accompanying the developments of the industrial society to send it back the image of their main defects.This thesis suggests to read some of the images made by counter-utopias from a scientific scheme, that of the thermodynamics, a discipline which, from the study of the economy of steam engines, was one of the main springboard to the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. Because it aims at drawing a physics of the economic value, the recourse to thermodynamics is going to serve us to analyze the economy of counter-utopias and to draw by this way the outlines of a critical theory of the described societies.Being interested in counter-utopia in the perspective of a criticism of the industrial world, the works held for the corpus, films and literature (novel and short stories), belong to works produced in North America (United-States), Europe (France, Great-Britain) and Japan during the twentieth century, a century in which the effects of the industrialization of societies show their fatal aspect. By examining with numerous examples how counter-utopia proceed to a political transposition of physical principles, this thesis has for objective to enlighten the lessons of moral and political philosophy given by the whole genre and to consider under a new angle the links between science and science fiction.

This doctoral thesis examines the ways in which contemporary writers have adopted the critical dystopian mode in order to radically deconstruct the socio-political conditions that preclude equality, inclusion and collective political appearance in twenty-first century Britain. The thesis performs theoretically-informed close readings of contemporary novels from authors J.G. Ballard, Maggie Gee, Sarah Hall and Rupert Thomson in its analysis, and argues that the speculative visions of Kingdom Come (2006), The Flood (2004), The Carhullan Army (2007) and Divided Kingdom (2005) are engaged with a wave of contemporary dystopian writing in which the destructive and divisive forms of consensus that are to be found within Britain's contemporary socio-political moment are identified and challenged. The thesis proposes that, in their politically-engaged extrapolations, contemporary British writers are engaged with specifically dystopian expressions of dissensus. Reflecting key theoretical and political nuances found in Jacques Rancière's concept of 'dissensus', I argue that the novels illustrate dissensual interventions within the imagined political space of British societies in which inequalities, oppressions and exclusions are endemic - often proceeding to present modest, 'minor' utopian arguments for more equal, heterogeneous and democratic possibilities in the process. Contributing new, theoretically-inflected analysis of key speculative fictions from twenty-first century British writers, and locating their critiques within the literary, socio-political and theoretical contexts they are meaningfully engaged with, the thesis ultimately argues that in interrogating and reimagining the socio-political spaces of twenty-first century Britain, contemporary writers of dystopian fiction demonstrate literature working in its most dissensual, political and transformative mode.

This thesis examines TV series adaptation as a type of intersemiotic translation. Proposing an interdisciplinary approach to adaptations, it combines methods of translation studies, film theory, narratology, and adaptation studies. The thesis analyses the translation of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale into the first season of its TV series namesake. While using Katerina Perdikaki's translation/adaptation model, it studies and interprets the shifts that occur during the adaptation process. Applying hypotheses by Linda Hutcheon, it focuses on the film means used in the TV series to express meanings narrated in the novel (such as dialogues, voice-over, sound and soundtrack, types of camera shots, camera angles and movement, editing, colours, depth of field, light, narrative and story time, actors, or misanscene).

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<p>The aim of this study is to analyze the construction of research culture and collaboration within the research studio Tools for Creativity, one node in the larger Interactive Institute. This studio is an arena that in today’s society is associated with boundary crossing, dynamics and variability: An environment with high-tech equipment, a staff equipped with diverse skills, and a flexible approach with the ambition of developing innovative tools based on ICT to strengthen human creativity. The present thesis is divided into four main parts. In Part One, culture as analytical framework is presented. This is followed by a presentation of field work, data and field site, the studio Tools for Creativity, and its employees. This includes a discussion of the methods of participant observations and deep inter-views. In the theoretical framework overview, perspectives used in this thesis is presented, including the so-called “new research landscape” debate, a background to this thesis. The introduction concludes with a chapter whith a reflexivity discussion including the making of the research self during field work and in the written text. In Part Two, entitled “Technology”, the informants’ definition of technology in relation ICT and the prototypes produced is ana-lyzed. The concepts “enlightenment optimism” and “romantic uneasiness” are presented as theoretical entrances to the chapter. This is the background for an analysis of the future- and speed-oriented discourse that characterizes the informants’ perception of technology. The aim of using technology to support human creativity, challenge presence and facilitate multi-cultural communication is further discussed. This is juxtaposed with another aspect of technol-ogy, namely the informant’s critique of technology’s impact on mankind, humanity and society. Part Three, “Re-search”, deals with interpretations and negotiations of the concept of research and the researcher conducted by the informants at Tools for Creativity. First, the concept of “boundary object” is presented followed by its use order to analyze the construction of research and the researcher in a multi-disciplinary arena like the studio. An important part of the making of the researcher is the trading of skills in the attempt of legitimizing the individuals’ efforts at conducting research. Here, focus is the negotiation of research as an activity between individuals representing the sciences and the arts, as well as those with formal education and autodidacts. Attempts to manage a broader research concept are placed in relation to academic quality demands. In this analysis, the point of departure is Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital. Here, gender is included as symbolic capital. Part Four is called “Reflections” and contains a discussion of the study and reflections concerning field work. This is followed by a summation of what happened to Tools for Creativity and Interactive Institute after finished field work.</p>

The essay at hand is a New Historicist reading of C. S. Lewis’ dystopian fantasy novel That Hideous Strength. According to New Historicist theory it is informed by many disciplines, namely, philosophy, history, literary theory, theology, social science, and psychology, and it attempts to lessen injustices of race and class. The essay examines how satire operates in the novel, focusing on its societal targets: totalitarianism, laboratory animals, and education. Lewis’ philosophical idea expressed in his “The Abolition of Man” – that a society that averts from what he calls universal, timeless, objective values will eventually lead to a loss of that which is truly humane – is a main theme of the novel as well as for this essay. Another, complementary, main theme is that a cultivation of the heart is necessary for individuals of society since childhood if society is going to stay humane.