Cette thèse se propose d’étudier l’expression du mouvement dans la poésie grecque ancienne et plus particulièrement le lien qui unit la mort au mouvement de chute dans la poésie homérique. La question du mouvement apparaît en filigrane dans toutes les études qui se préoccupent de la mort en Grèce ancienne et de ses différentes représentations. À travers non seulement différentes expressions métaphoriques, mais aussi via la chute des corps sur le champ de bataille, la chute de certains objets et le plongeon de différents personnages, le mouvement illustre la mort ou son imminence. Loin de figurer seulement le plongeon de l’âme vers les Enfers, le mouvement de chute figure aussi un large éventail d’états émotionnels et s’avère un moyen efficace d’exprimer des états altérés de conscience, par exemple le passage entre la vie et la mort, le sommeil, la folie et l’ivresse, mais aussi des émotions d’une grande intensité telles que la colère, la douleur et la tristesse. Cette utilisation du mouvement de chute dans la poésie grecque s’exprime dans l’imaginaire poétique, mais également dans les pratiques rituelles recensées dans la poésie homérique. En effet, dans l’Iliade, le mouvement de chute, qui apparaît dans la libation, le serment rituel et les rites funéraires, ne signifierait pas seulement la mort, mais dans certains cas, la mort sans inhumation. Cette découverte nous permet de poser un regard nouveau sur les pratiques rituelles du poème qui mettent en lumière la véritable volonté des Achéens, explicitée au chant 3 (Il. 3. 276-301). Celle-ci consisterait non seulement à tuer les hommes et les enfants, et à mettre les femmes en esclavage, mais aussi à abandonner les corps de leurs ennemis aux éléments et donc de leur refuser l’inhumation, ce qui pose problème dans le contexte religieux de la Grèce ancienne. Le mouvement de chute, à travers le geste de projection, exprime une menace que le public grec devait parfaitement comprendre et qui s’avère centrale pour l’ensemble de l’intrigue. Il apparaît aussi que le mouvement posséderait une « efficacité magique » qui permettrait de déclencher et de sceller un serment. Durant toute l’Antiquité, la signification du mouvement change à travers le temps, s’approfondit, se complexifie et s’il permettait de représenter la mort et la tristesse chez Homère, durant toute la fin de l’époque archaïque jusqu’aux derniers jours de l’Empire romain, le mouvement prend parfois une connotation érotique. En raison de la capacité du mouvement à représenter différents états altérés de conscience et de ses liens étroits avec la mort et le deuil, le plongeon devient alors le modèle exemplaire de la souffrance amoureuse. Cette thèse permet donc d’observer l’évolution d’un motif qui conserve tout au long de l’Antiquité sa dimension mortifère, mais qui, encore aujourd’hui, exprime un lien poétique étroit entre la mort et l’érotisme. / This thesis proposes to study the expression of movement in ancient Greek poetry and particularly the link between death and the physical act of falling in Homeric poetry. The question of movement appears implicitly in all studies concerned with death in ancient Greece and its different representations. Through not only different metaphorical expressions, but also through the fall of bodies on the battlefield, the fall of certain objects and the plunge of different characters, human and divine, the movement illustrates death or its imminence. Far from representing only the plunge of the soul into the Underworld, the falling movement also represents a wide range of emotional states and proves to be an effective way of expressing altered states of consciousness, for example the passage between life and death, sleep, madness and drunkenness, but also emotions of great intensity such as anger, pain and sadness. This use of the movement in Greek poetry is expressed in the poetic imagination, but also in the ritual practices recorded in Homeric poetry. Indeed, in the Iliad, the movement of fall which appears in libation, ritual oath and funeral rites would not only mean death, but in certain cases, death without burial. This discovery allows us to take a new look at the ritual practices of the poem which bring to light the true will of the Achaeans, explicitly shown in the third book (Il. 3. 276- 301), which is not only to kill men and children, and to enslave women, but to abandon the bodies of their enemies to the elements and thus to refusing them burial, which is problematic in the religious context of the ancient Greece. The falling movement, through the gesture of projection, expresses a threat that the Greek audience had to fully understand and is central to the entire plot. It also appears that the movement would possess a "magical efficiency" which would make it possible to trigger and seal an oath. Throughout Antiquity, the meaning of the movement through time became more complex and if it represents death and sadness in Homer, throughout the end of the archaic period until the last days of the Roman Empire, the movement eventually took an erotic connotation. Because of his capacity to represent various altered states of consciousness and its close links with death and mourning, the plunge then becomes the exemplary model of the suffering in love. This thesis thus makes it possible to observe the evolution of a motive which preserves throughout Antiquity its mortiferous dimension, but which, even today, expresses a close poetic link between death and eroticism.

This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.