Il s’agit de reprendre la question autobiographique à l’époque où le genre se constitue en Europe, au premier XIXe siècle, en déplaçant le regard vers les marges du genre. Les œuvres de Jean Paul, d’Ugo Foscolo, de Stendhal et de Gérard de Nerval sont d’abord étudiées sous l’angle de la poétique des genres dont elles déstabilisent les catégories. La thèse déplace la question générique en soulevant les enjeux éthiques et politiques du récit de soi qui sont liés à l’expérience du sujet et du temps. À côté de ce qui deviendra le canon en matière d’autobiographie se dessine une autre ligne autobiographique qui, en souvenir de Laurence Sterne, se place sous le signe de l’imagination et de l’arabesque. Les œuvres du corpus mettent en évidence la ligne de poésie de la vie et du sujet. Ces poétiques autobiographiques excentriques manifestent une dissemblance de soi, du temps et de l’histoire. Elles mettent en crise l’identité pensée comme « mêmeté » et l’idée d’un temps homogène. Le soi n’est pas un ; l’autobiographe n’est seul ni dans sa peau, ni dans sa langue, ni dans sa plume ; il se déplace entre les lieux et entre les langues, ne trouvant pas d’assise. La figure de l’auteur est plurielle et collective, en rupture avec le mythe du génie. Aux transfigurations de soi s’ajoutent les transfigurations de la mémoire qui ressaisit le passé au présent et pour l’avenir. Expérience mélancolique de revenance, le récit de soi multiplie les fantômes qui sont le signe d’un deuil personnel et des disjonctions de l’histoire. Témoignant des révolutions du siècle, l’autobiographe ouvre aussi l’histoire individuelle et collective : le récit de soi est prospectif. C’est une mémoire au futur. / The thesis takes up the question of autobiography by focusing on works at the margins of the genre during the early 19th century, the period in which autobiographical writing in Europe came into its own. The works of Jean Paul, Ugo Foscolo, Stendhal and Gérard de Nerval destabilize established generic and canonic categories. They do so by pointing to the ethical and political issues at stake in the narration of the self, which are in turn linked to the experience of the subject and of time. The thesis thereby identifies and explores another autobiographical “line” emerging alongside canonical forms of the genre, a “line” which recalls Laurence Sterne through the use of arabesques and the reliance upon imagination in life narratives. These works emphasize the “line of poetry” which constitutes life and the subject. The poetics of these eccentric autobiographical works explores dissemblance in writing the self, time, and history. They question reductive understandings of identity as ‘sameness’ and conceptions of time as homogenous. The self is not ‘one’; the autobiographer is alone neither in his body, nor in his language, nor in the act of writing. Rather, he is in constant movement between places and languages, unable to establish a stable grounding for his narrative. The author’s persona is multiple and collective, inverting the myth of the romantic genius. Such transfigurations of the self are tied to transfigurations of memory, which allow for the past to be reenacted in the present and for the future. This melancholic experience is also one of haunting, for narratives of the self draw on the figure of the phantom as a sign of mourning for both personal and historical disjunctions. As witnesses of recent or contemporary revolutions, the autobiographers stress the incomplete nature of both individual and collective history, that is, the potential that such history contains. Narrating the self is therefore prospective; it is memory addressing the future.

This thesis is structured as a feminist creative endeavour, a practice of self-love that aims at exploring (my) depression as a cultural and social phenomenon caused mainly by an inability to correctly embody swedishness, a constant haunting of a colonial and Colombian past, and the affective dimensions of language. This text is based on autoethnographic material about the experiences of being a Colombian-born migrant in Sweden and uses mainly affect theory and decolonial theory to make sense of these experiences. The thesis showcases my temporal relation to both swedishness and colombianness and how that dimension influences the (re)production of my self, and the consequent “negative feelings” linked to depression I experience. Furthermore, as a creative endeavour following the tradition of WOC feminist writers, this thesis highlights how writing and theorizing can lead to healing.

<p>My dissertation explores contemporary coming-of-age stories that employ spectral and relational narrative strategies to address readers, demanding a re-negotiated response from them. Drawing upon and extending the observations of critics who emphasize the role of liberalism and its contradictory legacies for post-colonial <em>Bildungsroman</em>, my research highlights a radically ethical potential in unsettling reiterations of this long-standing narrative form. The narratives that I have chosen to examine—namely, U.S. Latino/a and Canadian diasporic second-generation coming-of-age stories and African child soldier narratives—reflect a broad geographical and linguistic range, drawing attention to constitutive relationality and various kinds of haunting to call upon a globally entangled sense of disappointment and responsibility in a profoundly critical register. These coming-of age stories signal the need to imagine alternative ethical and political frameworks for reconceptualising the way we think about knowledge, responsibility, and belonging in twenty-first century planetary relations. Even as they inevitably participate in the global market for stories of otherness and epistemological and/or material dispossession, these texts challenge generic and market expectations, troubling the reader’s easy consumption of them. The open-endedness and ambiguity in the indirect, yet insistent, rhetorical manoeuvres of these narratives urge us as readers to confront complicated questions about global solidarity if we are to respond ethically to global, national and transnational realities.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.