Though overlooked and largely unread today, the long narrative poem was a distinct genre available to nineteenth-century American poets. Thematically and formally diverse, the long narrative poem represents a form that poets experimented with and modified, and it accounted for some of the most successful poetry publications in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on contemporary theories of form and situating these poems within their literary-historical context, I discuss how our reading practices might be shaped by a greater attentiveness to the long narrative poem. My analysis will focus upon a small set of poems from across the nineteenth century, centering on works by Lucy Larcom and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. More than mere recovery, this project aims to illuminate a tradition in which poets ambitiously melded genres, claimed poetry’s place to shape public discourse, and thought deeply about the reading practices available to their audience. Along the way, I consider how the dominant critical categories in the study of poetry have occluded these poems, and what these poems might offer in terms renewing or revitalizing our analytical tools and concepts.

L’objet de ce travail est de montrer le rôle capital qu’a joué la parodie dans la construction du genre romanesque, le seul de ce que l’on considère aujourd’hui comme les grands genres à ne pas être théorisé jusqu’à la fin du XVIIe siècle. La parodie est considérée comme une pratique facile et gratuite, comme une attaque déloyale visant à détruire sans pitié un modèle supérieur. Pourtant, on peut plaider en faveur de son pouvoir habilement corrosif et régénérateur : en critiquant une esthétique, elle en dénonce les défauts et invite à la renouveler. Tournée vers le passé du texte qu’elle imite, elle est aussi tournée vers l’avenir et porte en germe, dans sa critique, la suggestion de voies de renouvellement. Cette capacité de la parodie de régénérer par-delà la critique explique que le roman, en l’absence de théorisation, se soit largement défini par la parodie. Son rôle a, de ce fait, été crucial aux époques où le roman n’était ni théorisé ni accepté et elle a constitué un des lieux majeurs de la réflexion sur le genre romanesque. Non seulement la parodie bouscule le genre du roman et, par ce geste même, le constitue comme genre, mais elle permet aussi de mettre en évidence la conscience générique d’une époque et les formes qu’elle adoptait. Œuvre de lecteur, elle reflète la vision qu’a eue une époque du roman et les manières dont elle entendait le renouveler : elle est donc doublement théoricienne. Il s’agit ici de voir comment la parodie, du roman grec au roman du XVIIIe siècle a été le laboratoire du genre romanesque, situé dans un fragile équilibre entre la destruction des esthétiques qui l’ont précédé et la promotion de nouvelles formules. / The aim of this dissertation is to show the decisive role that parody played in the construction of the novel as a genre, that has not been theorized before the end of the XVIIth century (a unique case within the main forms of literatures). Parody is often considered as an easy process, an unfair and merciless way to attack a superior model. However, its defenders can valuably argue for its caustic and regenerative impact : by criticizing the novel’s aesthetic, parody points out its weaknesses and thus shows the way to renew it. By the process of imitation, parody inevitably confines the parodied text into the past; but at the same time it looks towards the future and suggests, in its criticism itself, new territories to explore. This fertile feature of parody explains why it has largely helped to define the novel in the absence of theoricians. At times when the novel was neither theorized, nor even accepted, parody has played a crucial role, concentrating most of the intellectual reflection about the novel. Not only has parody shaken the form of the novel – which by the way helped establishing it as a genre, it has also highlighted how conscious people were of the existence of this genre, the forms it took. Being a reader’s work, parody reflects how an audience considered the novel and how it intended to renew it : in that sense it has a double contribution to theory. Our objective is to see how, from the greek novel to the XVIIIth century, parody has been a think tank for the novel, in a fragile balance between the destruction of former aesthetics and the promotion of new formulas.

The thesis deals with the realization of three narratives -"Virtuous Young Man", "Divine Lover", and "Sacrifice of a Child"- in diverse literatures of East and West. Basic form, characters/(arche)types, and motifs and their possible variations depending on cultural, literary, and religious/mythological setting are presented for each plot. Using historical and comparative poetics, each plot is analysed from the first extant adaptations in European and non-European literatures to the modern ones. The thesis puts an emphasis on specification and configuration of particular motifs, variations depending on the religious-mythological context, and tension between the same and different, general pattern and specific realization, type and character.

The choice of content and number of technologies that audiences view television with are increasingly expanding in the post-network era, leading those who use the medium to question its definition. In the wake of the Internet, online programming and streaming technologies, the death of television is frequently forecast.  Netflix’s 2013 release of their original online production House of Cards prompted popular media and trade journals alike to declare a revolution of television that would result in a paradigm shift of current production and viewing practices. House of Cards is esteemed for its distribution method and asserted advantages over traditional television by creators and executives surrounding the show, which calls for an examination of the specific practices that are dubbed ‘innovative’, as current television production practices have been put in place for years. The aim of this thesis is to shed light on the claims surrounding the series through production and textual analysis. Second-hand sources are used to gather evidentiary claims surrounding the production, and analyzed using historical poetics analysis with Jason Mittell’s complex television definitions in order to make comparisons of particular elements of the creation, production and distribution of House of Cards. Making these areas its starting point, this inquiry provokes larger questions of the future of online television programming in general, and its role in the death of television in particular.

The audio visual essay, or ”film/video essay” as it might be better known, has in recent years started to enjoy a level of popularity previously unseen in its long and obscure history; encouraging a proper reexamination of the genre through the years, to see how it has developed and changed throughout its lifetime to finally arrive at where it is today. With a lineage stretching back across the centuries, through to the 16th -century writings of Michel de Montaigne, the essay format, either as it manifests in the traditions of literature or the audio visual mode, is a curious form of expression, preferring an indirect route towards knowledge, marked by quandary, reflection, the trying and retrying ideas in a process built around the act of searching. Because of its unusual and shifting nature, on both a formal and discursive level, coupled with a propensity for analysis and dialectical reasoning, it has been a staple of transgressive aesthetic practices, landing it with several of leading experimental filmmakers and movements of the pre- and postwar eras. Interestingly, however, in the new cultural landscape, shaped by the advent of the digital revolution, it has also been involved in a politically transgressive arena of democratized home productions, sparking discussion about the imperative conditions and potential future possibilities of media creation as a whole. To make sense of these historical proceedings, and the forces which impel them, a cohesive definition of the genre is in order, which can then be used as the basis of a functional historical model. As such, the following questions are prompted: What characteristics define the audio visual essay, in what ways has it manifested throughout its history and, by extension, how does one go about formulating a conception of its history? To accommodate these queries both an essayistic mode of analysis, concerning a work’s discursive and formalistic properties, and a chronological lineage of the audio visual essay, is proposed, and applied to different historical examples, to map out paths of development and progression as well as the genres response to the varying cultural, social, political and technological forces during its lifetime.