Les études présentées dans ce thèse, The Violence of Bearing Witness in Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, portent sur les représentations narratives de l’acte de témoigner dans les textes des écrivains américains Flannery O'Connor et Cormac McCarthy. Plus précisement, j'identifie l'acte de témoigner comme étant une fonction essentielle du prophète et situe ensuite la représentation narrative de cet acte dans la tradition de la jérémiade américaine. Je débute alors mon étude de O’Connor en examinant son interprétation du rôle du prophète aussi bien dans ses textes que dans la société en générale et sa culture en particulier. Je place ensuite son corpus dans le contexte du mouvement des droits civiques des 1950s-60s et retrace l’évolution de ses personnages noirs à travers la progression d’un groupe de récits que je term « The Geranium Variations ». Mon analyse herméneutique de Blood Meridian emploie la typologie de la violence de Slavoj Žižek pour affirmer que, bien que le roman soit rempli de représentations vives de la violence, McCarthy démontre que la violence structurelle est à l’origine des flambées individuelles – c’est-à-dire de guerre, d’expansion territoriale agressive et de génocide sanctionné par l’État. De plus, mes études démontre que les descriptions excessives de violence du roman sont juxtaposées à une pénurie de description narrative dans la mesure où les représentations incessantes de violence tout au long du roman aboutissent à la mort non décrite du protagoniste, the kid. Enfin, je conclus que les allusions aux Écritures au tout début du roman prédit que the kid aura un rôle liminal dans le texte en tant que prophèt maudit qui a pour fonction de témoigner les horreurs indescriptibles de la nuit des temps. / This dissertation, The Violence of Bearing Witness in Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, investigates the narrative expressions of bearing witness in the fiction of two writers of the American South: Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. I identify the act of bearing witness as an essential function of the prophet and locate the narrative representation of this act within the tradition of the American jeremiad. I begin my study of O’Connor’s works by investigating her understanding of the significance of the role of the prophet in her writing as well as in modern society. I then situate O’Connor’s literary art within the context of the civil rights movement and trace the evolution of her treatment of Black characters through the progress of a group of stories I have termed the “Geranium Variations.” My hermeneutic analysis of Blood Meridian employs Slavoj Žižek’s typology of violence to argue that though the novel is replete with vivid portrayals of violence, the true horror with which McCarthy reckons is the structural violence that fosters the individual outbreaks of brutality, i.e. warfare, aggressive territorial expansion, and state-sanctioned genocide. I demonstrate that the novel’s excessive descriptions of violence are juxtaposed with an absence of description insofar as the relentless representations of gratuitous violence throughout the novel culminate in the unnarrated death of the protagonist, the kid. I conclude that the allusions to scripture in the opening sentences of the novel foretells the kid’s liminal role in the text as a cursed prophet whose function is to witness the unspeakable horrors of history.

This dissertation concerns the narrative and theological role of divine vengeance and saintly cursing in the saints’ Lives of England and Ireland, c. 1060-1215. The dissertation considers four case studies of primary material: the hagiographical and historical writings of the English Benedictines (Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Eadmer of Canterbury, and William of Malmesbury), the English Cistercians (Aelred and Walter Daniel of Rievaulx, John of Forde), the cross-cultural hagiographer Jocelin of Furness, and the Irish (examining key textual clusters connected with St. Máedóc of Ferns and St. Ruadán of Lorrha, whose authors are anonymous). This material is predominantly in Latin, with the exception of the Irish material, for which some vernacular (Middle Irish) hagiographical and historical/saga material is also considered. The first four chapters (I-IV) focus discretely on these respective source-based case studies. Each is framed by a discussion of those textual clusters in terms of their given authors, provenances, audiences, patrons, agendas and outlooks, to show how the representation of cursing and vengeance operated according to the logic of the texts and their authors. The methods in each case include discerning and explaining the editorial processes at work as a basis for drawing out broader patterns in these clusters with respect to the overall theme. The fifth chapter (V) frames a more thematic and comparative discussion of the foregoing material, dealing with the more general questions of language, sources, and theological convergences compared across the four source bases. This chapter reveals in particular the common influence and creative reuse of key biblical texts, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and the Life of Martin of Tours. Similar discussion is made of a range of common ‘paradigms’ according to which hagiographical vengeance episodes were represented. In a normative theology in which punitive miracles, divine vengeance and ritual sanction are chiefly understood as redemptive, episodes in which vengeance episodes are fatal can be considered in terms of specific sociological imperatives placing such theology under pressure. The dissertation additionally considers the question of ‘coercive fasting’ as a subset of cursing which has been hitherto studied chiefly in terms of the Irish material, but which can also be found among the Anglo-Latin writers also. Here it is argued that both bodies of material partake in an essentially shared Christian literary and theological culture, albeit one that comes under pressure from particular local, political and sociological circumstances. Looking at material on both sides of the Irish Sea in an age of reform, the dissertation ultimately considers the commonalities and differences across diverse cultural and regional outlooks with regard to their respective understandings of vengeance and cursing.