Freiburg (Breisgau), Univ., Diss., 2002

Stuttgart, FH, Diplomarb., 2002.

Zugl.: Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss., 2008

Diss. Fern-Univ. Hagen, 2006.

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2006.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2000--Berlin.

Les années soixante-dix ont vu la résurgence d'un genre hollywoodien centré sur la figure du justicier civil, errant dans la modernité urbaine ou rurale afin d'éradiquer le crime en lieu et place des institutions officielles. Baptisé "vigilante movie" par la critique des années soixante-dix, ce type de film a connu son avènement commercial dans une séquence que nous situons entre 1968 et 1989.La majorité des œuvres concernées étant, à nos yeux, conscientes des contrastes et des égarements comportementaux de leurs personnages, nous nous attachons ici à analyser le regard critique porté par leurs auteurs sur la justice civile – un regard souvent occulté par les textes rédigés contre ces films, perçus comme des apologies conservatrices des solutions les plus draconiennes à la criminalité. Nous proposons donc de relever les procédés communs fondant la nature profondément pessimiste de ce cinéma d'action. Comme nous allons le voir, les cinéastes et les scénaristes des grands studios et des circuits de l'exploitation ont saisi que le vigilante est en soi l'outil idéal pour incarner tout à la fois l'Amérique, ses origines, son évolution, ses aspirations, son rêve de liberté et d'indépendance. / Within the nineteen-seventies, a Hollywoodian genre focusing on the vigilante archetype, wandering throughout urban or rural modernity in order to eradicate crime instead of legal institutions, came back in the public eye. Called "vigilante movie" by critics in the nineteen-seventies, this genre arose commercially within a period that we situate between 1968 and 1989. Since most works are, according to us, aware of the paradoxes and bewilderments of their characters, we try to analyze the critical view expressed by authors on vigilante justice - that is, a view often neglected by texts written against these movies, perceived as conservative glorifications of the most radical reactions to criminality. Therefore, we propose a collection of common aesthetic processes that define the pessimistic aspect of these action films. As we are about to see, filmmakers and screenwriters from major studios and exploitation channels have understood that the vigilante in itself is the ideal tool for the embodiment of America, its origins, its aspirations, its evolution, its dreams of liberty and independence.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

A large number of recent scholarship in (American) literary and cultural studies is devoted to describing the contemporary moment as a monumental break from the previous (or current) period, postmodernism, by hailing our contemporary times as the era of post-postmodernism, late postmodernism, metamodernism, cosmodernism, or of a similarly termed construction. In these different proclamations, we recognize a pervasive tendency to periodize, an attempt to separate phases of human existence and cultural creation into neat stages that ‘logically’ follow after one another to form a supposedly coherent narrative. This practice of periodizing comes with a number of pitfalls that many of these studies seem not fully aware of, and it in turn speaks to (and characterizes) the contemporary moment as one marked by a desire for the boundedness of such clear divisions. In the following pages, we chronicle the quandaries that follow from such implicit and explicit efforts of periodization by focalizing them through three different ‘creation myths’ of the contemporary that such efforts at periodization typically subscribe to. As a way of sidestepping these, we accentuate the strengths of more ‘local’ critical lenses, approaches that historicize without periodizing. As one such lens, we suggest to engage the contemporary moment through the ‘poetics of politics,’ a historical discursive formation in which literary and popular texts’ desire for political relevance is matched by a recognition, in politics, of the (meta)textual quality of political action.

En algunos trabajos ya publicados he puesto una serie de materiales a disposición para la discusión sobre la postmodernidad y la postcolonialidad en Europa y Latinoamérica, en particular sobre la obra de Borges, con la finalidad de establecer una base mí nima para una discusión científica y, así, tratar de excluir la polémica ideológica o de cualquier tipo. Partiendo de estos trabajos quisiera, a continuación, resumir características y elementos constitutivos de la obra de Borges o, al menos, de un buen número de textos que se inscriben como marcas de la postmodernidad y postcolonialidad, y confrontar así el tema en cuestión.