Abstract Gothic fiction captivates adults probably because it always reminds them of childhood and the irrational and naïve responses to the invisible beings. In fact, fear initiated by terror intrinsic in ghost tales is not aimed to suppress desire, but turns to be an access for people to recognize their suppressed desires. Is Gothic fiction worth canonizing, deserving of the name of ¡§literature¡¨ when Gothic fiction tends to be associated with immature fear and desire, and for most people, it is particularly suited to the temporal possession for passing leisure and boring time, and then it is piled up even around the corner of the lavatory? My dissertation, however, starts with these pejorative terms: primitiveness, childhood, fantasy, terror and disposable commodity. Truly, this kind of popular literature appeals to great numbers of people, influencing a large portion of the population in the world, but is not credited accordingly. My intention is to discover the valuable relic that Gothic fiction has left among the contemptuous debris that the moralists and scholars have thrown at it. The strategy I adopt is to represent the milieu where Gothic fiction rises and falls in a historical and cultural perspective. Abroad, the American and French Revolutions break out in tandem, which instigate heated debates over ¡¥revolution,¡¦ and ¡¥history¡¦ in Britain. And the Reign of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution shocks the English monarch and aristocracy. The military conflicts between Britain and France increase. Domestically, the Industrial Revolution brings great impact to English society, precipitating the rise of the bourgeoisie and working class. Coincidentally, this literature of terror becomes the allegory of cultural and political convulsions that rack this nation. And the English people, especially the rising class, find the expression of their anxieties and expectations in Gothic fiction. In addition to reconstructing the network of political, social, aesthetic strains that are integrated into Gothic fiction, I attempt to depict how power shifts, changing the relationships of different factions and ranks of English society when commerce gradually dominates in the activity of literature. As is noted, Gothic fiction is conceived to be more than an innocent enchantment, or a palliative composed of nostalgia for childhood, or a consumable pastime. To indicate how Gothic fiction is rooted in the depth of English culture, I exemplify four English classics as well as bestsellers, and scrutinize them with the concept of ¡§spectralization¡¨ together with the theory of psychoanalysis. The four English Gothic novels I decided on are Ann Radcliffe¡¦s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis¡¦s The Monk, Mary Shelley¡¦s Frankenstein, and Charles Maturin¡¦s Melmoth, the Wanderer. With the spectralization of women, sexuality, ambition, and life in individual works, I endeavor to make the latent truth manifest. Thus, the visible and invisible states of existence are juxtaposed. These motifs indeed pertain to the anxious restlessness, painful sense of insecurity, and the tantalization of suppressed desires, which confronts the middle and lower classes as English society is going through rapid vicissitudes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Finally, I come to the conclusion that a common pattern of forming and suppressing of desire repeats itself in each novel as well as in the interactions of different participants in the establishment of the Gothic discourse. The suppression imposed on popular literature, such as thrillers and Gothic novels, in fact, originates from the bias that there are highbrow and lowbrow types of literature. And the critics, most of whom consider themselves arbiters of literary tastes and makers of literary canons, show contempt to the bestsellers in the book market. With my research, I expect to convince people that Gothic fiction can be defined as a literary asset, not a disposable forged relic. Writers and readers that favor popular literature do not have to apologize or feel ashamed for their devotion to it.

Magister Artium - MA / The demands of modernity and globalisation present print culture as dominant in such a way that oral tradition is forced in to a shadowy position, because the latter tradition cannot be exploited entirely for profit. Dominant scholarship on oral studies therefore positions orality in the background of writing, so as to suggest that it is a past tradition of, and serves as a reservoir for, written literature. However, such approaches reveal theoretical gaps, highlighted, as will be shown in the thesis, by the effaced position of the black woman as storyteller. Orality, in this, becomes the spectre which haunts the writing of most African writers in the same way that the black woman haunts man -centred nationalism. Such spectrality is precisely one which is embodied if not by the black woman in nationalist discourse and in society in general. I begin in by examining the representation of an archetypal black woman namely Sycorax, in William Shakespeare’ s The Tempest. Even though Shakespeare is quite ambiguous about her racial identity, I interpret Sycorax– whose story is told by male characters– as a black black woman.

Le présent travail s’intéresse à une sélection de pièces de Harold Pinter comprises entre Landscape (1968) et Ashes to Ashes (1996) et généralement regroupées par la critique sous le terme « pièces de la mémoire ». Si ces œuvres sont souvent évoquées en raison de leur préoccupation pour le passé et de leur qualité intime et méditative, une approche sous l’angle de la spectralité révèle en quoi elles dépassent une présentation du souvenir afin de mettre en lumière l’impact du passé sur le présent et, de manière plus générale, l’impact des vies sur d’autres vies. Grâce aux diverses manifestations spectrales, l’image du personnage pinterien solitaire et fonctionnant de manière autonome laisse place à une conception du sujet prenant en compte les rapports de dépendance et d’interdépendance le reliant à autrui.Dans une exploration de la dépendance par son négatif, une première partie examine les formes de ruptures instaurées par la spectralité, observant en quoi les fantômes s’inscrivent à première vue comme radicalement autres, à la frontière entre le visible et l’invisible, le passé et le présent, le représentable et l’irreprésentable. Toutefois, une seconde partie analyse en quoi la spectralité ne peut en fait se comprendre que comme profondément liée : ce qui paraissait étranger se révèle familier, l’absence se lit comme deuil et les obstacles à la représentation fonctionnent comme indices de la nature orectique du sujet. Une troisième partie analyse la vulnérabilité révélée au-delà de cette dépendance essentielle : en soulignant la passivité du corps et les échecs de la connaissance, la spectralité ne cesse de mettre en relief les limites du sujet. Pourtant, cette vulnérabilité n’est pas perçue comme paralysante mais au contraire comme le fondement possible d’une éthique dans laquelle le sujet prendrait en charge une responsabilité envers l’autre auquel il est inévitablement lié. / This study focuses on a selection of Harold Pinter’s plays, from Landscape (1968) to Ashes to Ashes (1996), commonly referred to by critics as “memory plays”. Their emphasis on the past and their meditative dimension is often commented on, but tackling these plays through the notion of spectrality reveals how they go beyond a representation of memory to highlight the impact of the past on the present as well as the impact of lives on other lives. The image of the solitary and independent Pinterian character gives way to the vision of a subject taking into account his/her dependence and interdependence and the links uniting him/her to others.The first part explores dependence through its opposite, rupture, looking at how ghosts may seem radically other, in between the visible and the invisible, past and present, representation and the failure of representation. Nevertheless, the second part suggests that spectrality can actually only be understood as necessarily linked: what seemed foreign is revealed as familiar, absence is perceived as loss and the obstacles to representation become clues hinting at the orectic nature of the individual. The third part focuses on the vulnerability revealed beneath dependence: by highlighting the limits of embodiment as well as of rational knowledge, spectrality repeatedly emphasizes the limitations of the subject. However, this vulnerability lays the foundation for an ethics in which the subject would accept to bear responsibility for the other to whom s/he is inevitably related.

Nell’ambito delle odierne teorie del cinema e dell’audiovisivo il problema dell’autoritrattistica e dei suoi rapporti con i nuovi mezzi è oramai di acclarato rilievo. Se la teoria contemporanea pare infatti polarizzarsi da un lato intorno alla questione mediologica e dall’altro a quella dell’immagine, l’autoritratto, inteso nel senso più ampio, si colloca, per la sua peculiare e costitutiva metadiscorsività, all’intersezione di questi due ordini di problemi, interrogandone la correlazione. Ne emerge una comune strutturazione del discorso intorno alla questione fondamentale dell’opposizione e reciproca implicazione di sensibile e intelligibile, frastico e ostensivo, dicibile e indicabile. Una simile problematica si imponeva già in linguistica con Benveniste e nel campo dell’immagine, in modi diversi, con Metz e Marin, e trova oggi nuova e feconda formulazione nella riflessione recentemente sviluppata da Rancière intorno al “regime estetico delle arti”. A partire da ciò che, alla luce dell’implicita dimensione “estetica” che risulterebbe allora soggiacente all’orizzonte teorico contemporaneo, abbiamo chiamato “la scena dell’autoritratto”, quest’ultimo sembra allora assumere complessivamente una valenza di traccia, di impronta, manifestante nella presenza sensibile dell’immagine l’assenza di ciò che vi si è impresso. Modalità mediale di ciò che Derrida ha chiamato spettralità. / In the field of contemporary cinema and audiovisual theories, the subject matter of self-portrait and its relations to new media is by now noticeably relevant. If contemporary theories are indeed polarized between media and visual studies, self-portrait, as a whole, appears, because of its peculiar metadiscursivity, as a crossroad between these two main issues, and therefore as a chance to question their correlation. What emerges is a common and fundamental problem, that of the opposition and mutual implication of perceptible and intelligible, discursive and figural: what can be expressed with words and what can be shown, indicated. Such problems had already been discussed by Benveniste in the field of language and by Metz and Marin in that of the image, and finds today a new and fertile formulation in Rancière’s reflection on the “aesthetic regime of the arts”. Starting from what, in the light of what would then be the “aesthetic” dimension implied by the contemporary theoretical horizon, we called “the scene of the self-portrait”, the latter would then take value of track, imprint, displaying in the perceptible presence of the image the absence of what is impressed in it: mediated modality of what Derrida called spectrality.

Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre le traumatisme et la hantise qui est concomittante, comme le montrent spécifiquement The Pregnant Widow (2011), Wish You Were Here (2012) et The sense of an Ending (2011), les récits qui en découlent et qui font allusion au sentiment contemporain des crises existentielles mondiales. Nous avons analysé les implications du traumatisme et de la spectralité dans l'économie narrative comme étant le reflet d’implications sociales et culturelles plus vastes. Nous avons cherché à démontrer comment la spectralité et la « possession » par le traumatisme représentent non seulement une lutte psychique interne pour « perlaborer » le traumatisme, mais aussi la façon dont cette lutte affecte et altère les notions profondes de subjectivité des protagonistes. Nous avons étudié comment les différentes manifestations du traumatisme sont (re)présentées dans le texte et comment les manifestations textuelles du traumatisme prouvent ou contredisent certains points de vue établis sur le traumatisme dans le milieu universitaire au cours des trois dernières décennies. En outre, nous avons étudié la dynamique découlant de l'interaction textuelle entre la narrativité et le traumatisme, car la narrativité est un élément visiblement mis en avant-plan dans les romans du corpus. Notre préoccupation était de savoir si l'interaction entre fiction et trauma permet à la littérature de richement élaborer le traumatisme au-delà de sa conception comme un vide cognitif et si la mise en avant métafictionnelle de la narrativité permet d’aller au-delà de la révélation postmoderne de la réalité comme une construction fictive. Le traumatisme, personnel ou collectif, est représenté comme la force affective qui déclenche une réflexion subjective universelle. Le résultat de cette enquête psychique est un réexamen de la subjectivité et une prise de conscience de l’existence composée d’êtres interconnectés et donc responsables. Ces romans problématisent une période contemporaine en crise profonde et souscrivent à une vision du monde immanente. L'univers représenté dans ces romans évoque un seul corps vulnérable, appelant à la sensibilité et à l’éthique. De plus, ils réaffirment la nature de la subjectivité relayée par des constructions sociales fictives, mais ils avancent également que les récits provisoires et revisités du traumatisme sont la seule voie vers l'avant pour « perlaborer » le trauma. / This study sets out to gain a better understanding of trauma and its concomitant haunting as reflected specifically in The Pregnant Widow (2011), Wish You Were Here (2012) and The Sense of an Ending (2011), narratives that arise from, and allude to the contemporary sense of global existential crises. We investigated the implications of trauma and spectrality for the narrative economy as reflecting the wider social and cultural implications. We aimed to demonstrate how spectrality and “possession” by trauma represent not only an internal psychical struggle to ‘work through’ trauma, but how this struggle also impacts and alters the protagonists’ deep-seated notions of subjectivity. We studied how the various manifestations of trauma were (re)presented in the text and how the textual manifestation of trauma proved or contradicted certain established views of trauma as theorized in the academia over the past three decades. Additionally, we researched the dynamics arising out of the textual interaction between narrativity and trauma, as narrativity is a visibly foregrounded element of the corpus novels. Our concern was to know whether the fiction-trauma interaction is one in which literature allows for a richer elaboration of trauma beyond its conception as cognitive void, and whether metafictional foregrounding of narrativity points to any tendency beyond postmodern revelation of reality as a fictive construct. Trauma, whether personal or collective, is depicted as the affective force that triggers a universal subjective questioning. The outcome of this psychical investigation is a revised subjectivity and an awareness of existence as composed of interconnected – and thus responsible – beings. The novels problematize a contemporary period in deep crisis and subscribe to an immanent worldview. The universe portrayed in the novels evokes a single vulnerable body, calling for ethical sensibility and care. Further, they reaffirm the nature of subjectivity as mediated through fictive social constructs, yet they also posit the revisited provisional narratives of trauma as the only way forward toward working through trauma.

Il est aujourd'hui possible d'affirmer que, depuis la publication de L'Être et le Néant, s'est imposée une interprétation dominante, fondée sur la lecture de cet ouvrage, de l'ontologie de Jean-Paul Sartre. Les traces les plus marquantes de cette lecture peuvent être attribuées au travail critique de Merleau-Ponty, dont la philosophie s'est développée en partie par affinité avec la pensée sartrienne et en partie en opposition avec elle. En fait, plutôt qu'une simple opposition, la critique merleau-pontyenne opère un questionnement approfondi des principes fondamentaux de l'ontologie sartrienne, en particulier ce qui concerne le problème du dualisme. La présente thèse met en question la lecture de Merleau-Ponty -et avec elle la vision dominante plus générale qui s'est constituée de L'Être et le Néant -, en proposant une autre lecture qui vise, non pas simplement à offrir des réponses aux apories posées par l'apparent dualisme de Sartre, mais à principalement rendre possible la reprise de cette pensée d'une manière originale. Ainsi, le passage par la critique de Merleau-Ponty a signifié non pas une défense unilatérale du texte, mais plutôt une exploration des propres ambiguïtés de Sartre par d'autres chemins, indiquant une richesse peu exploitée de sa philosophie. Il a fallu alors présenter en quoi consistent les problèmes inhérents à la division établie par Sartre entre les modes d'être du pour-soi et de l'en­soi, à partir d'un déplacement des argumentations de Merleau-Ponty, et rendre manifestes les impasses révélées à la reprise de la question du dualisme en termes d'être et de néant, subjectivité et objectivité. Notre travail a consisté à démontrer qu'il y a des éléments implicites dans le texte -ou même explicites, mais non exploités -qui permettent de dépasser les difficultés posées par le dualisme. Inspirée par certaines analyses de Jacques Derrida sur les spectres, nous appelons spectralité la couche implicite de l'œuvre qui, en surgissant, ébranle la base dualiste qui paraissait la soutenir. En faisant émerger la couche spectrale, nous révélons aussi l'omniprésence et le caractère essentiel des relations de hantise, à tel point que nous comprenons l'ontologie de Sartre comme une hantologie, pour souligner la pertinence et la prédominance de telles relations. A partir de cette perspective, il est possible de voir non seulement qu'un dualisme rigide entre pour-soi et en-soi ne rend pas compte d'une multiplicité de modes d'être dans le texte sartrien, ni non plus de l'importance des relations de hantise qui garantissent l'imbrication des régions ontologiques, parfois considérées comme incompatibles. Cette lecture démontre finalement qu'un mode de présence non intuitive des spectres ébranle la supposée "pureté" lumineuse de la conscience qui s'est établie comme paradigme du sujet sartrien, dans la mesure où la hantise démontre un type singulier d'opacité qui finalement inscrit le sujet dans le monde et obscurcit sa relation à soi. / Today, it's possible to affirm that, since the publication of Being and Nothingness (L 'Être et le Néant), a certain reading based on this work has consolidated and established itself as the dominant interpretative view over Jean-Paul Sartre's ontology. This reading's most remarkable traces can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty's critical work, whose philosophy has developed in part because of an affinity which, at the same time, claimed for an opposition to Sartre's thinking. Merleau-Ponty's critical view, however, cannot actually be described as a simple opposition, since it leads to the deeper questioning of aspects which form the groundwork of Sartre's ontology, specially concerning the problem of dualism. This thesis calls into question Merleau­Ponty's reading - as well as the more general dominant view that has formed about L 'Être et le Néant - while proposing another interpretation, which does not aim at simply offering answers to the resulting aporias of Sartre' s apparent dualism, but primarily at amplifying the possibility to return to such line of thought through an original path. Thus, going over Merleau-Ponty's critical view did not mean defending a text has a single meaning; though it did suggest that Sartre's ambiguities could be worked with in other ways, indicating a seldom explored depth in his philosophical thinking. It was then necessary to explain the division established by Sartre between the modes of being For-itself and Being- in-itself, and its inherent problems. Moreover, after the displacement of Merleau-Ponty's arguments, it was essential to highlight the impasses revealed when reconsidering the issue of dualism in terms of being and nothingness, subjectivity and objectivity. Our work consisted in demonstrating there are implicit - or even explicit, but unexplored - elements in the text which allow us to surpass the difficulties created by the dualism. By way of an inspiration caused by a few analyses of specters by Jacques Derrida, we refer to spectrality as the implicit layer, which might arise from the work, undermining the dualistic basis seemingly supporting it. By making the spectral layer emerge, we also reveal the omnipresence and the essential character of the haunting (hantise) relations, to the point of understanding Sartre's ontology as an hauntology, and stressing the significance and predominance of such relations. From this perspective, it is possible to observe not only that a rigid dualism between the For-itself and the in Being-in-itself cannot encompass the multiple modes of being present in Sartre 's work, but also the relevance of the haunting relations as those which guarantee the imbrication of the ontological regions, at times taken as incompatible. Finally, this reading demonstrates how a spectral mode of non-intuitive presence disrupts the supposed luminous "purity" of conscience which bas stablished itself as a paradigm of Sartre's view of the subject, insofar as the haunting shows a unique kind of opacity which ultimately inscribes the subject in the world and overshadows his relationship to himself.

In this thesis I attempt to trace the origins of spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. While it is true that the spectral is introduced properly in The Specters of Marx, published in 1993, Derrida indicates, in The Specters of Marx and elsewhere, an affinity between spectrality and deconstruction and explains that this affinity pertains to a form of disjointed temporality which is characteristic of haunting as well as the deconstructivistic understanding of a constitutive deferral and delay. The challenge is then, firstly, to show how concepts that are central to deconstruction such as difference, trace and the other, all of which arise in and through the deconstruction of Husserls concept of temporality, anticipate the appearance of the spectral in later texts by Derrida. The affinity between the spectral and deconstruction is rarely recognized, much less elaborated upon. Even less recognition is given to the fact that his understanding of concepts such as responsibility, legacy, inheritance and the ethics of mourning is heavily influenced by his interpretations of the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, published around the same time as La voix et le phènomene, L’écriture et la difference and De la grammatologie, published in 1967, in which deconstruction is first introduced. The introduction of the spectral, in The Specters of Marx, is sometimes considered a turning point towards a more ethically oriented philosophy than in his earlier work. If deconstruction is haunted by the spectral from its moment of conception, then the notion of such a turn is jeopardized since the ethicality of mourning, responsibility, legacy and inheritance adhere to the spectral. In this thesis I argue that deconstruction has always been haunted by the concept of spectrality. The question then is not if deconstruction has an ethical aspect but how we should understand the implication that deconstruction has always been an ethical endeavor.

No description available.

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.

No description available.