In this thesis I propose a new approach to the study of the “childlike” in five works from the first half of the 20th century: Les Enfants terribles (1929) by Jean Cocteau, “Un diamant gros comme le Ritz” (1922) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, La Métamorphose (1915) by Franz Kafka, Le Petit Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and L’Arrache-coeur (1953) by Boris Vian. Distinct from both childhood narratives and narratives for children, these texts nevertheless exhibit a childlike quality that can best be described as an in-between state of ambiguity. In the first section of the thesis, I look at the “between” identity of the children. There are children who fly and who are extraterrestrials. There are others who have adult jobs and who even marry. In fact, I call these ambiguous characters, “les enfantins”. In the second section of the thesis, I show that the language is “between”. In 1951, child psychologist Jean Piaget published “La Formation du symbole chez l’enfant”, a work in which he studies the tendency of young children to take one object for another. I show how this type of almost magical thinking that Piaget calls “symbolic thought” appears in the “récit”. In the final section of my thesis, I study areas in the story where the reader finds himself in a “between” position, unable to establish whether what he is reading is occurring or whether it belongs to the imaginary symbolic thought of the child. Here I focus on the readers’ hesitation, contrasting it with the hesitation that Tzvetan Todorov explores in the genre of the fantastic. While this thesis is a close reading of five specific works, it incites several theoretical questions that can be applied more widely to studies concerning the “literary child”: what constitutes a child character in a work, what effect does a child character have on the language of the text, and how does a child character affect the way a text is read? / Thesis (Master, French) -- Queen's University, 2008-02-14 12:16:39.799

Ce mémoire est centré sur les caractéristiques fantastiques dans le Spectre large de Gérard Prévot (1975) et par la suite, sur une comparaison avec les caractéristiques d’un autre recueil de Prévot, la Nuit du Nord (1974), étudié par Ricci en 1993. Notre analyse est basée sur la théorie du fantastique de Tzvetan Todorov qui met en avant l’hésitation à savoir si le phénomène énigmatique provient de l’étrange ou du merveilleux.         L’étude de l’œuvre littéraire de Prévot est intéressante car, comparé aux autres fantastiqueurs belges comme Jean Ray ou Thomas Owen, Gérard Prévot reste relativement inconnu et peu étudié.         Pour ce qui est du résultat, nous trouvons que les contes du recueil ont des qualités variées relativement à la théorie fantastique. Les principales caractéristiques fantastiques du Spectre large naissent surtout grâce à une narration à point de vue limité et au narrateur obscur, parfois inconnu. Le fantastique naît aussi grâce à l’intrigue qui fait venir la force perturbatrice, souvent à la toute dernière page.         En comparant nos résultats avec l’étude de Ricci (1993), nous trouvons plusieurs points en commun mais aussi de divergence. Prévot a écrit les deux livres en utilisant un lexique similaire et les contes se déroulent souvent dans des lieux similaires, dans le Nord — un lieu ayant des connotations mystiques. Un fantastique dit « social » se trouve aussi dans les deux recueils. La principale différence entre les deux livres est la narration. Tandis que le narrateur de la Nuit du Nord possède un savoir absolu qui lui donne le statut omniscient, il est clairement limité dans son point de vue et parfois anonyme dans le Spectre large. / This thesis is centred on the fantastic features in Le Spectre Large by Gérard Prévot (1975) and subsequently on a comparison with the features from another collection by Prévot, La Nuit du Nord (1974), studied by Ricci in 1993. The analysis is based on Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, which puts its emphasis on the hesitation whether the enigmatic phenomena has its origins in the natural (uncanny) or the supernatural (marvellous) world.         The research of Prévot’s literary work is interesting given that, compared to other Belgian fantastic writers such as Jean Ray or Thomas Owen, Gérard Prévot is still rather unknown and not much studied.         With regard to the results, it is found that the stories have a mixed qualities in relation to fantastic theory. In the better tales, the fantastic is born out of a narration with a limited point of view and a vague and sometimes unknown narrator. It is also born out of the plot which introduces the disruptive elements at the very last page.         When comparing the corpus with Ricci’s study (1993), several common features are found, but also a few differences. Prévot has written the two books using a similar vocabulary and the stories often take place in related environments – the North, a place with mysterious connotations. A fantastic which Ricci calls “social” can also be found in both collections. The main point of difference between the books is the narration. While the narrator in La Nuit du Nord has an omniscient status, the one in Le Spectre Large is clearly limited and anonymous.

Eva Krásová: Émile Benveniste and the role of sens My thesis "Émile Benveniste and the role of sens" is a monographic study of the life work of Émile Benveniste (1902-1977) through the role that the concept of meaning (sens) takes in his thought. I adopt the methodology defined by K. Kœrner as "historiography of language sciences", and thus my perspective on Benveniste's work is mainly chronological and developmental. First part of the thesis concentrates on theoretical foundations of Benveniste's thought in the school of Paris (A. Meillet and M. Bréal), Prague (R. Jakobson and V. Skalička) and Copenhagen (texts around 1939). I point out the concept of language system in diachrony in A. Meillet's thinking and in Prague school and present a hypothesis about the role of Émile Bneveniste in their contact during the International congresses of linguists. This results into a description of the perspective of meaning as it was presented in Benveniste's 1962 lecture "Levels of linguistic analysis". Second part deals with Benveniste's concept linguistics of discours. First chapter explains the main concepts of Benveniste's theory of language: semiotics and semantics or the semiotical and the semantical (le/la sémiotique, sémantique), enunciation (énonciation), appropriation (appropriation) and the theory...

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.