‘Data Imaginary’ is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary – what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do – in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature. Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

Dans l’Amérique et les Caraïbes des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’œuvre du poète national est au cœur d’un trafic d’images qui nourrit un lien social fragile dans un temps où les collectivités reposent moins sur un lien direct entre leurs membres que sur un lien imaginé. Prenant ses distances vis-à-vis des représentations en circulation à son époque, comme les représentations exotiques de la nature, le poète offre une vision démocratique ambitieuse pour l’avenir de la communauté à travers des images nouvelles du territoire, du peuple, de l’esclavage et de l’histoire. L’ethos auctorial encourage l’appropriation de ce discours par le lecteur en désignant le poète comme figure de référence. Mais c’est surtout à travers son procédé d’écriture qui met à mal les normes littéraires de son temps que celui-ci est à même d’influer sur la société. Plutôt qu’ils ne parviennent à saisir l’esprit de leur peuple, Whitman, Martí et Césaire participent par leur travail sur le fragment, les formes populaires ou le tremblement du sens à la création d’un devenir collectif. / In 19th and 20th centuries America and West Indies, the national poet’s works lay at the centre of a traffic of images. This traffic feeds the fragile social ties of young collectivities, at a time when communities are bound by imagination rather than by direct contact between their members. Distancing themselves from the representations of the community circulating at that time, like the exotic images of the New World’s nature, the poet offers an ambitious democratic vision for the future which is channeled through images of the territory, the people, slavery and history. The poet’s ethos encourages the reader to appropriate this discourse by presenting the author as a role model. However, it is mainly thanks to his style, at odds with the literary norms of his time, that the poet is able to act upon society. Whitman, Martí and Césaire do not so much contrive to capture their people’s spirit, as they participate through their work on the fragment, on popular poetical forms or on the destabilizing of meaning, in the creation of a common devenir.

Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.

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The PhD. dissertation Written Voice examines how Walt Whitman and Henry Miller through books, confined textual products of modernity, strive to awaken the reader to a more perceptive and courageous life, provided that the reader is willing to suspend hermeneutics of suspicion and approach Leaves of Grass and Tropic of Cancer with hermeneutics of hunger. This is examined from linguistic, anthropological and theological vantage point of oral theory (M. Jousse, M. Parry, A. Lord, W. Ong, E. Havelock, J. Assmann, D. Abram, C. Geertz, T. Pettitt, J. Nohrnberg, D. Sölle, etc.). This work thus compares Leaves (1855) and Tropic of Cancer examining their paratextual, stylistic features, their genesis, the phenomenology of their I's, their ethos and story across the compositions. By "voluntary" usage of means of oral mnemonics such as parallelism/bilateralism (Jousse) - along with present tense, imitatio Christi and pedagogical usage of obscenity - both authors in their compositions attack the textual modern discourse, the posteriority, nostalgia and confinement of literature, restore the body, and aim for futurality of biblical kinetics. It is the reader's task, then, to hermeneutically resurrect the dead printed words of the compositions into their own "flesh" and action. The third part of the thesis...