In this dissertation I explain the transition from modernism to postmodernism through the study of the French existentialist novel. I follow theories that demonstrate that the latter owes its success to historiographic metafiction. By setting off the aporias that deeply penetrate modern novels, I demonstrate the obsolescence of the prototype of the realist novel and I explain the impasses towards which the project of a committed literature lead, inscribed in the line of realism and aimed at an almost direct relation with society and history through the mediation of art between 1945 and 1955 in France. / On one hand I consider literature as an object which can be described by the methodologies of history. On the other hand I suggest an analysis of the historicity of the text that is constituted by the dynamic system generated by the interaction, the interdependence, and the correlation of the poetic and aesthetic parameters and the factors of the historical context. My aim is to set off the poetic and aesthetic mecanism of stability and of transformation of literary creation according to the dynamic relation between the vector of the project associated to realism and the one of the prototype associated to the novel. I think that late modernism produces paradoxical configurations of the novel because it is the period in which the project of realism becomes lapsed and the prototype of the realist novel becomes dilapidated. / Among the works that are exemplary of the tension between fiction and history and between project and prototype in the framework of the representation of reality and of the inscription of history in novels, I identified Albert Camus' La Peste, Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins and Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberte . I conclude that the enterprise of committed literature was an aporias because it was generated from the impoverishment of the project of realism and the obsolescence of the prototype of the novel. Later literature was extricated, firstly, by the radically and extremely metafictional writing of the Nouveau Roman and, secondly, it was changed by postmodern historiographic metafiction. The crisis of history and of the writing of history was solved by works in which there is the acknowledgement and the use of sophisticated mediations to evoke and inscribe history in different ways.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85134 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Calderón, Jorge |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002208922, proquestno: AAINR12814, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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