The first part of the present work elaborates the "problem" that concerns the study as a whole, namely the crisis in historical consciousness that figures prominently in the fiction of Herman Melville and Victor-Levy Beaulieu. This crisis has as its zero degree the humiliation of historical paradigms and the failure of traditional theodicy that Pierre, or The Ambiguities and Sagamo Job J narrativize. The apprehension of a nonsensical totality of being results in the "horror of history" (Eliade), which dread precipitates various modes of forgetfulness and uchronia. A stalemate emerges from the readings in Chapter One: on the one hand, a solipsistic textual infinite is opened by the death of the fiction of the end; on the other hand, the will to sainthood and eternity portends a form of Western nihilism. It is this "dead wall" of metaphysics that inspires the effort to think more and differently in the chapters that follow. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/9937 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Leroux, Jean-François. |
| Contributors | Bossiere, Camille La, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 200 p. |
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