Up where the dog barks (creation). Sitting around the table of a secret municipal council, a mayor and his aldermen, outraged by the village idiot's stupidity, are planning his death. On a beautiful spring's morning, they kidnap him and throw him in a isolated well, whose opening they carefully seal afterwards. Three days later, however, screams are heard from the bottom of the idiot's pit. Contaminated within their own cadastre by the innocent's cries, the villagers, one after another, will have to tell their story: their rural madness, hidden within their common unawareness. Then, without knowing it, it is with the dispossessed's eloquence that they will be caught inside short narratives with no beginning or end---many frames in movement---that will constitute a sole account since all determined by the same disturbing rumour. / The rhetoric of the idiot (criticism). In the shadow of the madman, literary character extremely fascinating lately, the idiot silently cradles himself. Many times portrayed in the works of various authors, its problem seems to differ from the "illuminated"'s. Often aphasic or having a poor vocabulary, the idiot is, in most cases, only described. However, some authors have been able to give him a voice, usually in a strongly poetic prose. Among these writers, William Faulkner ( The Sound and the Fury), Anne Hebert (Les fous de Bassan) and Suzanne Jacob (Laura Laur) distinguish themselves by letting the characters such as the idiot or the simple minded assume control, to a certain extent, of the narration in their fiction. Indeed, it will be the tools of the new rhetoric (rhetoric reconciled of the figures and the argumentation) as apprehended by Michel Meyer in his several works that will be used for the analysis of the three narrations. It will then be possible to investigate the necessary assimilation of the sense and the argumentation within what could be called a project common to the three authors.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20455 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Ouellette, Julie. |
| Contributors | Chapdelaine, Annick (advisor), Rivard, Yvon (advisor) |
| 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 | Master of Arts (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: 001641694, proquestno: MQ43929, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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