Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Voyages, imaginary – history and criticism'

This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.

This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.

This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.

With its focus on the relationship between dreamscape and death, this study examines the possibility of indirectly experiencing – through writing and dreaming – that which cannot be directly experienced, namely death. In considering this possibility, the thesis engages at length with Maurice Blanchot's argument that death, being irrevocably absent and therefore unknowable, is not open to presentation or representation. After explicating certain of this thinker's theories on the ambiguous nature of literary and oneiric representation, and on the forfeiture of subjective agency that occurs in the moments of writing and dreaming, the study turns to an examination of the manner in which such issues are dealt with in selected dreamscapes. With reference to David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the thesis explores the literary and cinematic representation of human attempts to define, resist, or control death through dreaming and writing about it. Ultimately, the study concludes that such attempts are necessarily inconclusive, and that it is only ever possible to represent death as a (mis)representation.

Pourquoi la fiction utopique française des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles s’est-elle incarnée sous la forme d’un récit de voyage imaginaire à la première personne ? Pour la plupart des commentateurs du genre, l’utopie se pense d’abord et surtout sur le plan des idées, des mentalités et des idéologies ; la forme qu’elle adopte, les figures qu’elle déploie, les représentations dont elle est porteuse seraient, au mieux, des accidents de parcours. Notre hypothèse de lecture est tout autre : ces textes intéressent l’historien de la littérature précisément parce qu’ils s’articulent sous la forme d’un récit, mettant en tension la subjectivité trouble du voyageur témoin. Par leur construction mêlant le factuel et le fictionnel, ils se situent dans la double perspective du « monde comme fable » et de la « fable comme monde ». Cette dualité définitoire, nous l’étudierons à partir de la notion d’imaginaire géographique : les textes sur lesquels nous nous penchons problématisent en effet les liens entre voyage et langage, territoire et société, mobilité et individu. L’imaginaire géographique que nous analyserons est un processus, une dynamique qui informe la perception du monde et la possibilité de sa représentation : la présente étude s’intéressera, en deux parties, aux figurations de l’espace et aux pratiques spatiales, qui sont autant de médiations entre le voyageur utopique et les lieux qu’il traverse
Why were utopian fictions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries written in the form of a first person imaginary travel ? Most commentators study utopian literature as being a concept ; the form it adopts and the representations it deploys are considered, at best, incidental. Our hypothesis is quite different : these texts should interest the historian of literature precisely because they present themselves in the form of a narrative in which the subjectivity of the narrator is problematic. By their construction mixing factual and fictional elements, these texts can be read in the double perspective of the “world as fable” and the “fable as world”. We will study this duality through the notion of geographical imagination : the texts we analyze are addressing the links between travel and language, territory and society, mobility and subjectivity. The geographical imagination that we will interpret is a process that informs the perception of the world and the possibility of its representation. This doctoral thesis is divided in two parts : we will investigate depictions of space and spatial practices which are both mediations between the utopian traveler and the places he crosses

Orientador: Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-24T21:54:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Caixeta_BrunaPereira_M.pdf: 41483159 bytes, checksum: 9da2fe0848c5c1d54ac61022e851cefe (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014
Resumo: Alguns anos antes da deflagração da Revolução Inglesa de 1640, que na Inglaterra deporia o regime monárquico e daria aos puritanos o controle de um regime pretensamente republicano, ocorreria uma série de erros políticos que contribuiriam para os conflitos que levaram à Guerra Civil. Boa parte deles adveio da política pró-Espanha assumida pelos dois primeiros reis Stuart, Jaime I e Carlos I, que, entre outras ações, não apoiaram as classes protestantes nas suas empresas de comercialização e colonização de mercados no exterior, deixando a situação econômica do país negativa. Diante do iminente fenecimento do regime monárquico, da Igreja Anglicana alicerçada no sistema episcopal e de aliança ao Estado, do perigo da Inglaterra se tornar domínio espanhol, Francis Godwin compõe por volta de 1629, publicado seu texto em 1638, a ficção utópica "The Man in the Moone". Sumarizando todo o conflito religioso e os deslizes do governo dos primeiros Stuart que caracterizou a Inglaterra nos 40 primeiros anos do século XVII, o presente estudo objetivará mostrar que essa ficção do espanhol Domingo Gonsales na sua viagem à lua, na passagem pela fictícia ilha de Santa Helena e pela China ocupada por jesuítas, debatendo as teorias de Copérnico, Galileu, Gilbert e Kepler na área da astronomia, se pretendeu uma defesa e proteção da Igreja Anglicana e do regime monárquico Tudor que aliava a Igreja ao Estado e favorecia a economia. Através do exemplo disciplinado e inovador dos jesuítas em missão na China no início do século XVII, Godwin intentará advertir os confusos reis, que a saída para os conflitos internos e externos ingleses estava no livre desenvolvimento da ciência, do comércio, e, agora diferente dos jesuítas, numa política adversária à Espanha e à mentalidade medieval e obsoleta católica
Abstract: Some years before the outbreak of the English Revolution of 1640, testifying that in England the monarchy and the Puritans would control an allegedly republican regime, there were a series of errors that contribute to political conflicts that led to the Civil War. Most of them came from the pro-Spanish political assumed by the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, who, among other things, did not support the Protestant classes in their trading enterprises and colonization of overseas markets, leaving the economic situation of the country negative. Faced with the imminent withering of the monarchy, the Anglican Episcopal Church founded on the alliance with the State, the danger of Britain becoming a Spanish colony, Francis Godwin composed around 1629 and his text published in 1638, the utopian fiction "The Man in the Moone". Summarizing all the religious conflict and glides early Stuart England that characterized the first 40 years of the seventeenth century, this study will aim to show that this fiction of Spanish Domingo Gonsales on your trip to the moon, in his passage by the fictional island of Santa Helena and China populated by Jesuits, debating the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Gilbert in the field of astronomy, sought a defense and protection of the Anglican Church and the Tudor monarchy that allied the Church to the State and favored the economy. Through disciplined and innovative example of the Jesuit mission in China in the early seventeenth century, Godwin will bring and warn the confused kings, that the output for the English internal and external conflicts was the investment in science, commerce, and now different from the Jesuits, in opposition to Spain and the Catholic medieval mentality and obsolete policy
Mestrado
Historia e Historiografia Literaria
Mestra em Teoria e História Literária

Cette thèse interroge les apports de la critique marxiste de l’idéologie quant à l’intelligibilité dumonde contemporain devant un double paradoxe qui marque notre époque. Ce paradoxe consisted’une part dans la proclamation de la fin de l’idéologie et, d’autre part, dans la montée d’uneimpuissance politique qui alimente des nouvelles formes de mélancolie.Si la critique marxiste de l’idéologie, en tant que problématisation de la relation entre lesformes de conscience et les conditions de production de l’existence sociale, a contribué àl’intelligibilité du monde forgé par la modernité capitaliste en tant que champ de lutte etde transformation, les mutations du capitalisme la confrontent à ses limites.La totalisation du capital efface les distinctions qui fonctionnaient comme repères pour lacartographie de la totalité sociale et engendre une nouvelle expérience de la réalité ; lemonde prend la forme d’une surface plate et vitrifiée qui nous renvoie l’image de notreimpuissance à la pénétrer. Cette expérience privilégie le versant imaginaire de l’idéologieexprimé sous la forme d’une opposition binaire et amplifie le trait de la mélancolie enajoutant au versant de la tristesse celui de l’intensité.Si l’on veut dès lors confronter les formes de conscience aux conditions de production del’existence sociale dans la configuration socio-historique du capitalisme tardif, laquelleefface les limites entre les deux registres, la reconfiguration tant du mode de productionque de l’idéologie s’avère nécessaire. Les travaux de Fredric Jameson allant dans ce sensopèrent un renouvellement important de l’herméneutique marxiste
This dissertation examines the contribution of Marxist critique of ideology in understandingthe contemporary world in the face of a double paradox that characterizes our era. Thisparadox consists, on one hand, in the proclamation of the end of ideology, and on the other inthe rise of political powerlessness that nurtures new forms of melancholy.If the problematization of the relationship between forms of consciousness and the conditionsof production of social existence has helped to understand the world of capitalist modernity asa field of struggle and transformation, the changes capitalism is undergoing confronts marxistcritique of ideology with its limits.The totalization of capital relations cancels the conceptual distinctions that have hithertofunctioned as markers for the mapping of the social whole, and generates a new experience ofreality; the world takes the form of a flat and glazed surface that reflects the picture of ourinability to penetrate, to fathom it. This experience favours the imaginary aspect of ideologythat is expressed in the form of binary oppositions while, at the same time, accentuates theaspect of melancholy by adding intensity to sadness.Consequently, if one wants to juxtapose forms of consciousness and the conditions ofproduction of social existence within the socio-historical setting of late capitalism that blursthe limits between them, it is necessary to reconsider both the mode of production andideology. Along that line, the work of Fredric Jameson marks an important renewal of Marxisthermeneutics. The mode of production can henceforth also be considered in terms of theproduction of signs and representations that constantly remodel the lived experience of thedominant mode of production. Ideology is not only limited to its imaginary aspect asexpressed by the binary oppositions, but appears also in the form of symbolic acts throughwhich the subjects become part of collective structures, social synchrony, as well as historicaldiachrony

This dissertation is an examination of public culture and memory sites in post-apartheid South Africa, in relation to their narrativisation in the fiction of the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić, who evinces a creolized, ludic style. The carnivalesque elements at play in his writing and his use of “minoritised” English constitute a radical aesthetic. With reference to poststructuralist theories of language, representation and history, I examine short stories and a novel by Vladislavić. I then turn a grammar developed from this aesthetic to an examination of one of post-apartheid South Africa’s most symbolically rich memory sites: Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Official spaces in this country and in this era have tended to be built and curated in the interests of establishing a national imaginary based on a teleological understanding of apartheid history. This can be problematic, as I show in a brief discussion of the Apartheid Museum, a site that offers an instructive comparison with Constitution Hill. I argue that Vladislavić’s radical aesthetic provides a way to interrogate the more totalizing discourses of nationhood and citizenship of the post-Rainbow Nation. Vladislavić’s refusal to allow an authentic history and his radical aesthetics of representation constitute an iconoclasm that can be brought to bear on the more totalizing aspects of Constitution Hill’s design.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

The focus of this dissertation is Frank Herbert‘s use of messiahs and martyrs in selected novels of the Dune Chronicles. I make connections with Herbert‘s studies, inspirations and background to his treatment of religion, establishing the translation of these ideas in the texts. To identify and study every aspect of religion in the series is impossible; however, I will include other features that I deem important to my understanding of the religious theme in these texts. I intend to scrutinize these novels to find evidence of Herbert‘s claim that he studied religion at great length. I will also observe Herbert‘s attitude to and engagement with religion in the Dune Chronicles
English Studies
M.A. (English Studies)

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências Humanas e Sociais na especialidade em Estudos Portugueses e Franceses, Época Medieval apresentada à Universidade Aberta
O século XII francês caracteriza-se por múltiplas transformações (políticas, sociais, económicas, jurídicas, ideológicas, culturais) que redefinem, lenta mas profundamente, os contornos da civilização medieval. Ora, uma das mutações mais decisivas (senão a mais decisiva e marcante) reside justamente na passagem, que perscrutamos atentamente a partir dos múltiplos discursos que in-formam o texto poético, de uma economia oblativa, intimamente ligada ao pensamento simbólico, para uma economia mercantil e monetária, subordinada ao imaginário do signo. Será por mero acaso se vemos nascer e desenvolver-se, neste preciso contexto, a narrativa ficcional em língua vernacular (em romance)? Ou será uma mesma viragem epistemológica que dá simultaneamente origem à notável monetarização (aos mais diversos níveis) das relações sociais, ao renascimento da vitalidade urbana (factores através dos quais tendem a dissolver-se os laços, extremamente fortes e ritualizados, que uniam os homens uns aos outros na sociedade feudal), ao desabrochar do pensamento escolástico e das Ordens Mendicantes, à irrupção das catedrais góticas e à emergência de uma literatura profana que reivindica, pouco a pouco, a sua autonomia perante os sistemas poéticos latinos ou neolatinos? Surgia assim uma rede coerente de possíveis analogias na qual se vislumbrava a estranha e singular geminalidade entre a imagem ambígua do mercador (modelo da fertilidade e comunicação restauradas sobre o qual plana, todavia, e inelutavelmente, o espectro da usura, da avareza, da fraude, da mentira e da falsificação diabólicas) e a não menos ambígua figura do poeta, esse demiurgo que se compraz no jogo, ao mesmo tempo lúdico e subversivo, dos simulacros da Palavra, da Criação e da Verdade. Sobre ambos, pesa o anátema da danação; ambos aspiram, no limiares de uma espécie de Purgatório da linguagem, à plena legitimação dos respectivos discursos. Numa altura em que começam a desagregar-se os valores constitutivos do feudalismo, em que a relação com um Significado fundador, referencial, se torna cada vez mais longínqua e irrecuperável, a ficção e a moeda cunhada emergem assim como dois novos tipos de mediação ante o objecto de desejo, como duas formas de escrita (homólogas, embora distintas e autónomas) que modificam as relações com o Outro e com o mundo (e com o Outro-Mundo inclusive), tanto quanto as suas respectivas representações, e através das quais se elaboram, em suma, novos processos de simbolização. A dualidade e duplicidade que se instauram entre estes dois modos privilegiados de representação (mental e socialmente construída) não podia deixar de ter influências na própria concepção da palavra poética. Com efeito, a forma como dialogam, se entrelaçam, colidem ou se excluem mutuamente imaginário oblativo (bem patente no ideal cavaleiresco e cortês de liberalidade, por exemplo) e imaginário mercantil, abre-nos um terreno de investigação único para observarmos o modo como os dois principais géneros narrativos em verso dos séculos XII-XIII (a canção de gesta e o romance que analisamos mais minuciosamente), reflectem e/ou inflectem o universo que os rodeia e, nesse processo, verificar de que forma se interrogam sobre o seu próprio estatuto e se posicionam um face ao outro através de secretas ou explícitas relações dialógicas e intertextuais. Se, nesta perspectiva, vemos o discurso épico dar, frequentemente, corpo e voz ao inconsciente ideológico e textual recalcado nos inúmeros inter-ditos, ou não-ditos, que estruturam o imaginário romanesco (e vice versa), evidenciando simultaneamente as potencialidades e os limites de uma determinada concepção da linguagem poética e da visão do mundo que (a) sustenta e veicula, caberá à chamada narrativa "realista" do século XIII levar este processo de reflexão (no sentido cognitivo e especular do termo) às últimas consequências. Com efeito, ao multiplicar falaciosamente os "efeitos de real" e as referências ao universo económico, esta narrativa sugere que a única realidade da/na literatura consiste, na verdade, no facto de ser uma arte, subtil e engenhosamente, tecida através de uma temível e sedutora manipulação da retórica da linguagem e das formas significantes nas quais se espelha incessantemente. Desta nova economia poética, emerge uma (in)suspeita, mas agora triunfal e triunfante, relação entre o poeta e o mercador de palavras, entre a usura e a narrativa ficcional enquanto infinita reprodução de simulacros e perpétua deslocação metafórica de uma significação ao mesmo tempo proliferante e sempre ausente; relação na qual se vislumbra a natureza paradoxal, evanescente e profundamente enganadora, do texto medieval como eterna falsa moeda sígnica e semântica.
The twelfth century is a complex period, characterised by an unusual quantity of transformations at all levels (political, social, economic, juridical, ideological and cultural) which would, slowly but profoundly, redefine the contours of Western Civilization. One of the most decisive mutations (if not the most decisive and impactive one) lies in the transition, deeply analysed by us through the several discourses which in-form the poetical text, from the so-called gift economy, closely related to the symbolic though, to a monetary mercantile economy, subordinated to the sign imaginary. Can it be mere chance if we can also find, precisely during that period and context, the beginning and development of the written fictional narrative in vernacular language, (the romance)? Or is it not rather the same epistemological turnover which originates, simultaneously, the remarkable monetarization of social relationships, the rebirth of urban vitality (the towns being the set for an important progressive weakening of the strong and ritualised personal bonds which maintained the cohesion of the traditional feudal society), the flourishing of scholastic thought and Mendicant Orders, the irruption of Cathedral churches and the emergence of profane Literature which slowly takes its autonomous place among the latin and neolatin poetic systems? Faced with this vast net of possible analogies, we were forced to recognise the strange and singular similarity and closeness between the ambiguous image of the merchant (a model of restored fertility and communication, upon whom, nevertheless, always planes the spectre of usury, greed, fraud, lie and devilish forgery) and the none the less ambiguous one of the poet, the demiurge who indulges himself permanently in the vain, ludic and subversive gamble of playing with the Word, the Creation and the Truth. The anathema of damnation stands upon both of them; they both aspire - at the verge of a sort of Purgatory of the Language – to the universal recognition of the legitimacy of their respective discourses. In an era in which the feudal values were starting to dissolve, and the relation to a founding Signified, source of every reference, becomes more and more distant and irrecoverable, the fiction and the minted coin emerge as the two new models for mediation in the face of the object of desire, as two forms of writing (similar although very distinct and autonomous), which drastically modify the relation to the Other and to the World (and to the Other World, as well), just as their respective representations, thus creating a whole new process of simbolization. The duality and duplicity which pervade these two privileged forms of representation (mentally and socially constructed) would forcibly end up behaving serious reflections in the poetic word. In fact, the forms through which the oblative imaginary (in the centre of the chivalric and courtly code of honour) communicates, intermixes, collides or opposes the mercantile imaginary, opens a unique field of research which enables us to observe the way in which the two main versified narrative genres in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (the chanson the geste and the romance being the ones here under scrutiny) reflect and/ or inflect the universe surrounding them. And, in the course of that same process, to verify the ways in which they position themselves facing one another, through secret or explicit dialogic and intertextual relations. If, under this perspective, we frequently see the epic discourse as voicing and embodying the ideological and textual unconsciousness of the repressed inumerous inter-dicts or non verbalised (unsaid) concepts which shape the romance imaginary (and vice versa), thus enlightening the potentialities and the limits of a certain conception of poetic language and of the respective world vision which feds it and promoted it, it will be the "realistic" narrative of the thirteenth-century to take this process of reflection to its last consequences. By fictively multiplying the "reality effects" and the references to the economic universe, this narrative suggests that the only reality of/ in Literature consists, basically, in the fact that it is an art, subtle and ingeniously, woven through a frightening and seductive rhetoric manipulation of the language and the signifier forms in which it is unceasingly mirrored. From this new poetic economy comes an unsuspected but now triumphal and triumphant relation between the poet and the merchant of words, between usury and fictional narrative. An infinite reproduction of fictiveness and a perpetual metaphoric dislocation of a meaning which is simultaneously proliferating and absent. A relation in which we can envisage the paradoxical, evanescent and profoundly deceiving nature of the medieval text as an eternal false coin of sign and meaning.
Le XIIe siècle est incontestablement une période bigarrée dont les contours multiformes traduisent les diverses transformations (sur le plan politique, social, économique, juridique, culturel ou idéologique) qui redessinent, lentement mais en profondeur, les traits de la civilisation médiévale. Or, une des plus marquante, sinon la plus marquante et décisive, de ces mutations réside justement dans le passage, que nous observons attentivement en nous appuyant sur les nombreux discours qui in-forment le texte poétique, d'une économie du don, intimement liée à la pensée symbolique, à une économie monétaire et marchande subordonnée à l'imaginaire du signe. Est-ce, dès lors, une simple coïncidence si nous voyons immerger et se développer, dans ce contexte, une foisonnante littérature écrite en langue vernaculaire (le roman)? Ou est-ce un même tournant épistémologique qui ouvre simultanément les portes à une remarquable (sous tous les points de vue) monétarisation des rapports sociaux, au renouveau de la vitalité urbaine (la ville étant l'espace où se distendent désormais les liens, extrêmement forts et ritualisés, qui unissaient les hommes au cœur de la société féodale traditionnelle), à l'éclosion de la pensée scolastique et à la multiplication des Ordres Mendiants, à l'irruption des cathédrales gothiques et à la naissance d'une littérature profane qui revendique, peu à peu, son autonomie face aux systèmes poétiques latins ou néo-latins? On voit ainsi se mettre en branle un réseau très cohérent d'analogies possibles au sein duquel on commence à soupçonner d'une étrange et singulière gémellité entre l'image ambiguë du marchant (modèle de fertilité et exemple d'une communication restaurée sur lesquels plane cependant le spectre diabolique de l'usure, de l'avarice, de la fraude, du mensonge et de la contrefaction) et celle, non moins ambiguë, du poète, ce démiurge qui se plait incessamment à prendre le lecteur au jeu tout à la fois vain, ludique et subversif des simulacres de la Parole, de la Création et de la Vérité. Sur l'un comme sur l'autre pèse l'anathème de la damnation; tout deux aspirent également – au seuil d'une espèce de Purgatoire du langage – à voir leurs discours accéder pleinement à la légitimité. À une époque où l'on assiste à la désagrégation des valeurs constitutives de la féodalité, où le rapport à un Signifié fondateur et source de toutes références devient de plus en plus lointain et irrécupérable, la fiction et la monnaie frappée émanent comme deux nouveaux modèles de médiation à l'égard de l'objet du désir, comme deux formes d'écriture (analogues bien que distinctes et autonomes) qui modifient profondément les rapports à l'Autre et au monde (et à l'Autre-Monde, bien entendu), aussi bien que la façon dont ils sont représentés, et autour desquelles se bâtissent, en somme, de nouveaux processus de symbolisation. La dualité et la duplicité qui s'instaurent ainsi entre ces deux modes privilégiés de représentation (mentalement et socialement construite) avaient forcément des reflets sur la conception même de la parole poétique. En effet, la façon dont l'imaginaire oblatif (au cœur de l'idéal de la largesse chevaleresque et courtoise, par exemple) dialogue, s'entrelace ou entre en rupture avec l'imaginaire marchand, ouvre à la recherche un domaine riche et unique où il est permis d'observer comment les deux principaux genres narratifs en vers des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (la chanson de geste et le roman que nous analysons le plus en détail) réfléchissent et/ou infléchissent l'univers qui les entoure, et ce faisant, comment ils se questionnent sur leur propre statut et se positionnent l'un par rapport à l'autre par le biais des relations dialogiques ou intertextuelles qu'ils maintiennent secrètement ou explicitement. Si le discours épique apparaît, dans cette perspective, comme une forme qui donne fréquemment corps et voix à l'inconscient idéologique et textuel refoulé ou enfoui dans les innombrables inter-dits et non-dits qui structurent l'imaginaire romanesque (et vice versa), mettant ainsi en évidence les potentialités et les limites d'un certain langage poétique et de la vision du monde qu'il véhicule et qui le soutient tout à la fois, il incombera au récit - que la critique désigne vulgairement de "réaliste" - du XIIIe siècle de pousser jusqu'aux ultimes conséquences ce processus de réflexion (au sens cognitif et spéculaire du terme). En effet, en multipliant illusoirement les "effets de réel" et les références à l'univers économique, ce récit suggère, en fait, qu'il d'existe d'autre réalité de/dans la littérature que celle qui la définit comme un art subtilement tissé par une menaçante et séductrice manipulation (de la) rhétorique du langage et des signifiants où il se miroite continûment. Il ressort de cette nouvelle économie poétique un (in)suspect, mais désormais triomphal et triomphant, rapport entre le poète et le marchant de paroles, entre l'usure et la fiction en tant que reproduction infinie de simulacres et perpétuel déplacement métaphorique d'une signification à la fois sans cesse foisonnante et toujours absente; rapport qui laisse deviner la nature paradoxale, évanescente et profondément trompeuse, du texte médiéval en sa qualité d'éternelle fausse monnaie du signe et du sens. Sujets: Littérature médiévale française (XIIe-XIIIe siècles); Le marchant dans la littérature médiévale; Culture et civilisation du Moyen Âge, Histoire et critique littéraires; Théorie(s) de la littérature (rhétorique, poétique, théorie des genres); Économie et littérature; Langage et imaginaire.