NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Des lucioles, suivi de, Utilité et limites de la commune dans L'ange de la solitude de Marie-Claire Blais

Des lucioles is a versified novel in which intimate and outside world are shown as irreconcilable. Through a female narrator who is still grieving the death of her father, this project shows what remains after a person disappears, especially when circumstances do not allow the griever to properly process that loss. Surrounded by like-minded people who seem to be struggling as much as her in their own lives, the narrator realizes the importance of belonging to a community, but also, the limits of that solidarity. The recurring image of light shows both the beauty and the despair of the environment in which the characters evolve. The apparent lack of resolution for the protagonist tells us a lot about the helplessness of the subject facing the world they live in.   The essay that follows, Utilité et limites de la commune dans L'ange de la solitude de Marie-Claire Blais, is also exploring the ideas of solidarity and community. Through the concept of hétérotopie developed by Michel Foucault, we try to understand the necessity for Blais’ characters to create a safe space for themselves. We then observe the presence of power relationships inside the friend group, despite their attempt at creating a space out of the social structure that marginalized them in the first place. With this essay, we expose the relationship between the marginalized subject and the world that rejects them, which allows us to reflect on the way these social groups interact with space in general.

Keyphrases: Marie-Claire Blais, L'ange de la solitude, Michel Foucault, marginality, subjectivity, space, community, identity, queer studies
Fantasme d'immersion dans les poétiques de construction de mondes : complétude et canonicité, de Tolkien aux univers partagés

Starting from Erich Auerbach's interpretation of the Homeric epic, this master's dissertation studies the notion of fictional immersion, not in its psychological aspect of a contingent phenomena of human consciousness, but rather in its collective imaginary sense, as a societal myth of immediacy generating concrete aesthetic and media strategies that I investigate from the standpoint of contemporary poetics of world building. The objective is to apprehend the aesthetic repercussions of this desire for a mediation that would conceal both the real and its own mediacy, in a time where transfictionality and transmedia storytelling are becoming more and more the dominant narrative modes of our contemporary western culture. Under the conviction that immersion must be looked at as a set of cultural strategies, the first chapter unravels some theorical difficulties bounded to the term by problematizing it towards ontological questions of truth and Sartre's phenomenological stance on the imaginary. While laying a necessary theorical toolset for subsequent analyses, the second chapter examines these problems by borrowing to possible worlds modal theories a set of working concepts, which will lead to the assumption that fiction is a movement of distanciation, notably with the aide of the formal concept of ``world''. Through a reading of the tolkienian novel, the third chapter directs the desire for immersion towards an encyclopedic impulsion for completeness, embodied by textual strategies such as informational proliferation and allusion to virtual diegetic data -- strategies leaving an impression of the actual that I describe as extra-narrative in contrast to Aristote's \emph{muthos} forming a teological causal chain based on a principle of an unitary narrative. The fourth and final chapter, articulated around the still too little studied notion of canonicity, observes poetics of world building as they neutralize themselves, particularly with shared universes, by generating logical inconsistencies giving birth to authorial and editorial discourses stating fictional truths as a way of maintaining the mediation's immersivity. The analysis of the superhero comics genre and an inquiry of the editorial management of the Star Wars universe will exemplify the multiple modalities of this delimitation between the canon and the apocryphal. As a conclusion, I briefly come back to the notion of immersion itself by redescribing it as a competitive mediation of presence.

Keyphrases: Immersion, Fiction, Auerbach, Erich, Star Wars, Fictional worlds, World building, Canonicity, Completeness, Possible worlds theories, Shared universes, Superheroes
Le voyage d’hiver de Keith Kouna : à l’écoute de Winterreise de Schubert. De la réécriture au studio d’enregistrement

This master’s thesis is a case study of Keith Kouna’s music recording Le voyage d’hiver (2013). Produced by René Lussier, this album is a literary and musical transposition based on Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1828). Although the text was rewritten in French and the music underwent significant transformations, the melodic and harmonic foundations of Le voyage d’hiver create a recognition effect that constantly hearken Kouna’s work back to Schubert. Instead of viewing both works as inseparable, this study will examine the distance that separates them. One may ask if Le voyage d’hiver possesses the distinctive traits to be considered an original, free-standing musical work. Given that the rewriting of the text is rooted in music listening, this research posits that Le voyage d’hiver takes form as the result of listening to Schubert’s Winterreise. Based on the relationship that unfolds between the text and music, the research is then a matter of following this listening through the mediations of the resulting music that was created and recorded in the studio. Establishing this path will make it possible to assess the extent of the transformations that led to Le voyage d’hiver in order to put into perspective the distance that separates and distinguishes it from Schubert’s work.

Keyphrases: Keith Kouna, René Lussier, Le voyage d’hiver, Franz Schubert, Winterreise, Transposition, Listening, Text and music, Sound recording, Rewriting
Entre historia y memoria : Días y noches de amor y de guerra y Memoria del fuego de Eduardo Galeano

This master's thesis is about two works that the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote with the aim of “revealing the past of Latin America as it happened” and, in this way, giving representativeness and visibility to the historical experiences of the Latin American collective. The first work, Días y noches de amor y de guerra (1978) remembers the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone of the 70s, as well as those significant experiences that he had throughout his life, including the memory of those subjects whom he interacted with. The second is, the trilogy Memoria del fuego (1982, 1984 and 1986) in which he recreates five centuries of history from experiences considered by the author as subaltern. In this study we try, through a detailed analysis of the subjects highlighted by Galeano, as well as the narrative resources used, to see how the writer approaches the historical events that he narrates, paying special attention to the use he makes of his memory as well as the archival sources consulted. We believe that his life experiences and the regional context of social unrest and dictatorships have influenced the narrative articulation of these texts, going beyond their historical character, becoming at the same time literary, political, and, above all, personal documents.

Keyphrases: History, Memory, Latin America, Historical reconstruction, Representativeness, Subaltern experiences, Past, memoria
Urban planning and identity : the evolution of Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel

The Nikolaiviertel neighborhood in the heart of Berlin is considered the birthplace of the city going back to the 13th century. Despite its medieval charm, the quarter was only built in the 1980s. It was conceived as a means of rooting the East German identity in the past to differentiate itself culturally from its western neighbor during a time of détente and rapprochement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Berlin has changed enormously since the construction of the Nikolaiviertel: the once-divided city is now the reunified capital of one of the most powerful nations in the world. So how important is the Nikolaiviertel today, a neighborhood built to strengthen East Germany’s identity? This study posits that the quarter is more important than its reputation as a simple kitsch tourist site suggests. By studying its roles in contemporary Berlin, this research shows that the Nikolaiviertel is significant for Berlin’s place identity by manifesting a multiplicity of identities intrinsic to Berlin, i.e. a local Berliner identity, a national East German identity and a supranational European identity.

Keyphrases: Nikolaiviertel, Berlin, Germany, Urbanism, Urban identity, Urban planning, Old town
Le mouvement dans le langage : une représentation littéraire de l'indicible

This master’s thesis explores the narratives poetics of what in French is called the indicible – a noun that, in English translation, hovers between the “unsayable” (i.e., that for which there is no precise or prehensible language) and the “unspeakable” (i.e.; that which concerns affects that are not easily expressed). As a thematic or affective content that slides between the inexpressible and unexpressed, the indicible generates various literary architectures of indirect story-telling. The goal of this thesis is to illuminate these innovative signifying structures. Accordingly, the analytical project that unfolds here is a necessary movement beyond and beneath the literal thematics of the texts. Within a range of possible interpretations, the text will reveal something of its original conception, its traumatic mark or primal scene. Language as an artistic medium is the essential focus of this work – language, or discourse, as a matrix informed by Jacques Derrida’s model of Différance is, above all, a theory of the movement of narrative or expository language in time. The very movement of discourse around a thematic project – that of bearing witness, of conceptualizing desire, or of mapping identity – is itself generative of the unsayable. Ironically, language is at once the matrix of representation’s limits and incapacities, and the medium of its unveiling and illumination. This mémoire explores three distinct narrative examples of the unsayable by way of three radically different texts : trauma and its temporalities (W, of the memory of childhood, by George Perec), the image-structure of the affects (Froth on the Daydream, by Boris Vian), and the gendered metamorphosis of the self (Orlando: a biography, by Virginia Woolf). Although these narratives vary in form, subject, and thematic content, they collectively dismantle the linear sequence of events and the familiar contours of space; they deconstruct the referential certainties of language; and they point to the limitations of traditional narrative codes in the encounter with reality and the real.

Keyphrases: indicible, trauma, affect, corps, Perec, Vian, Woolf, comparative literature, unspeakable, language, movement, trauma, affects, gender, bodies, pluralism
Escritura migrante latinoamericana : por la construcción de una identidad latino-quebequense.

This work analyzes the dynamics of the cultural contact between Québec and Latin America in order to study the production and development of a Latin-Quebecer identity based on the processes of reconfiguration of identity. Likewise, it studies how literary texts of Latin-American origin produced in Quebec present and intertwine the cultural elements of these two groups, in dialogue with existing analyses of migrant writing (Moisan, 2008; Dupuis, 2006; Chartier, 2002). Therefore, individualized analyses of the three works of our corpus focus on distinct issues relating to migrant writing. First, in the short story “El país de los hiperbóreos” by Roberto Angulo (2015), we analyze how characters were created to address processes of identity formation (Acha, 1996), alterity and the sense of a double belonging (Bhabha, 2007). Second, in the Gerardo Ferro’s short story “Côte-des-Neiges” we focus on how space is represented, and its correlation to the development of the migrant’s identity, in dialogue with the concepts of chronotope (Bajtín, 1989), habitable place (Harel, 2005) and social space (Bourdieu, 1994). Lastly, with Mauricio Segura’s novel Côte-des-Nègres (2003), we draw on theories of the novel (Eikhenbaum, 1965), transculturation (Rama, 2004) and interstitial spaces (Bhabha, 2007), to focus on processes of rupture and negotiation in Quebec society.  This research project aims to outline some dynamics of cultural contact that favor or obstruct the processes of reconfiguring the identities of the Latin-American migrant population in Quebec.

Keyphrases: transculturation, Roberto Angulo, Gerardo Ferro, Mauricio Segura, Cultural contact, Subjectivity, Alterity, Space
Trauma, hybridity, and creolization in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, eyes, memory and The dew breaker

Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) tells the story of Sophie Caco, a young Haitian girl who moves from Croix-Des-Rosets, Haiti, to New York City to reunite with Martine, her birth mother. Her coming-of-age-narrative becomes an exploration of cultural displacement, political violence, and intergenerational sexual abuse. The Dew Breaker (2004), a novel as short stories, recounts the tales of different characters whose lives intersect under the Haitian regimes of both François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. The text explores a multiplicity of perspectives representing the long-term effects of political terror on a host of characters. At their center are Ka Bienaimé, a young Haitian-American woman, who has idealized her father, whom she has perceived as a victim of the Duvalier regime, and her father, a Haitian immigrant hiding his past as a dew breaker, a Tonton Macoute, working as a violent enforcer of the dictatorship. Both novels depict the psychological, interpersonal, and cultural damage caused by the violence of an authoritarian regime. In my thesis, I investigate how Danticat uses the characters of Sophie and Ka to interrogate questions related to trauma and emotional betrayal. My study argues that in these texts the author creates a space where notions of hybridity and creolization mingle and give birth to new forms of discourse. More particularly, I provide an account of how the Creole language helps the reader to "come to a better understanding of the cultural, physical, and the historical realities of Haiti" (Sarthou 20). In acknowledging the traumatic experiences of their past as part of themselves, Danticat’s characters exercise agency by choosing to address the past. I will thus divide my thesis in three chapters. In Chapter One, I explore hybridity and creolized language as a space to articulate new forms of identity. In my second chapter, I examine how the author uses Breath, Eyes, Memory to reformulate memory and reclaim tradition. In Chapter Three, I analyze how The Dew Breaker interweaves explorations of violence, remembrance, and forgiveness to interrogate the potential for emotional healing.

Keyphrases: Violence, Post-colonial, Trauma, Postcolonial, Creole, Identity
Teatro religioso en el siglo XVI : encuentro cultural entre Japón y el mundo ibérico

This thesis explores a topic attributed to the field of theatre studies. Its purpose is to deepen the knowledge concerning the evangelization theater of the 16th century that developed in Japan after the arrival of Jesuits in 1549, in order to better grasp the scope and the elements that define it. Firstly, this type of dramatic art is studied within the context of the European religious theatre of the 16th century and in relation to the New Spain evangelization theater. Then, considering the investigations of Bourdon, Leims, Rubiera and Ruiz-de-Medina and after analysis of the four main collections of Jesuit letters in Japan, we dedicate our research to the only work, of those four, written entirely in Castilian: Cartas que los padres y hermanos de la Compañía de Jesús que andan en los reinos del Japón escribieron a los de la misma Compañía, desde el año de 1549 hasta el de 1571 (Alcalá, 1575), with the purpose of extracting and analysing all relevant information related to evangelisation dramatic art . In addition, we make a comparison of the main segment of epistolary text concerning this theatre (De una [carta] del hermano Juan Fernández, de Bungo para los padres y hermanos de la Compañía de Jesús, a ocho de octubre de mil y quinientos y sesenta y uno), which is identifiable in the four main correspondence collections mentioned above, in order to confirm possible content discrepancies.  The results of this research allow to update the available information related to Japanese missionary theatre of the 16th century, as well as to identify potential new study paths primarily through analysis of the critical edition of Ruiz-de-Medina and the missive collection from Évora (1598).

Keyphrases: evangelization theater, Japan, Iberian Peninsula, 16th century, Jesuits, Japón
Intermédialité, matérialité du réel et articulation du corps dans l'oeuvre House of leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski

It took Mark Z. Danielewski over ten years to publish the final version of his novel House of Leaves. Ten years of reflection, research, questioning, writing and rewriting. Quickly becoming a bestseller, House of Leaves also caused a sensation in the literary field, arousing together wonder, concern and cogitation. While the novel features a relatively simple story that has been used repeatedly in the literature – the adventure of an American family moving into a nightmarish house with varying proportions – it surprises with regards to both its text formatting and its content. A multiplicity of typographies, an infinite number of footnotes, upside-down texts, blank pages followed by chaotic and illegible sections, coloured or striped words, a plurality of languages, photographs, drawings, models etc. : Danielewski ultimately transcends the rules of literature. A true and unique masterpiece, House of Leaves is an artwork in its own field of literature and stands out for its innovative presentation and extreme originality. In the context of this thesis, I study three main aspects: the architectural structure of the book, the intertextuality and intermediality in the manuscript and the notions of genres and gender. I firstly analyze the external and internal structure of the book and attempt to understand why Danielewski totally deconstructs the basic rules of architecture. Besides, I examine the link between the evolution of the Navidson family’s house and the psychology of the characters. Then, I evaluate the role of the founding myths and the various use of languages within the novel. Why does the author attach so much importance to myths? Secondly, I put into perspective the intertextual and intermedial aspects of the novel. Finally, I try to apprehend which literary genre does the novel belongs to, and I reflect upon the role of gender in the narrative. Is it a novel? A play? A movie script? Is it a poem? Or a combination of genres? Furthermore, how to define gender and why Danielewski, normally so innovative, is traditional in the hierarchical presentation of the masculine and feminine gender in his work?

Keyphrases: Architecture, structure, littérature, concept, intermédialité, intertextualité, genre, Gender, limits, literature, philosophy, poetic, space, myths, mythology, languages, intermediality, intertextuality
Andreas Hofer : the modernization and Europeanization of the Tyrolean national myth

Since the European refugee and migrant crisis began in January 2015, nationalism has grown in popularity again across Europe. The number of nationalist parties and anti- migrant movements have increased to a point where there is once again a far-right movement, the Alternativ für Deutschland, in Germany; something thought impossible until recently. The EU itself is facing an identity crisis, as identified by Thierry Chopin of the Robert-Schuman Foundation and Gérard Bouchard of the Jacques-Delors Institute. Both scholars have argued that, instead of creating new national myths to bolster its political support, the EU should exploit existing ones, and indicated that they might already be doing so. Still, the extant literature does not explain how this mythological reframing influences local, mediated discourses and policies. Therefore, the Euroregion of Tyrol- South-Tyrol-Trentino’s Andreas Hofer mythology and its impacts are still strong candidates for study. Indeed, Hofer, who was called the “rebel of the Alps” during the Napoleonic wars, has always enjoyed high popularity in both Tyrol and South-Tyrol in Italy, where his name is on street signs, hotels, and the many statues dedicated to him. Since 1984, Hofer mythology shifted in ways that challenged its traditional narratives. This shift was accomplished, in part, by newspaper articles covering the myth and its various manifestations (e.g., museums, cultural events, and other celebrations). Therefore, the current study traces the myth’s evolution back to Austria’s entry into the EU in 1995 to demonstrate that this folk-hero mythology underwent three stages of development: 1) Modernization, where the myth took on new forms to fit its current local contexts; 2) consolidation, where this new Hofer-imagery coalesced during the rebellion’s 200th-year celebrations in 2009, and, finally; 3) Europeanization. We conclude that, in this final stage, contrary to popular scholarly belief, Hofer and his mythology are still very salient topics and political tools in, not only the Euroregion, but now, also across the whole of Europe.

Keyphrases: Europe, mythe national, Andreas Hofer, Nationalism, National myth, EU, Evolution, Austria
La chair, entre immanence et transcendance : lecture du corps chez J.-K. Huysmans et Georges Bernanos

This thesis explores the question of the body, where Michel Henry’s phenomenology of the flesh and Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety are articulated by an analysis of J.K. Huysmans’ En Route (1895) and George Bernanos’ Sous le soleil de Satan (1926). The choice of fiction to render the mystery of God "perceptible"- to give God shape and form, flesh and substance - through fictional characters is fully in line with the Christian belief in the Incarnation, as Christianity is indeed a religion characterized by the incarnation of eternal and absolute realities in the relative and the contingent.  The theoretical framework of the philosophy of the flesh conceptualized in Michel Henry’s Incarnation (2000) will serve as our principal theoretical framework for thinking about the relationship that the body maintains with immanence and transcendence; that is to say, the institutions of self-affection and hetero-affection. In the second chapter, we will evaluate Henry’s reclaiming of Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety in Incarnation. In addition to the dialogue between these two philosophers of pathetic subjectivity, the phenomenological thought of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-François Lavigne will allow us to test Henry’s principal thesis of absolute immanence. This research is at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and theology.

Keyphrases: Religion, Theology, Christianity, Immanence, Transcendence, Flesh, Hetero-affection, Self-affection, Body, Phenomenology