NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Sociétés de fictions

The concept of Societies of fictions developed inside the framework of this Masters thesis aims to explore the mediation at the digital age. The main idea is to think the terms of narrative fiction with the idea that each one may be part of societies. To do so, this analytical work intends to examine various fictions, specifically some examples of the American Gothic in contemporary literature, to extract a significant thought mode. In attempt to analyze how these fictions connect to each other, this piece of research focuses also on the relationship that fiction maintains with technology, including various modes of dissemination. To understand how narrative mechanisms contribute to positioning those fictions relative to each other, they will be approached as if they formed a society of their own. This strategy will lead us to revisit past tradition in a critical vein, and it will also provide an entry into the ways in which and how relations among human, literature and technology are reconfigured through new forms of mediation. By emphasizing the idea that fictions are organized into societies, we are in a better position to describe the paradigm shift from printed to digital media, and to examine how it transforms our relationship to narrative fiction in general. On balance, this discussion on mobility forms and fictions related platforms and their society should ultimately permit a better analyze of individuals who invent and consume these fictions, their social world and their intimate relationship with technology and mediations. As a result, Societies of fictions can become a key element to understand our relationship with the virtualization of our social universe. Between societies of fictions and human societies, a substantial connection can be drawn in the form of a co-evolutionary process. The main works studied and cited will be those of the American novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, more specifically Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms. The television serial drama Twin Peaks, which aired on the ABC channel in 1990 and was directed by David Lynch, will also be discussed, as well as a John Cheever’s short story, The Enormous Radio, originally published in 1947 in The New Yorker.

Keyphrases: fiction, flux, Society, fiction, mediation, slip, platform, network, flow, gothic, intimate
Diaspora arménienne de Montréal : comparaison intergénérationnelle du contenu des imaginaires nationaux et des sources de (re)production culturelle

The Armenian genocide of 1915 has had substantial identity impacts on different generations of Armenians in the diaspora, creating, for diasporic Armenian communities, a responsibility to perpetuate the traumatic collective memory. However, differences can be observed between these generations in the definition of Armenianness and in the identity supplies. Thus, our research question seeks to understand how the content of the national imaginary and the sources of cultural (re)production change between the second, third and fourth generations of Armenians settled in Montreal. The aim of the present study is to combine the emerging scientific literature on diasporic nationalism, as well as the role of cyberspace. Through interviews with Armenians – exiled since the Armenian genocide of 1915 and settled in Montreal – we will show, firstly, how the content of the national imaginary changes from a traditional identity to a symbolic one. Secondly, we will demonstrate how the sources of cultural (re)production are transformed by the transition from traditional sources to digital ones with the advent of cyberspace.

Keyphrases: Imaginaire national, Genocide, Armenians, Nation and diaspora, Diasporic identity, National imaginary, Collective memory, Recognition, Cultural (re)production, Cyberspace
La confessionnalisation de l'aide canadienne au développement

Several indicators suggest that Canadian foreign policy and the Official Development Assistance (ODA) have been remodeled significantly during the last decade. Several of these changes coincide with the arrival of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Of these, it seems that some religious non-governmental organizations (RNGO) in partnership with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) are favored in their federal funding.     The objective of this thesis is twofold; first, to quantify the trend in the allocation of funds to the RNGO. The second objective is to explain the reasons for this shift in the orientation of Canadian ODA. The research hypothesis is that the religious aspect of the ideology of the Harper cabinet is a strong element of its strategic culture that can influence the behavior and decisions facing the management of its ODA. This thesis, using an empirical approach, shows that institutionalism theories typically used in the studies of ODA do capture adequately the observed phenomenon. This thesis solves in a novel way, this theoretical gap by using the concept of strategic culture and constructivist approaches.

Keyphrases: Canada, Harper, ONG, Religion, CIDA, Constructivism, Strategic culture, NGO, ODA, Proselytism
L’ironie à l’égard de la ruse féminine dans le Roman de Silence et son contexte manuscrit

  The feminine wiles topic is part of a series of motifs found in medieval narrative literature that bring to light a misogynistic ideologie. Iterations of such motifs are abundant in the Roman de Silence and in the fabliaux also copied in the Nottingham manuscript. Because of the prominent role played by cross-dressing in the narrative of the Roman de Silence, this text has been the subject of numerous studies grounded in the Gender Studies field. However, the cross-dressing carried out or orchestrated by feminine characters is part of a larger ensemble of narrative motifs all comprised in the notion of feminine wiles. Many comments about this topic are found in the corpus, originating both from narrators and from characters. Yet those comments, who may at first sound disapproving, sometimes highlight the power of feminine wiles. Moreover, from a narratological point of view, the success or failure of those wiles, in a corpus where the tone is often didactic, have been examined as to assess if they must be considered examples or counterexamples. The motifs regarding the feminine wiles were also studied in comparison with the hypotexts they evoked. Furthermore, we postulated an interreadability between texts all copied in the same manuscript. That way it was possible to determine to what extent the corpus defused those motifs, thus often creating ironic situations which warned the reader not to venture in those texts too gullibly, and to be watchful of irony either stemming from the narrative or from the enunciation.

Keyphrases: Roman de Silence, fabliaux, Merlin, irony, medieval literature, pragmatics, intertextuality, feminine wiles, cross-dressing
Étude du champ magnétique interne de deux matériaux magnétiques et d'un supraconducteur sans symétrie d'inversion

This thesis is divided in three sections. The first section presents the results from a small angle neutron scattering (SANS) investigation of the formation of bound magnetic polarons in the ferromagnet EuB6. While the magnetic nature of the system was observed below 15K, we could not resolve the q dependent signature of the polarons, thus putting a lower limit of 100\AA to the coherence length of the phenomenon (xi_{Lower}).    Secondly, we investigated the non-centrosymmetric superconductor LaRhSi3 by muSR. The absence of an internal field below T_c = 2.2 K in ZF-muSR, indicates that the superconducting wave function does not carry an intrinsic magnetic moment. The asymmetry spectrum taken under external magnetic field shows the magnetic signature associated with vortices between H_{c1}(0) and H_{c2}(0), respectively 80 +/- 5 and 169.0 +/- 0.5 G, suggesting the system is weakly type-II.    Finally, the third section presents the zero field muSR study of internal magnetic fields in the organic antiferromagnet NIT-2Py. The temperature dependent oscillating signal in the ZF-muSR spectrum confirms the presence of a long-range magnetic interaction between the molecules. By comparing the measured internal magnetic fields to calculated values based on density fonctional theory calculations, we confirm that half the molecules dimerizes while the other half forms the antiferromagnetic order under the critical temperature (T_c = 1.33 +/- 0.01K). In this antiferromagnetic order, the moments on the magnetic molecules are uniformly aligned along the (1 0 -2) axis. They interact antiferromagnetically along the (0 1 0) axis and ferromagnetically between the [-1 0 2] planes.

Keyphrases: muSR, ZF-muSR, NIT-2Py, Unconventional superconductivity, Non-centrosymmetric, Quantum magnet, Organic magnetism, Neutron diffraction, Ferromagnetism, Antiferromagnetism, LaRhSi3, EuB6, muSR
Éclatement des repères artistiques : la philosophie face à la crise de l'art contemporain

The decline of artistic reference points (which several people associate with the first readymade of Marcel Duchamp) reveals the symptoms of a crisis in art. As the history of art is a representation of what we are, we can infer that the crisis extends far beyond art. However, art has the power to enlighten because it literally illustrates several problems, especially in terms of judgment and reasoning. Without references or common knowledge, could it be that our world is lacking in discernment ? This question is legitimate insofar as everything and anything seem to be elevated into Art in our present context. The cult of individualism seems to be one of the causes of the problem. As observed in the régime de singularité (in the words of art sociologist, Nathalie Heinich) relations in the world of art are becoming more and more conflicted : when asking an artist to justify his own work, rationality necessarily becomes instrumental; it also renders the role of critics and institutions obsolete. This thesis focuses on analyzing, from a philosophical perspective, the various manifestations of the crisis in art and its issues in the world today.

Keyphrases: art, singularité, aesthetic, contemporary, crisis, judgment, meaning, philosophy, rationality, references, singularity
Une approche heuristique pour l’apprentissage de transformations de modèles
complexes à partir d’exemples

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a well-established software engineering paradigm that promotes models as main artifacts in software development and maintenance activities. As several models may be manipulated during the software life-cycle, model transformations (MT) ensure their coherence by automating model generation and update tasks when possible. However, writing model transformations remains a difficult task that requires much knowledge and effort that detract from the benefits brought by the MDE paradigm. To address this issue, much research effort has been directed toward MT automation. Model Transformation by Example (MTBE) is, in this regard, a promising approach. MTBE aims to learn transformation programs starting from a set of source and target model pairs supplied as examples. In this work, we propose a process to learn model transformations from examples. Our process aims to learn complex MT by tackling three observed requirements, namely, context exploration of the source model, source attribute value testing, and complex target attribute derivation. We experimentally evaluate our approach on seven model transformation problems. The learned transformation programs are able to produce perfect target models in three transformation cases, whereas, precision and recall higher than 90% are recorded for the four remaining ones.

Keyphrases: Model transformation learning, Model transformation by example, Model-driven engineering, Search-based software engineering
La nazification de l'Allemagne perçue à travers la presse alsacienne francophone (1933-1939)

At the dawn of 1930s, Alsace shares a troubled past with France and Germany. While the region came again under French rule after the First World War in 1919, Paris has difficulty integrating Alsace in the Republic, because it does not understand that forty years of German control upset the region's life at the political, cultural, religious and linguistic levels. France does not perceive the sense of identity of the population and its will to preserve its values. The Alsatian separatism of the 1920s and the repression of the movement by the French authorities damage the relations between Paris and Strasbourg.  Along with the tension of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler's arrival to power in 1933 in Germany radically modified the situation. The thesis examines how the French-speaking Alsatian press perceived the rise of Nazism in Germany from 1933 to 1939. Did Alsace question its allegiance to France, a country that demonstrated signs of weaknesses, and did not clearly understand Alsace? Or did it prefer a strong and stable Germany? By consulting newspapers of various political and religious orientations, such as Les dernières nouvelles de Strasbourg, Le nouvelliste d'Alsace, Le Lorrain et L'éclair de l'Est, the thesis analyzes the opinion of the Alsatian press on the German events in the 1930s.  The French-speaking press was not in favour returning to the Reich. Nevertheless, the allegiance to France was not as clear as the historiography leads us to believe on this matter. Until March 1938, the French-speaking Alsatian press did not claim particular status, even if it was dissatisfied with the options available, as much on the side of France as on the side of Germany. The region's point of view changed regularly. While Hitler caught everyone's attention in 1933, the unstable political situation in France as well as the choices of the Popular Front are the target for the French-speaking Alsatian press from 1936. It was only when the war seemed inevitable that it lined up behind the French Republic.

Keyphrases: Alsace, France, Alsace, France, Germany, nazism, press
Pensée, politique, totalitarisme : lire Platon avec Hannah Arendt

This study, which concerns the appropriations of Greek Antiquity in the 20th century, proposes to analyze the impacts of the reading of Plato on the development of Hannah Arendt's political and ethical thought. Our approach of this subject is historical and philosophical. First, we will consider the biographical, intellectual and historical background of this reading. The intellectual relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger receive a special attention, since Arendt's Plato is sometimes similar to the heiddeggerian one. We also consider Platonic reception in Germany between the Weimar period and the postwar era : the ideological readings of the Nazi era, and the debate surrounding Plato's status as the forebearer of totalitarianism, as claimed by Karl Popper, darkened Plato's philosophical reputation until the end of 20th century. We find some echoes of this particular intellectual climax in Arendt's treatment of Plato. Second, we will examine the themes and motives of arendtian reading by scrutinizing a selection of Arendt's books, essays, drafts, and notes from the Denktagebuch, and excerpts from the Platonic dialogues that informs her reading. Arendt deconstructs, transforms, distorts and uses these texts in order to show that our tradition of political thought was founded on a contempt for politics that finds its source in Platonic thought. This contempt culminates in Marx's thought and totalitarianism. But Arendt's reflections on thinking, judgment and conscience, and her treatment of Eichmann's case suggests that she sometimes appropriates Plato. Some comparisons with other German Émigrés thinkers who also reads Plato and the Greeks to inform their political thought, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, will enhance our understanding of Arendt's Plato.

Keyphrases: Arendt, Platon, Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Karl Popper, Weimar, Plato, Heidegger, classical tradition, phenomenology, German émigrés, American thought
Suzanne Lilar : configurations d'une image auctoriale

This thesis investigates the difficult positioning of identity in Belgian writer Suzanne Lilar's literary trajectory. The conflict between the writer's art and her need to project an image consistent with her environment is reflected not only in the set-pieces of her literary works, but also in her essays and paratext, and in the way her works were received by the press of the day. The first part of the analysis describes Lilar's position in Belgian literary circles, whose proximity to the mainstream was always threatened by assimilation, and within feminist writings. The second part analyzes the storylines in her fictional and more biographical works. The parallel viewpoints in these works demonstrate that Lilar's aesthetic approach, which is based on the need to legitimize her enterprise, is based mainly on multiple perspectives and forms of expression. The duplication of the plot line in her stories, the mise en abyme of the author's voice, and the constant rewriting illustrate her need to make a place for herself in the literary landscape, but also her mistrust of literary writing. The third part of this research analyzes the ethos and position Lilar constructs through her essays and paratext, upon which she bases her literary and social legitimacy. The final part of the thesis reports on how Lilar's work was received in its day. The image of Lilar propounded by the media positioned her within the literary establishment and also within her own chosen social stratum. The press of the time viewed her as she variously presented herself. This corroborates the hypothesis that Lilar had trouble in fully assuming her role as a writer. Her presentation of herself as being out of step with society − in the trompe-l'oeil manner of her poetics − appears to have been the only way for Lilar to shoulder the displacement essential to her creative work.

Keyphrases: Image, Trompe-l'oeil, Belgian, Identity, Creative displacement, Set-piece, Legitimization, Paratext
L’influence de la distance spatiale et la similarité physique entre une cible et un distracteur saillant sur la composante N2pc

An encephalographic event-related potential (ERP) component known as the N2pc is associated with visual spatial attention deployment. We examined the modulation of the N2pc component in terms of target absence/presence, distance separating two salient items and target/salient distractor similarity. Stimuli were short bars varying only in orientation and colour, where salient items were blue and non-salient filler items were grey. Results demonstrated an increase in N2pc amplitude with an increase in distance separating items as well as an increase in N2pc when salient items were more similar; however no interaction between these two experimental factors was observed. A significant interaction was observed between target absence/presence and target/salient distractor similarity. The findings provide evidence demonstrating a dissociation of neural activity modulated by the distance separating salient items and target/distractor similarity. The results suggest that these modulations of the N2pc cannot be explained via a single mechanism but is modulated by a combination of both top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes.

Keyphrases: N2pc, multiple frame procedure, PRE, distance, visuo-spatial attention, ERP, similarity
Régime d'historicité et historiographie en France et au Québec, 1956-1975. Michel de Certeau, Fernand Dumont et François Furet

Historians don’t write from within a vacuum. Embedded in their present, they adopt or critically assess the projects, utopias and grand narratives of their society. In this thesis, we propose to deepen this sense of temporal embeddedness through the crossed and compared history of the experiences of time of two French historians (Michel de Certeau, François Furet) and one from Quebec (Fernand Dumont). Our goal is two-fold: to begin with, we establish the connections between these experiences during two periods: the turning points of 1960 and 1970. While taking into account the authors’ own contexts, we aim at expanding the scale of analysis to understand the contemporaneity of experiences of time that go beyond national borders. We will then be prepared to define the coordinates of two different régimes d’historicité, which are characterized by different modes of combining future and present.   We build on this by establishing the links between historiography and experiences of time for the purpose of stressing the junctions between the epistemological enunciations and the horizon of expectation of the three authors studied. Focusing more precisely on the different roles they assign the historian, we examine the parallel transformations of their experiences of time and their historiographical practices. The shift from an experience of a progressing History in 1960 to the experience of a blocked history in 1970 considerably influences the status and the place of the historian. As the trends and directions of History become unclear, the historian sees his role marginalized. Whether he unfolds past alternatives or deconstructs teleology and commemorations, he has to keep open the horizons of time. We will see specifically the meaning of this task after May '68, when the possibility of a new society shines at the horizon. Significantly, it is at this moment that the role of historian is decisive in either reproducing dominating narratives or opening his contemporaries’ consciousness to new experiences.

Keyphrases: France, Experience of time, Historiography
Sur un modèle d'érythropoïèse comportant un taux de mortalité dynamique

This thesis addresses erythropoiesis mathematical modeling, which is the process of erythrocytes production and its regulation by erythropeitin. We propose an erythropoiesis model extension which includes aging of mature cells. First, we consider an age-structured model with moving boundary condition, whose dynamics are represented by advection equations. Biologically, the moving boundary condition means that the maximal lifespan varies to account for a constant degraded cells flux. Then, hypotheses are introduced to simplify and transform the model into a system of three delay differential equations for the total population, the hormone concentration and the maximal lifespan. An alternative model composed of two equations with two constant delays is obtained by supposing that the maximal lifespan is constant. Finally, a new model is introduced, which includes an exponential death rate depending on erythrocytes maturity level. A linear stability analysis allows to detect simple and double Hopf bifurcations emerging from variations of the gain in the feedback loop and from parameters associated to the survival function. Numerical simulations also suggest a loss of stability caused by interactions between two linear modes and the existence of a two dimensional torus in the phase space close to the stationary solution.

Keyphrases: Erythropoiesis, Erythrocytes, Age-structured model, Delay differential equations, Survival function, Senescence, Mortality rate, Stability diagram, Hopf bifurcation, Center manifold
Émergence de la websérie au Québec : ses origines et ses influences

This research seeks to illustrate a new genre present on the Web, the webseries. Its goal is to analyse Quebec webseries in order to understand its influences, particularly those of television. In the first chapter, theories of intermediality, remediation and convergence are explained to clarify the actual context of exchanges between media. In the second chapter, a quick historical panorama of quebec webseries is set. Then, four caracteristics of television are explained: watching context, schedule, aesthetics and seriality. In addition, this work demonstrates that those four caracteristics are present in the webseries and it explains how they are developped. Finally, in the last chapter, we analyse webseries to exemplify different existing links between TV shows and webseries.

Keyphrases: Webseries, Web, Seriality, Intermediality