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Littératures anglophones

Nature Élément Constitutif
Crédits ECTS 6
Volume horaire total 24

Contenu

This course will explore the intricate relationship between the body, writing and violence in the specific context of the contemporary American novel.
Contemporary criticism’s focus on the corporeal dimension of literary texts calls to mind Freud's theory of sensations, in particular the notion that the body is the locus of a symbolic order which encompasses the linguistic. Conversely, we may wonder whether the body, from which the most complex discursive systems stem, is not itself being erased by the very signs meant to represent it through language. How can we thus account for the body's persistence in the written text?
We will first reflect on the scope of the semantic body/somatic writing chiasmic structure as it appears in the writing of authors who over-expose the body to the point of ruthlessly mutilating it.
We'll then probe the aesthetic and ontological implications of technology as staged in XXth- and XXIst-century American fiction, and ponder the role of art and literature in a world threatened by technologically-driven abstraction.
To what extent do the body, technology and language make up a single coherent, theoretical system, and how does our corpus explore how crises in one dimension of this conceptual complex ripple through the whole?
Through an in-depth analysis of the corpus, we'll probe the multifaceted dimension of the interrelatedness of writing and the body as well as the paradoxical part played by technology, which constrains the human, even as it emancipates.