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L'analyse de la (fausse) polyphonie dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Nancy Huston : pour une poétique de showing au service de l'humanisme noir
Get PDFThe present dissertation offers a study of polyphony in Nancy Huston’s works. Author of novels, essays, plays, literary criticism, and children’s stories, Huston is today one of the most popular and valued francophone writers. As such, she and her texts have become an object of numerous scientific researches. Indeed, there are many articles as well as whole thesis dedicated to her works. However, those studies are limited to analysis of repeating motifs in Huston's novels, such as motherhood, feminism and human body. It is especially surprising given that throughout her works Huston experiments with generic and narrative form. The main aspect of her artistic wander is a multi-voiced narrative. The writer gives the floor to protagonists and in some of her books she goes even further by altogether dismissing the narrator. In consequence reader has to face a tangle of different, and sometimes event contradictory points of view.
This brings to mind a question of how reader can decipher author's point of view, from which neither author nor reader can escape. The above statement brings about another question: should polyphony be read as an attempt to avoid subjectivity and gain the utmost of objectivity or should it be rather seen as a deft argumentative strategy which is engaged by Huston in order to, imperceptibly, make readers see things in the way author wants them to. The aim of the present study is to answer those questions.
Even thought the notion of polyphony is far from being a new one, there is no up to date theory that covers the subject in the field of literature (Mikhail Bakhtin's theory introducing the notion of polyphony to literary studies goes back to 1929, a year when Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics was published). In response to this shortage the present dissertation combines several different methodologies. Thus three different areas of Huston's novels are analysed outlining three chapters of the study.
The focus of the first chapter is an analyse of the characters. It embraces their internal configuration and systems they create together within a text and that are in fact an underframe of each novel. The study of the internal configuration, based on Vincent Jouve's theory of character's effect, shows the bipolar nature of Huston's protagonists that makes their
understanding and interpretation problematic. On one hand the protagonists are repellent because of their immoral behaviour and on the other hand, thanks to their well outlined affective life, they inspire sympathy. The study of systems creadted by the protagonists, shaped by Algirdas Greimas' actantial model, shows that each character has a role to play within a story and is not there to present their individual and independent point of view but to convey, often in an indirect manner, the author's opinions. Moreover, this analyse indicates three great themes that lie behind Huston's works but that are expressed only in an implicit manner. They are conflicts between individuals and themselves, society and absurdity of human condition.
The second chapter approaches the problem of narration and is inspired by works of American and German critics such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, Gregory Currie, Dorrit Cohn, Ansgar Nünning, Edward Branigan and David Bordwell. Three cases of narrative form present in Huston's novels are examined : dramatised novels (novels in which there is no narrator), novels with overt but unreliable narrator and novels with covert narrator. The conclusion of this analyse is that the most polyphonic texts are those in which there is a covered narrator while the texts without narrator, that at the beginning of the study seemed to be the most suitable to carry different points of view, came out to be the least polyphonic. The reason is that when a narrator, being author's spokesperson, is there, even though his voice is hardly audible, the text can bring about different points of view without a high risk of a wrong interpretation. On the other hand, when an author dismisses narrator and leaves reader without a guide but with numerous characters, the novel has to indicate more explicitly author's opinions so that reader does not get lost in a bewilderment of different points of view expressed by characters. In addition the dissertation reviews the definition of narrator and the frontier between the notions of narration, narrator and implied author.
The last chapter argues that divers aesthetic categories used by Huston in her novels, which are mainly comic, tragic, beauty and ugliness introduce into the texts the apparent polyphony (that because of their ambiguous character) and at the same time they indicate the author's point of view. Moreover, they let Huston manipulate reader's aesthetical perception of certain phenomena (ageing, passage of time) and in this manner they let het influence the axiological perception of those issues.
The conclusion that comes out of the research is the effectiveness of polyphonic technique. Polyphony itself comes out to be only an illusion but at the same time this illusion turns out to be a powerful rhetoric strategy, mainly thanks to its implicit character and the fact that it places Huston's novels on the side of showing that liberates them from the heavy
didacticism of telling. Last but not least, the poetics chosen by Huston express her approach towards life and human beings which the research proposes to name "dark humanism". This approach does not ignore human weaknesses and faults but still sees extreme value of men's life
Un Dieu sadique : le rôle de l’image blasphématoire de Dieu dans Dolce agonia de Nancy Huston
Get PDFThe present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston allows the author to describe the sacred element in human life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to the three aspects of the text dependent on the type of God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering; the tone and the appropriation of time var-iations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
La figure du narrateur dans L’Empreinte de l’ange : un narrateur non fiable ?
Get PDFThe present article seeks to analyse the narrator’s role in Nancy Huston’s novel published in 1998, The Mark of the Angel. What is particular about the narrator in question are his cynical opinions that go against Huston’s ethos, emerging from her essays. Instead of being the author’s spokesperson, the narrator is only an element of the novel’s complex structure, which serves to implicitly show the man’s value, among different textual perspectives
The narrator figure in The Mark of the Angel: An unreliable narrator?
Get PDFThe present article seeks to analyse the narrator’s role in Nancy Huston’s novel published in 1998, The Mark of the Angel. What is particular about the narrator in question are his cynical opinions that go against Huston’s ethos, emerging from her essays. Instead of being the author’s spokesperson, the narrator is only an element of the novel’s complex structure, which serves to implicitly show the man’s value, among different textual perspectives
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