Title

Etude des representations d'une humanite resistante dans les romans d'anticipation de la litterature francaise et francophone contemporaine

Date of Completion

January 2012

Keywords

Language, Modern|Literature, Modern

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

"A study of the representations of a resistant humanity in futuristic novels in contemporary French and Francophone literatures" explores a recurrent concern regarding the very limits of what constitutes the human, a concern that inspires most of the futuristic novels in contemporary French-language literature dealing with the radical changes experienced by humankind. Through the study of narratives that feature characters who "long to be written," the objective of this dissertation is to focus mainly on French and Francophone futuristic novels in their dual identity: on the one hand they are based on scientific extrapolations, but on the other hand their stories reactivate ancient mythological representations. Referring to the work of Thomas Pavel in Fictional Worlds, an "external approach" creates a typology of different futuristic novels and focuses on the way the reader builds possible worlds based on the modalities of: knowledge, duty, and possibility itself. An "internal approach" explores how ostensibly dated and historically marked concepts such as the "book of nature" and the "book of the world" are essential to an understanding of the digital age and of the advent of a post-humanity, as well as the dystopias that preceded them, and explains how the metaphors of the book turn the manhunts in futuristic novels into metaphysical manhunts where the act of hunting parallels the act of reading. ^

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