The Imaginary Land in XXth century narrative french literature

PhD thesis, directed by Marc Dambre. February, 15th, 2006 · Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle · Members of the jury: Yves Baudelle (Lille III), Rachel Bouvet (UQÀM), Marc Dambre (Paris III), Philippe Hamon (Paris III) and Pierre Jourde (Grenoble III). 523 pages.

From Atlantis to Balkhyrie, all the way through Liliput, we survey, in our reader’s life, several countries that are not accounted for by any maps. In our memory, all those imaginary lands form a distinct territory that subsumes the diversity of their cultural and temporal idiosyncrasies, as it does for their disparate vocations and their various contextual meanings. However, the imaginary land, because it transcends generic and chronological borders, has a tendency to evade categorial acknowledgement.This work intends to understand its contemporary existence, which is as indeniable as it is problematic, by analysing the theoretic reasons of its misunderstanding as well as the mecanisms that permits its reading, and ultimately proposing that they result from its fundamental atopy.
> Read a short presentation (french only)

 

Keywords : Imaginary Lands, Imaginary Countries, Atopy, Mimesis, Reading, Literary Manners, Fantasy, Fiction Theory, Space, Strange, Grotesque, Imagination.