Liano, Thomas Benjamin;
(2022)
Faire avec – Genet Cixous Dustan - Pour une réévaluation négative de l'échec littéraire.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
My dissertation offers a reevaluation of the role of failure in a selection of contemporary French literary works. Dealing with the concept of faire avec (making do with) as a form of inconclusive literary bricolage, it draws link between the queer theorisation that David Caron offers of it and two other concepts that directly influence it: the concept of être-avec (being with) as defined by Jean-Luc Nancy in Être singulier pluriel, and the concept of faire sans (making do without) taken from Adorno’s reevaluation of the negative, in his Negative Dialectics. Drawing on the recent multidisciplinary body of theories around failure, it gives an (obviously non-exhaustive) overview of the variety of ways contemporary French literature creatively makes do with failure. To do so, it provides three independent case studies based on works from Genet, Cixous and Dustan. The first one, focusing on the last novel from Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love), explores the impact on his work of his political attempt to faire avec the Palestinian movements, and to write about it, without doing them violence. The second is centred on three recent books by Hélène Cixous, all part of a project called le “Livre-Que-Je-N’écris-Pas” (the “Book-I-Do-Not-Write”); it deals with the evolution of Cixous ethical positioning towards those close to her, as they are now dying and yet still a central part of her literary work. The third case study focuses on the fourth novel by the HIV positive French writer Guillaume Dustan, Nicolas Pages; it analyses how the discovery of the tritherapies (a then new treatment that strongly reduced the impact of the virus on people living with HIV) forced the narrator, realising suddenly that he will not be dying soon, to make do with the life (vivre avec) he newly got back, and to find something to do with (faire avec) it.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Faire avec – Genet Cixous Dustan - Pour une réévaluation négative de l'échec littéraire |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | French |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10156454 |
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