À la cheville des temps : la construction du présent dans la littérature narrative française au tournant du XXIe siècle

Cette thèse de doctorat met en lumière les stratégies narratives déployées dans le récit français actuel pour représenter et construire son présent. L’hypothèse principale que cette recherche vérifie est la suivante : la littérature narrative d’aujourd’hui, par le recours à une énonciation entremêlant discours et narration ainsi que par une utilisation critique et pragmatique du passé, réplique au « présentisme » observé par François Hartog, cette perspective sur les temps dont le point d’observation et le point observé sont le présent. Les écrivains contemporains mettent en place un régime de temporalités où passé et avenir sont coordonnés au présent pour pacifier le rapport entre les trois catégories temporelles et faire apparaître un présent qui, sinon, demeure narrativement insaisissable ou soumis à l’autorité d’un passé ou d’un avenir qui dicte ses actions. En distinguant leurs textes du genre romanesque et du mode narratif qui le compose, Pierre Bergounioux, François Bon, Olivier Cadiot, Chloé Delaume, Annie Ernaux, Jean Echenoz et Olivier Rolin, entre autres, s’inscrivent dans la tradition énonciative du récit, ici entendu comme genre littéraire où l’énonciation et le texte en formation sont à eux-mêmes leur propre intrigue. Le sujet d’énonciation du récit contemporain cherche à élucider son rapport au temps en ayant recours à des scènes énonciatives qui ont à voir avec l’enquête et l’interlocution, de manière à ce que d’une anamnèse personnelle et intellectuelle, de même que de la confrontation d’une mémoire avec son récit jaillissent les caractéristiques d’une expérience du présent. Or, une des caractéristiques du présent expérimenté par le sujet contemporain semble être une résistance à la narration et au récit, rendant alors difficile sa saisie littéraire. Cette opposition au récit est investie par des écrivains qui ont recours, pour donner à voir l’immédiateté du présent, à la note et au journal, de même qu’à des genres littéraires qui mettent en échec la narration, notamment la poésie. En dépit de leurs efforts énonciatifs pour extraire le présent de l’opération qui le transforme en passé, ces écrivains font tout de même l’expérience répétée de la disparition immédiate du présent et de leur incapacité à énoncer littérairement un sentiment du présent. Le seul moyen d’en donner un aperçu reste alors peut-être de chercher à construire le présent à partir du constat répété de l’impossibilité d’un tel accomplissement.

The Wolf and the Whale: aesthetic relationships between electroacoustic music and poetry inspired by the Canadian landscape

La version intégrale de cette thèse est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

The national preceptor, or, Selections in prose and poetry ... /

"Consisting of narrative, descriptive, argumentative, didactic, pathetic, and humorous pieces ... calculated to improve the scholar in reading and speaking ... designed for the use of schools and academies."

Female Exiles in Language: Reading for New Poetic Subjects in Modern and Contemporary Feminist Experimental Poetry

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Eden in the age of the fifth sun: The narrative work of Homero Aridjis

Homero Aridjis (b. 1940) is a major Mexican poet, novelist, essayist and ecological activist whose prolific body of work, ranging over forty years and including more than eleven volumes of poetry and thirteen novels, has yet to be studied as a coherent literary corpus in the context of recent Latin American fiction. The purpose of this dissertation was to analyze the narrative works of this author as both illustrative of the changes that have occurred in Latin American fiction since the 1960s when it first burst onto the world scene, as well as to study the uniqueness of this particular author's view of literature as it relates to historical discourse, apocalypticism. and social commitment. ^ Research showed that in the case of the narrative style of Aridjis, major trends in the contemporary Latin American novel were present in such a profuse and model manner as to confirm this author's importance as a prime example of what is commonly known as “Post-Boom” fiction. However, beyond the mere presence of literary elements, this study showed that the author's unique approach to narrative style has altered and expanded the aesthetic and thematic possibilities of the contemporary novel. The area where this is most clearly seen is in his experimentation with the historical genre. By manipulating the referential techniques of what has lately come to be known as the “new historical novel,” Aridjis has written both a cycle of purely historical novels and a cycle of futuristic ones that attempt to transcend the temporal limits traditionally imposed by these narrative forms, fusing them into one constant questioning of the nature of love, hate and identity. In this manner, he has developed a “simultaneist” narrative approach where distinct historical and imagined periods, places, people, things, and texts coexist and interact, widening almost to delirium the interpretative possibilities of the work. ^ This unique view of time and narrative, together with the author's political activism and millenarian view of history, make the novels of Homero Aridjis an important element in understanding the continuing development and evolution of Latin American fiction at the turn of the century. ^

Caught in the dance : dream poems, experiential narrative, and the continuity hypothesis

This thesis explores the efficacy of the dream poem as a narrative device and is the outcome of practice-led research. The creative component, a novella, includes significant dreams of the main characters in the form of lyric poetry. The author’s own dream reports are used as source material for the poetry, and are contextualised within a prose fiction framework. Caught in the Dance is an experiment in combining prose with dream poetry and in investigating the experiential power of dreams on the formation of character identity. The exegesis discusses dreaming as an experience and the place of that experience in the context of identity narratives. Central to this discussion is the continuity hypothesis regarding the symbiosis of waking and sleeping life. Fludernik’s theory of experiential narrative is applied to dreaming and to the composition of poetry. This theory moves the emphasis of narrativity from events and the action of telling to ‘grounding narrativity in the representation of experientiality’ (Fludernik 1996:20). Ricoeur’s theories on identity and narrative are also applied to the reading of dreams, and experiences in general. He calls the system through which we ‘read’ life the ‘semantics of action’ (Ricoeur 1991b:28). Fludernik’s and Ricoeur’s approaches build on each other and they are brought together in the context of theories of the self, consciousness, and the processing of experience. Lyric poetry, as a creative product of that same consciousness, is discussed as experienced narrative moment. Furthermore, those moments are identified as defining elements in the identity narratives of characters. By combining the experience of dreaming with the experience imparted through lyric poetry, this thesis argues that the continuity hypothesis serves effectively as a demonstration of the wider narratological importance of experiential narrative.

IT service desk process improvement : a narrative style case study

This paper is a detailed case narrative on how a Faculty of a leading Australian University conducted a rigorous process improvement project, applying fundamental Business Process Management (BPM) concepts. The key goal was to increase the efficiency of the faculty’s service desk. The decrease of available funds due to reducing student numbers and the ever increasing costs associated with service desk prompted this project. The outcomes of the project presented a set of recommendations which leads to organizational innovation having information technology as an enabler for change. The target audience includes general BPM practitioners or academics who are interested in BPM related case studies, and specific organisations who might be interested in conducting BPM within their service desk processes.

The use of narrative text for injury surveillance research : a systematic review

Objective: To summarise the extent to which narrative text fields in administrative health data are used to gather information about the event resulting in presentation to a health care provider for treatment of an injury, and to highlight best practise approaches to conducting narrative text interrogation for injury surveillance purposes.----- Design: Systematic review----- Data sources: Electronic databases searched included CINAHL, Google Scholar, Medline, Proquest, PubMed and PubMed Central.. Snowballing strategies were employed by searching the bibliographies of retrieved references to identify relevant associated articles.----- Selection criteria: Papers were selected if the study used a health-related database and if the study objectives were to a) use text field to identify injury cases or use text fields to extract additional information on injury circumstances not available from coded data or b) use text fields to assess accuracy of coded data fields for injury-related cases or c) describe methods/approaches for extracting injury information from text fields.----- Methods: The papers identified through the search were independently screened by two authors for inclusion, resulting in 41 papers selected for review. Due to heterogeneity between studies metaanalysis was not performed.----- Results: The majority of papers reviewed focused on describing injury epidemiology trends using coded data and text fields to supplement coded data (28 papers), with these studies demonstrating the value of text data for providing more specific information beyond what had been coded to enable case selection or provide circumstantial information. Caveats were expressed in terms of the consistency and completeness of recording of text information resulting in underestimates when using these data. Four coding validation papers were reviewed with these studies showing the utility of text data for validating and checking the accuracy of coded data. Seven studies (9 papers) described methods for interrogating injury text fields for systematic extraction of information, with a combination of manual and semi-automated methods used to refine and develop algorithms for extraction and classification of coded data from text. Quality assurance approaches to assessing the robustness of the methods for extracting text data was only discussed in 8 of the epidemiology papers, and 1 of the coding validation papers. All of the text interrogation methodology papers described systematic approaches to ensuring the quality of the approach.----- Conclusions: Manual review and coding approaches, text search methods, and statistical tools have been utilised to extract data from narrative text and translate it into useable, detailed injury event information. These techniques can and have been applied to administrative datasets to identify specific injury types and add value to previously coded injury datasets. Only a few studies thoroughly described the methods which were used for text mining and less than half of the studies which were reviewed used/described quality assurance methods for ensuring the robustness of the approach. New techniques utilising semi-automated computerised approaches and Bayesian/clustering statistical methods offer the potential to further develop and standardise the analysis of narrative text for injury surveillance.

Reading the environment : narrative constructions of ecological subjectivities in Australian children's literature

Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study, entitled Reading the Environment: Narrative Constructions of Ecological Subjectivities in Australian Children's Literature, examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. Chapter 5 is concerned with how texts highlight the negative consequences of human dominion over the environment, or, in the words of this study, living with ecocatastrophe. Chapter 6 examines representations of restrained anthropocentrism in its contemporary form, that is, sustainability. Chapter 7 examines representations of ecocentrism, a radical position with inherent difficulties of representation. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, I hope to contribute new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.

The aesthetico-ethical subject : another narrative about being ethically responsible

This paper builds on work I presented at the PESA conference in 2007, which moved through both aesthetic and ethical theory to generate a new theory of creative integrity around the issues of autonomy, agency and authenticity. This preliminary theorizing had its origins in my undergraduate ethics classroom where I was confronted with advertising students who resisted the idea of being taught ethics, along with all the philosophical ethical theories traditionally used to do this.

Narrative on the "Compliance and Regulatory Journal" : past, present and future

A conversation over a cup of coffee in late 2005 between Australasian Compliance Institute members Bill Dee and Dr Len Gainsford quickly turned to previously unsuccessful attempts to start a professional journal about compliance. There were two main issue - the difficultly in getting a professional journal off the ground and then sustaining a continuous flow of quality contributions. As practitioners, Bill and Len knew there was a considerable amount of 'thought and practice leadership' compliance material out there but they also knew that such material had not been presented in a relevant and interesting way. A foolish thought arose - could we start a professional journal that practitioners might actually read and use?