Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Poets – Biography'

T’ao Yüan-ming (365-427 A.D.) remains China's greatest medieval poet. While no adequate biographical sources exist, the poet’s own work presents the most intimate picture of T’ao Yüan-ming himself, in addition to reflecting various aspects of his historical and cultural era. This essay explores T’ao Yüan-ming’s character as reflected in his verse. When poised against a broader historical and cultural background, T’ao Yüan-ming’s poetry goes furthest in revealing the poet as an individual as well as a product of his times.
Master of Arts

This thesis examines the life and poetry collection of the woman poet Li Shuyi (1817--?) within the context of women's literary culture in late imperial China. In particular, the textuality of Li Shuyi's poetry collection Shuyinglou mingshu baiyong (One Hundred Poems from Shuying Tower on Famous Women) forms the centre of critical analysis, which aims to articulate her gendered intervention into representations of women's image in poetry. The thesis is organized into three interconnected sections: the reconstruction of Li Shuyi's life in order to provide a context to articulate her relationship to writing, a reading of Li Shuyi's self-preface to discuss her motivation to write, and critical analysis of poems according to the three thematic categories of "beauty, talent, and qing ." The thesis demonstrates how a woman author's self-perception leads to her becoming a conscious writing subject, and how this self-realization then motivates her to produce a gendered writing project.

This thesis examines the life and work of John Randal Bradburne (1921-1979), poet, mystic, musician, cenobite, sometime soldier, pilgrim and wanderer. His religious experiences, particularly, gave rise to a vast corpus of verse, virtually all of it as yet unpublished. This study provides a brief overview of his life, and a critical and textual introduction to a sample selection of poems entitled Bradburne 's Assays. The biography has been compiled from published and unpublished sources, as well as from personal interviews and correspondence with Bradburne's friends, relatives and associates in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom. Chief among these are two unpublished biographies by Judith, Countess of List owe I. Bradburne's extant corpus consists of over five thousand titled pieces of verse, ranging from brieflyrics to verses hundreds of pages long. The forty-seven poems comprising Bradburne 's Assays, published here for the first time, were selected and arranged by Bradburne himself in a single sequence. A unique collection in his corpus, they are unified by their common sonnet form and their contemplative approach to secular and religious experiences. An accurate reading text of this set of poems, transcribed from Bradburne's typescripts, currently held at Holyhead in Wales, is provided. These typescripts have been electronically scanned and are presented in the Appendix. Editorial intrusion, which has been kept to a minimum, is recorded in the critical apparatus beneath the text of the poems. Since all the poems in this ed ition are presented here for the first time, each is accompanied by detailed commentary on their form and content. Where necessary, interpretations of obscure passages have been suggested. A general index to the Introduction and Commentary is supplied, along with indexes of first lines and titles of the poems. It is hoped that this thesis will stimulate further study of the life and work of a unique and intriguing figure.

This thesis examines the life and poetry of the woman poet Gu Taiqing (1799-1877) within the context of a community of gentry women in mid-nineteenth century Beijing. This group of women was a "community" in the sense that their contact, sociability, friendship and poetry writing were meaningfully intertwined in their lives. The thesis is divided into three interconnected chapters. Two separate biographical accounts of Gu Taiqing's life---one centered around the relationship with her husband, and the second around her relationship with her female friends---are reconstructed in the first chapter. This biographical chapter underlines the importance of situating Gu in the women's community to understand her life and poetry. The second is comprised of a reconstruction of this women's community, delineating its members and distinctive features. In the third chapter, a close-reading of Gu's poems in relation to the women's community focuses on the themes of xian (leisure), parting, and friendship. This chapter shows how each of these themes are represented by Gu and how her representations are closely related to the experiences of this women's group.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Part 1 of this thesis comprises a biography which, for the first time, places Marion Angus within her historical, family and social context. A version of this was published as the introduction to my edited collection The Singin Lass: Selected Work of Marion Angus (Polygon, 2006). Assumptions made about the poet's activities and attitudes derive from critical reading of archival material: her published 'diaries', letters and prose, as well as her poetry. The appraisal of her work places it within literary contexts. The development of her linguistic awareness of the Scots language is traced and the extent of her commitment to it noted. I conclude that assessment of her work has frequently been affected by erroneous judgements about her lifestyle and that the poetry, which has greater depth than it sometimes is given credit for, illuminates her struggle rather than defines her character. Her strength and resilience, as well as her contribution to Scots literature, should be respected and admired. Part II comprises three extracts from Blackthorn, a novel based on aspects of the life and work of Marion Angus. My starting point was the marked contrast between her earlier prose and her later poetry. This, I believe, reflects an actual family crisis which is central to my narrative. The extracts presented here (dated 1900, 1930 and 1945-46) present a credible alternative to inaccurate assumptions which were made about her life. I explore two actual significant relationships in her life: with a sister who becomes wholly dependent on her, and with a younger friend who looks after her in her final year. In the absence of any firm evidence of lovers, I speculate on other relationships.

The first section of this PhD submission is a creative thesis, the aim of which is to write an original poetry collection which belongs to the sub-genre of the poetic biography. The poetry collection, entitled The Tallest Man in Australia, details the capture and imprisonment of John Boyle O'Reilly, a 19th Century Fenian rebel who spent nine months in the penal colony of Western Australia before escaping to America. My critical thesis aims to validate the idea that in the past twenty years a new sub-genre of biography has emerged, one linked to the fictional biography yet quite distinct from it. Examples deal with the life of an historic individual but are written in poetic form. Analysis of this sub-genre, which will be referred to as 'the poetic biography', will focus on four key texts: David Constantine's Caspar Hauser (1994), Maurice Manning's A Companion for Owls (2004), Linda France's The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club (2005) and Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Each of the four texts has been chosen as an example of a slightly differing approach to the same form, providing enough similarity to be used as evidence for the poetic biography's existence as a separate entity from both poetry and biography, but with enough stylistic differences to show the potential of the sub-genre.

This study has as main objective to analyze the biography of William Blake: dreamed and researched by Alexander Gilchrist and finished by his wife Anne Gilchrist and by the painter and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Considered a mad genius that talked to spirits by a great part of his contemporaries, William Blake became known only after his death, in 1827, for his works as a poet, painter and engraver. In a first moment, a short biography of Alexander Gilchristis presented, as well as of the others involved in the writing of the biography Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus. In the second chapter, an analysis is conducted on what Gilchrist wrote about Blake s technical side and his educational background. The third chapter is about the visionary Blake, and how these episodes are portrayed in the Gilchrist s biography. In the last chapter, a parallelis traced between what Alexander Gilchrist wrote in his biography and what five authors before him wrote on Blake. These authors are: Cunningham, J. T. Smith, Malkin, Tatham and Crabb Robinson. In this way, we intend to reach a hypothesis on which authors were used as sources by Gilchrist to write Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus.
Esse trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a primeira biografia escrita sobre William Blake, biografia esta sonhada e pesquisada por Alexander Gilchrist e finalizada por sua esposa Anne Gilchrist e pelo pintor e também escritor Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Considerado um gênio louco que falava com os espíritos por grande parte de seus contemporâneos, é apenas após sua morte, em 1827, que William Blake passa a ser reconhecido por suas obras como poeta, pintor e gravurista. Em um primeiro momento, é apresentada uma curta biografia de Alexander Gilchrist e das pessoas que colaboraram com a escrita da biografia Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus. No segundo capítulo, é feita uma análisedo que Gilchrist escreveu sobre o lado técnico de Blake, sua educação e seus estudos. O terceiro capítulo trata do Blake visionário, e como estes episódios são retratados na biografia em questão. Já o último capítulo faz um comparativo entre o que Gilchrist escreve de Blake com o que pode ser encontrado nos autores anteriores a ele, como Cunningham, J. T. Smith, Malkin, Tatham e Crabb Robinson, chegando assim a uma hipótese de quais os autores acima citados serviram como fontes para a escrita de Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus.

Composers Libby Larsen and Dominick Argento have each written song cycles based on the texts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese, for soprano and chamber orchestra, is a setting of six of the forty-four poems from Browning's amatory sequence of the same name. Argento's Casa Guidi, for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, is a setting of excerpts from letters written by Browning, primarily to her sister Henrietta, during her years in Florence. This study examines the two composers' images of Browning, and how those images are portrayed through choice of text and musical setting. The image of Browning depicted in Larsen's cycle is that of a woman who moves from a fear of love to an acceptance and embracing of it. The love that she comes to know is a love that recognizes the necessity of moving on in spite of unresolved issues. This image was gleaned from Browning's sonnets by Larsen and soprano Arleen Auger, who worked closely together to create a cycle that would speak of mature love, in contrast to the youthful love in Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben. Three of the six sonnets in the cycle are analyzed for Larsen's use of compositional devices that reinforce the themes of the recognition and acceptance of love and of trust in non-resolution. The texts chosen by Argento were based on his desire to depict the feminine and vulnerable aspects of Browning during her years in Florence. Although the letter excerpts are not arranged in chronological order, they accurately reveal a woman who delighted in her home and family. The last three of the five songs are examined to show how Argento's careful text setting and use of orchestral color and motives enhance Browning's words and the overall mood of the letters.

Cette thèse est une entreprise lacanienne interdisciplinaire pour aborder la représentation de l'enfance dans The Prelude de William Wordsworth et certaines peintures de William Adolphe Bouguereau. L'enfance est une image chargée de romance, souvent associée à la glorification nostalgique de l'enfance ou à une fixation sur les enfants en tant qu'incarnations de la beauté et de la sauvagerie par excellence. Wordsworth et Bouguereau, cependant, en tant que deux romantiques canoniques, montrent que ces lectures sont intenables, car les représentations de l'enfance dans leurs œuvres d'art sont un espace sur lequel ils ont projeté leur propre intérieur en tant qu'adultes, qu'il s'agisse de sentiments agréables, tels que le sentiment d'unité, le réconfort et l'attachement ou des sentiments désagréables, tels que l'anxiété, le sentiment de perte et le deuil. L'enfance a des modalités variées dans la littérature et la peinture romantiques, mais une approche similaire de cette image est l'un des dénominateurs communs entre ces deux artistes, dont l'étude en dit long sur les époques historiques dans lesquelles ils vivaient, ainsi que leurs réponses à leur milieux Cette étude démêle également la masse des diverses idéologies de l'enfance qui dominent le 19e siècle en tant que « siècle de l'enfant, » un siècle au cours duquel artistes et militants ont écrit « pour » et/ou « sur » les enfants à des fins pédagogiques, divertissantes, idéologiques, révélatrices, historiques. Alors que Wordsworth a écrit « sur » l'enfance comme une métaphore pour approfondir les intersections psychologiques de l'enfance et de l'âge adulte, Bouguereau a pris la même position dans la majorité de ses peintures, mais il est tombé dans l'écueil de confondre « pour » et « sur » les enfants dans quelques-unes de ses peintures « misérabilistes, » qui sont aujourd'hui accusées à juste titre de romancer la misère des enfants. Cette catégorie de ses peintures n'a certainement pas considérée dans cette étude. Compte tenu de notre connaissance au XXIe siècle de l'inconscient et de ses liens avec les souvenirs d'enfance, il est révélateur de cartographier les représentations nuancées de l'enfance dans The Prelude de Wordsworth et les peintures de Bouguereau à la lumière de la psychanalyse de Lacan. D'une part, Lacan, dont la thèse de doctorat était La psychose paranoïaque et son rapport à la personnalité (1932), a consacré une bonne partie de ses analyses aux paradigmes psychiques formés dans l'enfance qui définissent nos personnalités d'adultes. Il a transformé les théories trépidantes de Freud sur l'inconscient en données formalistes et structurées fondées sur les subtilités du langage. Textuel, le modèle de Lacan nous propose une approche qui prend comme point de départ les spécificités rhétoriques et sémantiques d'un texte, d'une peinture ou d'une poésie, pour mettre en évidence les opérations psychiques en jeu, ce que Peter Brooks appelle les « zones de jeu » d'un texte. La psychanalyse appliquée lacanienne peut supprimer les explications téléologiques que la plupart des approches psychanalytiques cherchent à trouver, car elle soulève des arguments plutôt que de les fermer. Avec ces considérations, cette étude vise à démêler les opérations psychiques encapsulées dans les représentations de l'enfance dans The Prelude de Wordsworth et les peintures de Bouguereau, qui s'articulent, entre autres, sur le « corps morcelé » lacanien, ces images de la désunion, de la désincarnation, de l'émasculation, ainsi que de la gestalt, qui a à voir avec l'unité et la plénitude. Ces deux concepts sont des éléments essentiels d'une « libre association » psychanalytique, car tandis que le premier signale la réalisation de la construction illusoire du moi d'un sujet, la seconde est une construction imaginaire qui a des effets constitutifs et formateurs sur l'organisme ainsi que sur la croissance psychologie des humains
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary Lacanian venture to address childhood representations in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude and some of William Adolphe Bouguereau’s paintings. Childhood is a romantically-charged image, often associated with the nostalgic glorification of childhood or with a fixation on children as the embodiments of quintessential beauty and savageness. Wordsworth and Bouguereau, however, as two canonical Romantics, prove these readings untenable, for childhood representations in their artworks is a space onto which they have projected their own innermost as adults, be it pleasant feelings, such as sense of unity, reassurance, and attachment, or unpleasant feelings, such as anxiety, sense of loss, and mourning. Childhood has variegated modalities in Romantic literature and painting, but similar approach to this image is one of the common denominators between these two artists, the study of which also unfolds a great deal about the historical epochs in which they were living, as well as their responses to their milieus as two very astute and talented observers. This study also disentangles the mass of varying child ideologies that dominates the 19th century as the “child century,” a century in which artists and activists wrote “for” and/or “about” children for pedagogical, entertaining, ideological, illuminating, historical reasons. While Wordsworth wrote “about” childhood as a metaphor to delve into the psychological intersections of childhood and adulthood, Bouguereau took the same position in the majority of his paintings, but he fell into the pitfall of confusing “for” and “about” children in few of his “miserabilist” paintings, which are today justly accused of romanticizing children’s misery. This strand of his paintings has definitely not been instanced in this study. Given our twenty-first century awareness of the unconscious and its connections to childhood memories, it is illuminating to map out nuanced childhood representations in Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Bouguereau’s paintings in the light of Lacan’s psychoanalysis. For one thing, Lacan, whose doctoral dissertation was Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relation to the Personality (1932), dedicated a great deal of his analyses to the psychic paradigms formed in childhood that define our personalities as adults. He turned Freud’s hectic theories of the unconscious into formalistic and structured data predicated on the subtleties of language. Text-oriented, Lacan’s model provides us with an approach which uses the rhetoric and semantic specificities of a text, painting or poetry, as a point of departure to bring in the fore the psychic operations at play, that which Peter Brooks calls the “play zones” of a text. Lacanian applied psychoanalysis can do away with the teleological explanations most psychoanalytical approaches seek to find, for it raises discussions rather than to close them. With these considerations, this study aims to unravel psychic operations encapsulated in childhood representations in Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Bouguereau’s paintings, which hinge on, among others, Lacanian “fragmented body” (corps morcelé), the images which have to do with disunity, disembodiment, emasculation, and so on, or gestalt matrix, which has to do with unity and wholeness. These two concepts are essential parts of a psychoanalytical “free association,” for while the former signals the realization of the illusory construct of a subject’s egos, the latter is an imaginary construct that has constitutive and formative effects on organism as well as humans’ psychological growth

Ao acompanhar a trajetória intelectual de Jamil Almansur Haddad desde suas primeiras publicações até sua morte, esta Tese de doutorado traz à luz o percurso de um literato pertencente à segunda geração de imigrantes libaneses e suas relações paradoxais com o meio intelectual brasileiro e, em especial, o paulistano. Seu percurso biográfico ilustra um desdobramento do movimento literário árabe da imigração, que desempenhou papel central no processo de renascimento da literatura árabe no final do século XIX. Imerso no contexto cultural de um país em busca da conformação de sua verdadeira identidade nacional e vivendo na cidade de São Paulo - que em meados do século XX foi um dos maiores polos de imigração do mundo Jamil, através de sua experiência biográfica e de seu caminho literário, revela nuances de um processo intermediário de hibridação cultural.
This thesis follows the intellectual trajectory of Jamil Almansur Haddad from his first publications to his death, bringing to light the trajectory of a poet that belongs to the second generation of Lebanese immigrants and his paradoxical relations with the Brazilian intellectual environment and, in particular, the paulistano one. His biographical journey illustrates an unfolding of the Arab literary movement of immigration, which played a central role in the process of rebirth of Arab literature in the late nineteenth century. Immersed in the cultural context of a country in search of the conformation of its true national identity and living in the city of São Paulo - which in the mid-twentieth century was one of the largest poles of immigration in the world - Jamil, through his biographical experience and his literary path, reveals nuances of an intermediate process of cultural hybridization.

Au cours des dernières années, l'intérêt pour les causes et les conséquences de la corruption en Argentine est allé crescendo, tant au niveau de l'université que des organisations non-gouvernementales locales, des agences internationales, et des médias. La majorité des recherches a adopté une perspective macro-structurale qui se centre sur la mesure du phénomène dans le secteur public et s'intéresse aux opinions et aux représentations d'informateurs qualifiés et de leaders d'opinions. Notre recherche, en revanche, s'interroge sur la manière dont opèrent les trames de corruption dans un quartier de la classe ouvrière du Conurbano Bonaerense. Dans ce but, elle reconstruit les expériences quotidiennes à partir de situations caractérisées comme étant liées à la corruption à partir de récits de vie. La question qui guide cette recherche est : comment opèrent les trames de corruption sur un territoire ? Plus spécifiquement : quelles sont leurs caractéristiques ? Dans quels domaines s'affirment-elles ? Quelles sont leurs mécanismes ? Quels sont les acteurs sociaux impliqués ? Quelles sont les conséquences que mentionnent les personnes dans leurs récits ? Quelles sont et comment s'expriment la domination et les micro-résistance liées aux formes de corruption ? Nous avons déployé une stratégie multimodale qui repose sur la réalisation d'une trentaine d'entretiens semi-structurés de personnes appartenant à la classe ouvrière et d'informateurs clefs. Parallèlement, nous avons réalisé une observation participante en passant une période prolongée sur le terrain, la complétant par l'analyse de documents, et de données statistiques qui permettent d'aborder en profondeur la thématique
Corruption is a social problem that has been widely debated in recent years, both in social sciences and the media. Most of the academic literature analyzes from a macro-social perspective the harmful effects of corruption on democracy and the economy. On the contrary, the present study analyzes corruption from a micro-social perspective, which recuperates the meanings constructed by social agents, the type of social relations ingrained in corrupt practices and the consequences of this phenomena for people's lives. The aim of the study is to analyze the corrupt practices affecting the lives of residents of a working class neighborhood of the Northern Gran Buenos Aires. We study these practices from people's perspectives. We mainly took into account the influence of their biographic experiences and their class affiliation in the way they understand corruption. Corruption is analyzed as part of asymmetric social relations of domination-subordination. In this context, we study weedy micro-resistances of workers, which could be understood as micro class fights oriented to create autonomous social organizations. The methodological strategy consists on a multi-method approach. We carried out 30 semi--structured interviews to urban working class people and key informants. At the same time, we performed a participant observation during two years, which was complemented with documents, photos, and statistical data

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

Stevie Smith's work not only prefigures a key debate in contemporary feminism between essentialists and social constructionists, but also the more current debates that have developed as the constructionist position continues to be explored. She takes an anti-essentialist position as her inaugural point and explores the limits of agency in redefining gender identities against established cultural signification. Novel on Yellow Paper is best understood in the context of autobiographical fiction, a genre which maintains that identities are always to some extent fictional and, therefore, subject to self-invention. Smith challenges the notion of a fixed, female essence by utilizing a strategy of multivocality. Pompey, the protagonist, adopts a variety of voices which situate her as a product of literary and social discourses and prevent her cooption into a stable subject suitable for matrimony. In Over the Frontier, however, self-construction seems less ideal. It carries the potential for self-destruction. Smith reveals the failure of androgyny as a solution to the woes of femininity and shows that a woman impersonating a man exposes the category "man" as a subject-position inhabitable by either sex. Smith's hat poems serve as clear examples of the risks and possibilities involved in refashioning gender. Hats serve as vestimentary signs that either reify or reformulate traditional gender identities. Beneath Smith's hats are bodies, not The Body, capitalized, abstracted, and theorized solely as a text inscribed by history and culture, but particular bodies which, in their differences, bear the marks of socialization. In her poetry, she most often tropes female bodies as prisons; in order to escape essentialist definitions associated with those bodies, she revises fairy tales to imagine physical transformations that transport women into other bodies and alternative sexualities. Similarly, the drawings that accompany her poems subvert poetic statements which appear to endorse "proper" feminine concerns and traditional, masculine literary values.

A considerable amount of information can be found about Pavel Z., but it is incomplete, his biographical data is listed only vaguely, usually in the form of short medallions. Most pieces about Pavel Z. are mainly written in connection with the so-called process with "Plastic People" or in connection with his artistic work. Mapping the life of Pavel Z., among other things, not just through his words and the testimonies of his close ones, is a probe into the history of a prominent personality, persecuted during the so-called normalization regime in Czechoslovakia and operating abroad, and a look back to his roots. Last but not least, it also represents an example of specific human thinking, and therefore serves as a mirror embedded in contemporary society.

Cette thèse entend proposer une analyse originale du phénomène connu mais polémique que constitue l’introduction de la notion d’auteur dans la littérature de langue française au Moyen Âge. Il s’agira d’essayer de contribuer à repenser la signification poétique, culturelle et historique de ce moment particulier où l’auteur – c’est-à-dire l’attribution d’un texte ou d’une série de textes à un nom propre donné – s’est imposé pour la première fois comme un critère structurant et primordial dans la production et surtout la transmission des textes de langue française dans les manuscrits médiévaux. Usant du concept foucaldien de fonction-auteur, des théories de la réception et du paratexte, ainsi que de la « Nouvelle Codicologie », l’approche déployée ici aborde l’auteur en tant que construction textuelle et éditoriale signifiante au sein d’un corpus de recueils littéraires de langue d’oïl où la volonté de construire des figures d’auteurs par les éditeurs de ces ouvrages est à la fois claire et indiscutable. Partie à l’origine d’un examen systématique de la tradition manuscrite d’environ 320 noms de poètes de langue d’oïl actifs entre 1100 et 1340, l’analyse se concentre principalement sur 25 manuscrits contenant des collections auctoriales dédiées à 17 poètes, dont le nom est associé avec insistance à une série de textes copiés les uns à la suite des autres. Parmi ces auteurs, on trouve les célèbres Chrétien de Troyes, Rutebeuf et Adam de la Halle, mais aussi Philippe de Thaon, frère Angier, Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, Pierre de Beauvais, Philippe de Remi, Gautier le Leu, Jacques de Baisieux, Geoffroi de Paris, Jean de l’Escurel, Baudouin de Condé, Jean de Condé, Watriquet de Couvin et Nicole Bozon. La présente analyse tente de nuancer et de dépasser la lecture répandue selon laquelle ces manuscrits à collections auctoriales individuelles constitueraient, de concert avec les fameuses biographies de troubadours et les chansonniers de trouvères, souvent présentés comme leurs « ancêtres », les débuts balbutiants d’une vaste épopée de l’avènement de l’« auteur moderne », annonciateur tout à la fois d’une « subjectivité littéraire », d’une « esthétique autobiographique » et d’un contrôle accru des auteurs historiques, réels, sur la transmission manuscrite de leurs propres œuvres. Tout en offrant une mise à jour contextuelle et matérielle – données originales à l’appui – concernant la dimension collaborative de la genèse de ces recueils et le caractère modulaire de leur transmission, on montrera qu’ils sont le fruit d’un dialogue nourri avec le modèle livresque latin et pluriséculaire de l’auctor – qui est à la fois un auteur, un garant de la vérité (auctoritas) et un ambassadeur prestigieux de la grammaire –, ainsi qu’avec l’antique exemple d’œuvres dites « biobibliographiques », qui décrivent la vie et l’œuvre d’auteurs illustres et exemplaires, comme le fait le De viris illustribus de saint Jérôme. Les manuscrits étudiés usent à répétition de ce modèle ancestral de la biobibliographie (« la vie et l’œuvre ») pour mettre en scène un face-à-face entre auteurs de langue d’oïl et auctores. Or cette mise en regard s’avère d’autant plus intéressante que, contrairement à ce qu’on observe pour les troubadours, considérés très tôt comme de nouveaux auctores illustres en langue vulgaire, dignes de cautionner l’excellence de la poésie et de la grammaire d’oc, elle ne prend pas uniquement, en français, la forme d’une imitation ou d’une adaptation de modèles anciens. En fait, l’analogie avec les auctores donne lieu à des exercices savants, autoréflexifs et parfois ironiques sur la fabrique éditoriale, poétique et épistémologique du type d’auteur et d’auctoritas qui peuvent (ou non) être bâtis dans des recueils en langue d’oïl, idiome qui était encore dépourvu à l’époque (1100-1340) de véritable grammaire, et où fleurissaient en revanche les genres littéraires de divertissement comme le roman, où l’on explorait la porosité des frontières entre le vrai et le faux, entre le bien et le mal. Plus qu’un pas pris dans la direction d’un sacre inéluctable, l’« invention de l’auteur français » à laquelle procèdent les recueils étudiés est un geste pétri des incertitudes et des interrogations de ceux qui le posaient, et qui en mesuraient la profonde vanité au regard de Dieu et de la mort.
This thesis aims to provide an original analysis on an often studied yet controversial issue: the introduction of the notion of authorship in French language medieval literature. The objective here is to reconsider the poetic, cultural, and historical signification of the particular moment when the author – understood here as the attribution of a text or of a series of texts to a proper noun – first became an essential structuring criteria in the production, and more importantly, in the transmission of French-language texts through medieval manuscripts. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of fonction-auteur, theories of reception and of the paratext, as well as New Codicology, this thesis will consider the author as a signifying textual and editorial construction within several literary collections written in langue d’oïl, in which the editors clearly and undeniably sought to construct figures of the author. Based on the systematic examination of the manuscript tradition of approximately 320 names of langue d’oïl poets, who were active between 1100 and 1340, this analysis will focus primarily on 25 manuscripts containing authorial collections dedicated to 17 poets, whose names are strongly associated with a series of texts that are copied one after the other. Among these authors are the famous Chrétien de Troyes, Rutebeuf and Adam de la Halle, as well as Philippe de Thaon, frère Angier, Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, Pierre de Beauvais, Philippe de Remi, Gautier le Leu, Jacques de Baisieux, Geoffroi de Paris, Jean de l’Escurel, Baudouin de Condé, Jean de Condé, Watriquet de Couvin and Nicole Bozon. This thesis attempts to question and ultimately discard the common conception according to which the manuscripts containing individual authorial collections constituted – along with the famous biographies of the troubadours and the chansonniers of the trouvères, often considered as their « ancestors » – the timid beginnings of the rise of the « modern author », himself a prequel to « literary subjectivity », « autobiographical aesthetics » and an ever stronger control exerted by actual empirical authors over the manuscript transmission of their own works. While offering contextual and material updates – supported by original data – regarding the collaborative process that went into the creation of these collections, as well as the modular aspect of their reception, this thesis will show that these collections were formed through a rich dialogue with the centuries-old latin model of the auctor – who is at once an author, a guardian of truth (auctoritas) and a prestigious ambassador of grammar –, as well as with the antique tradition of « biobibliographical » texts, dealing with the life and works of famous and exemplary authors, such as De viris illustribus, by saint Jerome. The manuscripts studied here repeatedly used this ancient model of biobibliography (« the life and works ») in order to stage a competition between authors writing in langue d’oïl and auctores. This confrontation is particularly interesting when one considers that – contrary to what may be observed in the case of the troubadours, who were quickly seen as the new illustrious vernacular auctores, worthy of vouching for the excellency of langue d’oc poetry and grammar – , we are not simply dealing here with a form of imitation or adaptation in French of ancient models. In fact, the analogy with auctores allows for autoreflexive and sometimes ironic learned exercises, dealing with the editorial, poetic and epistemological creation of the type of author and auctoritas in manuscript collections in langue d’oïl, an idiom which at the time (1100-1340) lacked a true grammar, yet was used in various literary genres meant for entertainment, such as romance, which explored the evanescent barriers between truth and lies, good and evil. Rather than a small step in the long path towards an inevitable coronation, the « invention of the French author » undertaken by these collections constitutes an action that reflects all the uncertainty and interrogations of those who undertook it, while being fully convinced of its utter vanity in the eyes of God and death.

The tensions between ethical practice and aesthetic freedom in documentary film are particularly magnified in auto/biographical films that involve representations of family members or participants from a different cultural background to the artist, both contexts that demand a greater awareness of self and other. In this doctoral thesis I use 'auto/biographical' in its most expansive sense to signify the blurring of autobiographical stories with biographical material - the impossibility of telling the self's story without implicating others and vice-versa. Also accompanying this thesis is a booklet of poems, titles "Porous", which is held in the Victoria University Library. The related URL links to the catalogue entry for this booklet.