«People’s fascination with true crime, especially murder, has no limits. True crime is a multi-genre that shares features of journalism and crime fiction and is often associated with murder narratives (Punnett 3). Murley defines true crime as stories of real events, shaped by the authors and imbued with their values and beliefs about these events (6). Moreover, in Biressi’s view, such stories are non-fiction narratives often promoted for entertainment (1). Because of the ever-growing popularity of true crime, my work tried to answer the following research questions: Who are the people that cannot get enough of stories about serial killers? Are there any similarities between true crime, nonfiction, and crime fiction? Which components of the story attract people’s attention the most and what are the reasons behind the public’s insatiable appetite for true crime? Is it perhaps our desire and need to understand the murderer and the driving force behind their acts? Or do we feel a deeper connection with the victim? What about serial killers allures us?» [Résumé]
Format: Mémoire
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The Sympathized Slasher
«Unlike several popular slasher films in which the serial killer is written off as emotionally absent, some horror films attempt to evoke sympathy in the male killer. In Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac (2012), viewers develop an understanding between the killers’ emotional distress and how anger against their abusive or neglectful parents carries through to violence against women. I will suggest that these films demonstrate masculinity in distress via the act of looking. As in many narrative films, the male gaze is a significant narrative; male looking and objectification/fetishization of the female victim plays a role in cinematography. The first-person I-camera assumes the gaze as the killer stalks and murders his victims. But in some cases, the male gaze is not the dominating, controlling force that film theorist Laura Mulvey identifies; in fact, the male gaze is challenged when the killers of these two films come into contact with central female characters, rendering them not only as the Other but also by adopting the feminine gaze. With the possibility that gaze can be subverted or even switched, these films suggest that male anxiety against the “final girl” is palpable on screen. Further, these two films examine the killers’ psychological displacement of rage against the father or mother but do so in different ways; while Peeping Tom analyzes rage against the father, Maniac studies disavowal against the mother.» [Résumé]
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FBI Files: A Psychological Comparison of Literary and Real-life Serial Killers
«This study examines the psychology of fictional and real-life serial killers and the behavioral similarities between them. Three fictional murderers, mainly Macbeth (William Shakespeare’s Macbeth), Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs), and the Creature (Frankenstein), as well as real life killers such as Charles Manson, Ed Gein, and Edmund Kemper were researched in depth. The data for this study was gathered from a variety of sources such as biographies, television interviews, published novels, articles, and documentaries. This study also focuses on predispositional factors and personality traits that led these killers to a life of crime. While no single behavioral trait was found to be present in every murderer studied, some of the psychological factors that were found to have predictive value included: abusive upbringings, mother hate, adoption, pornography, and brain damage were also reliable predictors in the lives of fictional and nonfictional perpetrators.» [Résumé]
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Le film d’enquête portant sur les tueurs en série : l’avènement d’un sous-genre et l’exception de Zodiac
«Ce mémoire a comme objectif premier, l’étude du film d’enquête sur les tueurs en série. Plus spécifiquement, le mémoire examine le cas du film Zodiac réalisé par David Fincher en 2007. En procédant par analyses comparatives portant sur la structure narrative, les thématiques et les mécanismes de réception du film d’enquête, nous avons tenté de mettre en lumière des hypothèses quant à l’insuccès commercial de Zodiac. La première section de l’étude examine la spécificité et les fonctions propres au film d’enquête sur les tueurs en série et parvient ainsi à tirer la conclusion qu’il prévaut de catégoriser ce corpus d’œuvres comme un sous-genre du film policier. Nous avons étudié la fonction sociale et médiatique des archétypes filmiques du tueur et de l’enquêteur afin d’atteindre une meilleure compréhension de la fascination du public américain pour ce sous-genre. La seconde section du mémoire examine comment Zodiac se détache des conventions génériques et, particulièrement, comment la mise en scène opère une démystification de la figure du tueur en série. De plus, nous avons soulevé le traitement particulier déployé par Zodiac, soit la monstration, par le biais des personnages, du travail spectatoriel de mise en récit de l’enquête. La troisième section vise à démontrer la rupture de l’horizon d’attente du spectateur chez Zodiac ainsi que la chute de l’imaginaire mythique qui est ainsi engendré.» [Résumé]
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Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel
«This dissertation contends that the historic events of the eighteenth-century Caribbean directly shaped the rise of the novel. The first chapter considers the conflicting cultural representations of the eighteenth-century pirate in the burgeoning genre of the maritime picaresque. The second chapter considers the role of mixed-race women in the Bildungsroman, what would later be categorized as domestic fiction due to the gendered politics eighteenth-century long-prose writing. The third chapter examines the rhetorical value of silence in autobiographical slave narratives, a genre of writing foundational to the African-American literary canon. The fourth and final chapter posits that the Caribbean gothic, formulated during the height of the slave trade debates, was influenced by slavery apologist anxiety over slave rebellion in the Atlantic. Each chapter is dependent upon postcolonial and empire studies and is grounded in primary source material spanning from 1690–1840. In providing a more globalized vision of the novel’s, my dissertation offers a unique perspective on the long eighteenth century and the literary history to follow.» [Résumé du mémoire]
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Le sociolecte pirate en traduction : le cas de Treasure Island de Robert Louis Stevenson
«Ce mémoire consiste en une étude des traductions de l’anglais vers le français du sociolecte pirate tel que représenté dans l’oeuvre Treasure Island de Robert Louis Stevenson. Après avoir examiné le contexte social et historique dans lequel la piraterie s’est développée, je cherche à définir les pirates réels et imaginaires pour comprendre ceux que Stevenson a créés. À la suite de cette recherche, je procède à une analyse approfondie des composantes du sociolecte pirate de Treasure Island afin de comprendre l’importance des éléments véhiculés par un tel sociolecte. Puis, je discute des approches possibles pour traduire chacune des particularités langagières discutées. J’examine ensuite les stratégies adoptées par six traducteurs ayant produit six traductions différentes de Treasure Island. Finalement, je réalise moi-même une traduction de quelques extraits choisis démontrant différents aspects du sociolecte pirate dans le but de transmettre les éléments analysés.» [Résumé du mémoire]
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Radicalism at sea: Literary pirates in “Emmanuel Appadocca” and “The Scar”
«This thesis explores radicalism at work in M. Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca (1854) and China Mieville’s The Scar (2002). These novels highlight piracy as a means of rejecting systems of power and social order. Through speculative fiction, each author finds the means to resist the hegemonic power of genre, race, empire, and knowledge that pervade each author’s social and historical milieu. This work examines the historical and literary context of piracy as a metaphor for radicalism, the project of legitimization and resistance to generic categorization of both texts. Emmanuel Appadocca resists racial stereotypes, and both texts exhibit clear resistance to colonial expansion. This resistance is made possible by each author’s use of the sea as the site of insurgency and challenging boundaries of knowledge. Thus both novels lend themselves to interpretation as works of postcolonial fiction.» [Résumé du mémoire]
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Across Sea and (Cyber)Space: The Mythic Structure and Participatory Fandom of “Star Wars” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”
«In this academic investigation of two film franchises, Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, the underlying mythological structure is examined, as well as the participatory fan cultures that have formed around them. Chapter 2 focuses on the Campbellian “Hero’s Journey” mythological structure, character archetypes, and how theses elements appear in both trilogies. Chapter 3 begins the discussion of participatory fan cultures and (like Chapters 4-5) draws heavily on the work of New Media scholar, Henry Jenkins. These fan cultures generate chimeric tiems that are made for fans by fans known as fan generated media texts. […]» [Extrait du résumé du mémoire»
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A Posthuman Exploration of the Robot in Contemporary Science fiction Films
«This study uses critical posthumanism to explore the representation of the robot in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) and Jake Schreier’s Robot and Frank in relation to posthuman embodiment, intersubjectivity and cultural anxieties about the interface between humans and robots. By conducting a close reading of the films’ mise-en-scene, cinematography and iconography, this thesis argues that while these films draw attention to the fears and anxieties associated with robots, the representation of an interconnected, posthuman robot enables the films to critique the anthropic principle and anthropocentrism. This thesis argues that by blurring and displacing the boundaries between human and machine, artificial and natural, organic and inorganic, these films challenge the structures of exclusion and demarcations established by humans and explore the implications of technology for our understanding of who, or what, can be truly considered ‘human’.» [Abstract]
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Robots et intelligence artificielle
Quelques ouvrages récents inscrivent l’intelligence artificielle dans le sillon de l’histoire du robot et de la créature artificielle.