«This dissertation explores the performative potential of the contemporary serial killer narrative, describing the narrative and aesthetic characteristics of the genre. I isolate the influence of crime scene photography and forensic science as the central disciplines currently influencing the aesthetics and ideology of these imaginative works. I discuss the formation of the male profiler and female forensic investigator in Thomas Harris’s novels Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs and their film adaptations, focusing on the confluence of forensic knowledge, profiling, and James Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic and mimesis. In approaching the construction of the pathological environment, I look at Spike Lee’s film Summer of Sam and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho as psychotopographies, pathological social spaces where interiors become increasingly blurred with exteriors. To explore the nature of the forensic aesthetic and its influence on the construction of the serial killer as an artist, I consider the performance of sin, attrition, and the refraining of the crime scene as an art object in David Fincher’s film Se7en. Through a close reading of narrative devices and film techniques, I arrive at the conclusion that the contemporary serial killer narrative is not only inherently performative, but also infinitely valuable for describing the preoccupations, tensions, and anxieties present in American culture; these imaginative works offer troubling and provocative performances of the social for mass consumption.» [Résumé]
Format: Thèse
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Creating cultural monsters: A critical analysis of the representation of serial murderers in America
«Serial murder and serial murderers have been the subject of considerable attention in fictional crime shows (e.g, the various versions of “Law and Order” and “CSI”) and movies (e.g., “The Silence of the Lambs”), as well as in the print media, since the term and profile for “serial killer” were developed by the FBI in the 1970s. White, American men are frequently identified as being over-represented as serial murderers, but no adequate sociological explanation has yet been developed for this. Biological and psychological explanations are deficient, and the cultural context generally has been ignored in previous studies. Informed by a framework drawn from cultural sociology and gender studies, this study employs a qualitative content analysis of biographical narratives, newspaper articles, and legal documents regarding 15 serial murderers –nine who appear to characterize the “typical” serial murderer and six who each represent a variation of one of the prototypical characteristics — to identify the ways in which the American cultural milieu fosters serial murder and the creation of white, male serial murderers. A model is offered to illustrate the workings of culture and help explain the development of serial murderers in the United States. People utilize cultural values to construct lines of action according to their cultural competencies. American cultural values — especially as they emphasize competition and individual achievement; white, male privilege; and hegemonic masculinity –along with the emotional appeal of crime commission appear to contribute to the development of serial murderers by making serial murder an available and desirable line of action for some men. There appears to be more diversity in characteristics of serial murderers than popular profiles suggest, and implications of the exaggerated and apparently inaccurate representations of serial murder by the media and FBI are considered. In addition, commonly employed definitions appear to describe characteristics most associated with white, male serial murderers in the United States and exclude other cases of multiple murder and serial offending. Representations of serial murder reinforce and perpetuate the power structure in American society and related values, which sustains an environment for extreme violence and creates a cultural blindness to some perpetrators.» [Résumé]
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Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, and Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry in Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature
«This dissertation argues that in the midst of an uncertain but formative period of continental expansion, which served as a crucial antecedent to the country’s rapid imperial rise of the 1890s, a revolutionary brand of popular crime fiction appeared and flourished in the pages of cheap periodicals and paperback novels. It consisted of conventional adventure romances and pulpy proto-dime novels that focused on frontier violence and backwoods criminals. Often popular in their day but quickly forgotten, these texts have been given short thrift by scholars and critics due to their shoddiness or ostensibly minor role in literary history. I contend that this obscure brand of crime fiction in fact has much to offer in the ongoing conversation about geographical borders and the roles they play in our conception of nation, culture, and literature. I will demonstrate the ways in which a specific group of American literary figures—Steelkilt, John Murrell, and Joaquin Murieta, among others—all of whom were featured in popular fiction between the 1830s and 1850s, dramatically altered the representation of crime in antebellum U.S. fiction, while also helping to shape national conceptions of expansion, imperialism, region, and identity. Though often subsumed under the umbrellas of various genres, I consider the narratives containing these characters to be forerunners of a transnational crime genre that continues to be popular today. The texts under consideration in this study begin with Morgan Neville’s 1828 sketch “Last of the Boatmen,” continue through the crime novels of the 1830s and 40s penned by Emerson Bennett and H.R. Howard, and reach their murderous pinnacle in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854). The transnational frontier bandits developed in their pages represent the unstable and at times impossible nature of the U.S. ‘civilizing’ mission. My dissertation aims to perform a threefold critical intervention: to argue that these characters’ appearances in popular texts reveal disturbing fissures in the conventional narrative of U.S. western expansion and national identity, to show that the regions they inhabit function as alien or non-national spaces characterized by culturally polyglot populations and unmapped terrain; and, finally, to demonstrate the overall impact they have on popular U.S. literature and culture in the 1830s, 40s and 50s.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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The Captain and His Fellows : Reading Editions of ‘A General History of the Pyrates’, 1724-1734
«A General History of the Pyrates purports to tell the true and entirely accurate stories of ‘the most notorious pirates’. It originates many of the images of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century piracy in circulation today and has been extensively mined as an archive for information about historical pirates. However, the General History is a complex literary fiction. This thesis meets the need for a robust understanding of the early life of this text. This involves examining both the text’s publishing history and the language, form, and content of editions published between 1724 and 1734 to interrogate the figure of the pirate generated by this influential text. This thesis establishes that there is no authoritative edition, and instead approaches the General History as a changeable tradition of narratives concerning pirates set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I compare across and within editions to argue that the crew and the captain jointly create the pirate. This thesis demonstrates that the pirate contributes to, but also exceeds, developing notions of the criminal. This produces a new reading of the pirate as a literary type. Chapter one establishes a publishing history of the General History between 1724 and 1734. It highlights understudied formats to establish a comprehensive account of the text’s early life within its publishing contexts. This chapter underlines that no two editions are exactly the same in this ten-year period and sets the foundation for why these differences are significant. Chapter two initiates the analysis of the pirate. By placing editions of the text in conversation with antecedent outlaw and contemporaneous highwayman narratives, this chapter argues that pirates are fellows aboard a ship. These fellowships are challenged by treachery, but are sustained by oaths and notions of honour to develop pirate homosocial relations. Chapter three argues that the General History presents captaincy as a spectrum of qualities and behaviours. It contextualises notions of the hero and adventure to argue that the text creates captains imbued with the affective qualities of early modern heroes who centre ideas of acquisition and predation. This creates a new iteration of the literary adventurer, for whom venture is a key concern. These chapters collectively argue that the General History is a product of long established ideas of adventure and outlawry that speaks to the concerns of the emerging eighteenth century.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Essais sur la littérature maritime américaine (American Sea Fiction)
Les ouvrages listés ici portent sur la littérature maritime, principalement américaine, mieux connue en anglais sous l’appelation «nautical fiction» ou «sea fiction».
«La fiction nautique, souvent également appelée fiction navale, fiction maritime, fiction d’aventure navale ou fiction maritime, est un genre littéraire dont l’action se déroule en mer ou à proximité, qui se concentre sur la relation humaine avec la mer et les voyages en mer et qui met en lumière la culture nautique dans ces environnements. Les décors de la fiction nautique sont très variés : navires marchands, paquebots, navires de guerre, bateaux de pêche, canots de sauvetage, etc. ainsi que les ports maritimes et les villages de pêcheurs. Lorsqu’ils décrivent la fiction nautique, les spécialistes font le plus souvent référence à des romans, des nouvelles et des récits, parfois sous le nom de romans de mer ou d’histoires de mer. Ces œuvres sont parfois adaptées pour le théâtre, le cinéma et la télévision.» (Nautical fiction sur Wikipédia, traduit avec DeepL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_fiction)
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Histoire et Littérature (faits vs. fiction)
Plusieurs ouvrages sur la piraterie cherchent à distinguer les faits historiques des légendes.
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Pirates, Runaways, and Long-Lost Princes: Race and National Identity in Transatlantic Adventure Fiction
«This project brings together adventure novels by white British authors, like Frederick Marryat, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and H. Rider Haggard, and African American and Afro-Caribbean texts by authors like Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, and Maxwell Philip, to argue that the sensational elements of the adventure genre that were so effective in developing British national identity were appropriated by African American and Afro-Caribbean authors to re-imagine national identity as a flexible and multi-ethnic concept. This project extends previous scholarship on the genre by placing white British adventure novels in the transatlantic context demanded by both the genre’s subject matter—the Caribbean, Africa, the wilds of the United States—and publishing history in order to demonstrate that the adventurous vision of national identity featured in those novels was part of a larger, multi-vocal conversation through which national identity was constantly being redefined. I argue that adventure novels were open to this type of rewriting because they were popular and accessible, and because they define national identity at the point where it is most vulnerable: on the nation’s frontier. This project focuses on three characters who exist on the margins of the nation—pirates, runaway slaves, and long-lost princes—and the ways that they and the plot elements surrounding them are used to affirm or challenge the nation’s physical, legal, and imaginative boundaries. More than just melodramatic window-dressing, these elements—such as a birthmark that identifies an ordinary man as a long-lost prince—provide an imaginative framework through which authors could engage with serious debates over race, kinship, and national belonging. Though we may be hesitant to connect literary figures like William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, or even Mary Elizabeth Braddon to this most popular of popular genres, adventure fiction deserves recognition for its important role in shaping transatlantic and transracial perceptions of what it meant to be Afro-British, Afro-Caribbean, or African American in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.» [Résumé de thèse]
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The fame monster!: Revers et fortune du Pirate, du 19e siècle à nos jours, des Mers jusqu’à la Toile
«Nous savons tous à quoi ressemble un pirate. Ce que nous savons moins, c’est la raison de ces succès, les causes de notre engouement – voire de notre fascination pour ce Fame Monster. La formule permet de caractériser l’ambiguïté d’un personnage dont chaque fortune connaît un revers, révélant notre soif de transgression et notre tentation pour l’envers de la morale. L’approche littéraire comparatiste, augmentée d’emprunts à l’image, à la sociologie, à la philosophie politique et à l’histoire des mentalités, permet non pas de simplement décrire un phénomène, mais d’essayer d’en extraire les sens, les besoins, les attentes, en prenant pour hypothèse que la fiction pirate constitue un jalon spécifique dans l’histoire des mentalités occidentales, et autorise l’exploration d’un état de nos désirs : d’aventure, de danger, de transgression, d’insurrection ; mais aussi de conformisme, dans un mythe continuellement répété. Histoire dans l’histoire, fiction en négatif, le pirate marginal se donne à lire comme une part retranchée de la société qui l’évacue, et partant comme l’idéal révélateur du sang et de l’or de nos virtualités, de nos « occasions manquées ».C’est ainsi que l’étude du pirate traditionnel conduit non seulement à une analyse du personnage mais encore aux enjeux fictionnels qu’il engage. Piraterie et piratage, ses deux corollaires directs, mettent en œuvre des problématiques particulières de création et de réception, et amorcent une reconversion sémantique du personnage : le pirate connaît une nouvelle fortune numérique, tandis que, devenu comportement par le truchement du piratage, il conduit à repenser le champ de la fiction. Alors : tous pirates ? Ou plutôt : tous (déjà) piratés ?» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Piratical Designations: Power and Possibility in Representations of Piracy
«This dissertation analyzes how designations and representations of piracy define, police, and challenge legitimate production and circulation. From antiquity through the present, the labeling of others as pirates has excluded the less powerful from the authorized distribution of tangible and intangible property. Such discursive exclusion not only defines piracy but also creates it, distinguishing it from other, sanctioned forms of appropriation. This exclusion generates political, legal, and cultural subjectivity, thereby allowing so-called pirates to affect the very discourses and processes from which they are excluded. The first chapter traces the term piracy from its linguistic origin in Ancient Greece to its extension to literary property in 17th century and its current use as a rhetorical weapon in the global information society. Isolating five necessary conditions, this chapter reads piracy across its maritime, intellectual, and digital manifestations, elucidating the success and failure of designations of piracy. The second chapter focuses on the destabilization of these conditions in Hollywood’s representations of Caribbean piracy. Due to gaps in the historical record, historians have conflictingly interpreted Golden Age (1650-1720) pirates as criminals, rebels, and anarcho-libertarians. Following these interpretations, but adapting them to its own institutional and hegemonic needs, Hollywood has developed three types of pirates: an actively piratical villain, a reluctantly piratical hero, and a gender shifting temporary pirate. The third chapter develops a genealogy of the anti-piracy media and educational campaigns of the film and recording industries, locating in the 1980’s “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign the appeals that have dominated later campaigns.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Geographies of the mind: Narrative spaces and literary landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s antebellum fiction
«Genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. Rhetorically, genre affords a political, artistic, and ideological tool that enables a rhetor to respond to personal and cultural anxieties. Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction examines ten of nineteenth-century American author William Gilmore Simms’s works, including three manuscript-only ones. Drawing upon rhetorical theory and narrative theory, this project uncovers the breadth of Simms’s rhetorical and literary practices within the confession narrative, the ghost story, the pirate romance, and the sentimental novel. I demonstrate that Simms’s texts both adhere to and subvert the boundaries of generic conventions and, in doing so, elucidate legal, psychological, and transnational concerns of the time. By focusing on the narrative spaces of Simms’s texts, I prove that Simms’s geographic spaces reverberate with hauntings that serve to mark moments of intellectual, personal, and historical disconnect, thereby voicing the disjunctive nature of antebellum southern spaces. By connecting rhetorical theory with literary and spatial considerations, this project offers a detailed analysis of Simms’s work, positing that narrative practices are dynamic and responsive spaces, ones that are reflective of and responsive to the geographies of the mind.» [Résumé de la thèse]