Le soi et ses institutions: images du sujet entre texte et photographie (Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert, Sophie Calle, Édouard Levé)

autobiography;photography;diary;poststructuralism;self-writing;French

Rogobete, Ana Delia DEgginton, William ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: autobiography;    photography;    diary;    poststructuralism;    self-writing;    French;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60062/ROGOBETE-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines the theoretical, aesthetic, and institutional outcome of poststructuralist thought dating to the turn of the 1970s. Through close analyses of texts and visual works by four practitioners of self-writing (semiotician Roland Barthes, AIDS memoirist Hervé Guibert, installation artist Sophie Calle, and photo-conceptualist Édouard Levé) I show how the construction of subjectivity has been transformed in the arts of the self-portrait and the diary.Part One examines theoretical and aesthetic implications of the ;;Death of the Author,” understood as a critique of the relation between the creative and the literary subject in the context of institutions that regulate the creative act. First I relate Roland Barthes’ article to the Nietzschean tradition of nihilist perspectivism through which French postructuralist thinkers critiqued the metaphysical subject. Analysis of the article’s publication context affords historical comprehension of the changing relation between literary theory and the visual arts. I then draw a parallel between photographic practice and autobiography. The artistic and theoretical uses of photography made by the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s (but also by the Surrealists in the 1920s) transformed it into a theoretical object and eventually into an aesthetic and mythological one.Part Two focuses on autobiographical discourse. First, by looking at Philippe Lejeune, Georges Gusdorf and the Dictionnaire de l’autobiographie I show how critical discourses informed by poststructuralism allow autobiography to become a literary genre during the second half of the 20th century. Second, I discuss how each artist and writer engages with self-writing and self-portraiture through a direct confrontation of text and image in narratives that, far from being authenticated by photographs, are troubled by the distortions of fiction and by the confrontation of different textual versions.Part Three turns to the journal intime understood as an impure practice (text, photographs, videos). I first show the historical transformation of diaries in a literary genre. I then focus my attention on primary sources that further push the very definition of the genre. I conclude with the question of finitude, namely the ways in which suicide not only informs the unfolding of the work of Guibert and Levé on the level of theme, but provides historical and structural resolution to their respective artistic careers.