Notes achriennes

Renaud Camus, Notes achriennes, Paris, Hachette / P.O.L., 1982.

« La note, le fragment, la contradiction, la répétition, le « romanesque », l’autobiographie, le subjectif, la citation, la nuance : ainsi l’homosexualité ne saurait se figer en discours, en doctrine, dans l’illusion de l’exhaustif, du définitif. Existence avant que d’être essence, elle s’invente chaque fois pour chacun, à chaque rencontre, à chaque mot.
Je me répète (je vais finir, si je n’y prends garde, par échafauder un semblant de « thèse ») : la nature de l’homosexuel, sa « vérité », n’existe pas : elle n’est pas dans la femme, elle n’est pas dans la « folle », elle n’est pas dans le « macho ». Vous n’êtes condamnés à rien. Soyez ceci ou cela ou n’importe quoi si vous en avez envie, et encore assurez-vous à deux fois que cette envie est bien la vôtre. »
(Quatrième de couverture)

HARTLEN, Neil C., « Queer across the Atlantic: Homo/sexual representation in the United States and France, 1977–2001 », thèse de doctorat, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2006, 324 p. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
This dissertation examines homo/sexual representation in French and American literature and film from 1977-2001. I use the slash to distinguish between two areas of representation whose relationship forms the object of my comparative analysis. Focusing on narratives featuring sexual encounters between men, I analyze sexual representation as it ranges from reticence to frankness. I consider these same narratives in relation to what I call “homo representation,” the interpretation of sexuality in minoritizing terms of identities, communities and politics. I argue that French texts demonstrate a greater frankness in relation to sexual representation; the dominance of a universalist tradition in France, however, inhibits the categorization of these texts and the sexuality they depict as “homosexual” or “gay”—or at least limits the political significance of that categorization. In contrast, I argue that the American texts I consider participate in a minoritized gay literature and subculture that has evolved in response to the greater reticence around sexual representation in the American mainstream. That mainstream, however, proves to be more open to “homo representation” on the levels of both culture and politics.
I analyze texts by Renaud Camus, John Rechy, Dominique Fernandez, Edmund White, Cyril Collard, Gregg Araki, Guillaume Dustan, Dennis Cooper, Paul Smaïl, and Samuel R. Delany, situating them in the context of various genres. Applying minoritizing vs. universalizing strategies and normalizing vs. transgressive ones in different ways, these genres include coming out narratives (for which I propose an alternative gay Bildungsroman model), AIDS narratives, “ghetto” narratives, “assimilative” narratives and “queer” narratives. Within my American examples, minoritizing ghetto narratives predominate, establishing alternative community norms that are themselves challenged by more transgressive queer narratives. In my French examples, however, universalizing assimilative narratives are more usual, even as they reserve a surprisingly privileged place for transgressive sexuality in comparison with their more normalizing assimilative counterparts in the United States. I argue that these differences must ultimately be understood in relation to contrasting ways of situating sexuality, literature, and politics within the public and private spheres, even as those configurations continue to evolve in both countries through the 1990s and beyond.

La partie concernant Renaud Camus porte également sur Tricks.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest###