Contenu du sommaire : Territoires, l'ancrage des errances

The United States of America has always rejected imperialism in its classical guise, and yet it has always been interested in expansion. From the late 18th century to the end of the 19th, it was eager to promote its values and institutions beyond its borders through territorial expansion. As a consequence, Americans needed to find new ways of expanding, and new vocabulary to express their “imperial designs”. Jefferson referred to the “empire of liberty” while others, in the following century, invoked a “manifest destiny” to justify expansion. This article deals with a less notorious phrase—the American system—often used by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, that can also be considered an attempt to reconcile the rejection of imperialism with territorial expansion.

Caught between genres as both a novel and a collection of stories, hovering between a regionalist claim and a nationalist plot, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most local of local texts, has, oddly enough, long proven “out of place”, stubbornly resisting the categories in which critics have placed it. Eschewing such a compulsary categorization, this article focuses on the constant dialogue, within the text, between two narrative postures: appropriation—the temptation to impose, from the exterior, a traditional, linear plot upon the country—and belonging, a desire to be one with the country which allows the country's design to emerge from within. However, this counter-plot is not so much a transformation of the country of the pointed firs into a “region” (i.e.) into the very site of the critical, of counter-hegemony), as an attempt to “regionalize” the very concept of nation, reversing the point of view from which the nation is created by rooting it in the region itself. In its design as well as in its intention, then, Jewett's text subverts the very categories upon which it rests—country, nation, region.

In The Senses of Walden, Stanley Cavell provocatively states that “America [has] never expressed itself philosophically,” save “in the metaphysical riot of its greatest literature”. A similar insight has prompted Richard Rorty to proclaim that philosophy can no longer sustain its old territorial claims, and that its sole remaining purpose is to supervise the “conversation” between non-philosophical discourses and forms of knowledge. Cavell counters this argument by pointing out that philosophy actually comes into its own when it loses its traditional privileges : if the mission of philosophical conversation is to question the legitimacy of territorial appropriation in the name of a common quest for justice, as it has been since Plato's Republic, then American literature may be better equipped to carry it out than academic philosophy, with its recognized “field” and carefully guarded boundaries. This article seeks to test Cavell's conclusions by examining Willa Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers !, which deals with what he calls “speculation in territory” while deliberately eschewing the conventional forms of philosophical rhetoric. It turns out that Cather's narrative indeed stages a loving conversation between the main characters and the surrounding world: the correct combination of proximity and distance allows the protagonist and the land to gaze at each other; this gives rise to an intermingling of voices which in turn guarantees the possibility of genuine knowledge. Thus, while the novel is ostensibly about farming, it can also be read as a constructive critique of academic institutions, as it draws the reader's attention to the broader context which alone permits teaching and research to carry out their true purpose.

Displaying the geographical and textual challenges that spending winter in the Yaak Valley represents, Winter is a founding work of Rick Bass's nature-writing. This article intends to show that, far from distracting the author from his original referential purpose, the metatextual questioning of discourse paradoxically leads him to renew the notion of realism and unveil the most intimate, invisible aspects of nature. An analogy between diary-writing and map-writing first leads me to unveil Bass's respectful recording of the mysteries of nature. The whiteness of winter then appears as a necessary screen initiating the eye to loss and renunciation. I finally try to show that by subverting romantic clichés, Bass's poetic transcription of unexpected, fleeting events of everyday life can favor an emotional encounter with Otherness.

In Plays Well with Others (1997), his novel about the AIDS pandemic which decimated the New York gay community in the eighties, Allan Gurganus makes a plea against sectarianism and exclusion. The purpose of this paper is to show how Allan Gurganus's rejection of closed territories manifests itself literally through his experimental and generous writing. By systematically playing with syntax, lexis and punctuation, but also with genre and various forms of artistic expression, Gurganus stretches the limits of language and of fiction, thus redefining open aesthetic spaces.

In 1998, Jonathan Demme adapted for screen Toni Morrison's critically acclaimed novel Beloved. This new cinematographic itinerary proves complex and problematic as the director chooses to reconfigure the heroine's agonizing journey through memory and to freedom in times of slavery in a violent and non linear manner. His incursion into a haunted territory of African American history leads him to make radical choices such as selecting at once the fantastic genre and structuring his film around numerous flashbacks. The effect is gripping, but also stifling and disorientating for the spectator. His aesthetic approach, at times debatable, seems to redefine the moral implications of Sethe's murder of her children and the inscription of distress and of the modes of survival on screen.

Over the past fifteen years, diversity management in corporate America has emerged as a new human resources paradigm, touted by large companies as the answer to the issue of persistent discrimination in the workplace. Given that women and ethnic minorities now make up two-thirds of all new entrants in the job market, corporations are trying to find new ways to capitalize on this diversity. Yet, while this new integration paradigm based on an economic rationale makes sense, closer inspection reveals that few companies are in fact prepared to take the necessary steps that would lead to a genuine overhaul of their corporate culture and improve race and gender relations at work, mostly because their real motivations are to be found elsewhere. And when business slackens, cost-conscious managers tend to either narrow or postpone these diversity programs which remain ill-defined and whose real impact on the bottom line is difficult to measure.