Contenu du sommaire : Le suspens dans la littérature américaine du XIXe au XXIe siècle

The figural ontology that authorises the Jamesian novel is constituted in a specular turn erecting before the subject, as in a mirror, an image of its original—or rather pre-original—dispossession, itself constituted by the faculty of language. Man doesn't possess language like a property; language, on the contrary, dispossesses him of himself. Mimesis, or, more precisely, the mimetic or specular turn which constitutes the principle of James's writing converts this intimate dispossession into a figure of the other apprehended (or misapprehended) by the subject as an alienated figure of the self. While the specular image provides the foundation for the Jamesian centre of consciousness (reflector) and a more or less conventional, if highly speculative, narrative structure, the spectral image places the mimetic turn in suspense, rendering visible the turn itself and reflecting without sufficient difference an image of the subject's originary dispossession. The speculative movement of the narrative itself being thereby suspended—as in “The Turn of the Screw”—the subject of writing is delivered over to the pure repetition of the mimetic turn: the uncanny—Unheimlichkeit—itself. In “The Jolly Corner,” however, while the speculative dynamic of the narrative achieves itself in typical, if particularly apocalyptic, fashion, the figural ontology of the subject is dislocated at its foundation by a moment of suspension giving way to the “supreme” value, or truth, of the novel as a work of art.

Enhancing the limitations of Judith Butler's reading of Willa Cather's “On the Gull's Road,” this article engages in a close reading of Cather's story, in order to identify, beyond the structuring foreclosure of the narrator's name, what constitutes and is at stake in the suspension, understood as reservation, reluctance or pseudo-absence, affecting the latter's gender, more particularly from the angle of reader response to Cather's short story.

This study analyzes various strategies of suspension in one of Eudora Welty's early stories, “A Curtain of Green”. Most of them pave the way for aesthetic choices to be confirmed in her later works : narrative discontinuity, visual screens, diegetic indetermination and an ambivalent use of intertextuality.

John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead's second novel, provides the reader with a moment of suspension, both geographic and temporal, delineated by the three-day festival devoted to John Henry, a figure of American mythology. This paper aims at showing how this text, built on a dynamic of disjunction, keeps meaning at bay, as if the feeling of suspension both of diegesis and language, brought about dissolution and dissemination more than stability and fixity. It seems as though what prevails is a fruitful mingling of voices, the embodiment of the vital power of breath as a form of resistance of desire to reality's attempts at totalizing.

In Oracle Night (2003), Paul Auster returns to the structure of the detective novel, which enables him to achieve several purposes : first, by involving the reader in the resolution of the main enigma, he shows the fictional character of any reconstruction of past events ; the first embedded story, which plays with the codes of the thriller, emphasizes the psychic function of narrative, since it enables the narrator to come to a partial understanding of his predicament ; conversely, the numerous metalepses face the reader with the task of restoring narrative continuity by interpreting the unreliable narrator's actions in the light of the embedded narrative, which suggests the danger of solipsism.

This paper aims at deconstructing the logic of Charles Bernstein's discourse in Recantorium, a poetic performance delivered on the occasion of an academic conference. Bernstein takes up the rhetorical set form of the Puritan confession, borrowed from the American tradition, in order to undermine it and reveal its violence and vacuity. In Bernstein's slightly dysfunctioning “machine célibataire,” what is suspended is the unpredictable outcome of a well ordered and highly determined process.

The Motion Picture Export Association is a legal cartel founded in 1945 by the Hollywood majors to reopen the markets closed by the war. Quickly, its main role was to represent and defend the majors' interests abroad. Under Jack Valenti's presidency (1966-2004), the cartel behaved as a lobby, creating for itself a specific form of diplomacy on the foreign market—a cartel diplomacy, based both on force and compromise.