Contenu du sommaire : Mutants et chimères.

The «stuff» Thomas Pynchon's novels. V. and Gravity's Rainbow, are made of is mostly historical : data, characters, background... Yet the heroes are fakes, places escape all determination — and History turns into a mythical monster. Stories can be but fragmentary, the historical framework is cracked open, and the Other World breaks in.

An ever expanding design of crisscrossing lines, the spiderweb figures forth the structure of the text as an interweaving pattern of poetry and prose, myth and fiction, and the oral and written traditions. The emphasis, thematically as well as structurally, is on the points of intersection — the transitional and the marginal — which leads to a consideration of the parameters of a world created in the likeness of spiderwoman rather than in the image of God the father.

U. Le Guin, J. Russ and A. Rice seem to challenge the traditional concepts of «genre» (in science-fiction, Utopia and the gothic novel). This essay studies the possible connection between the evolution of gender categorization and the emergence of literary generic hybrids.

Steiner's novel is here read as an enterprise in demotivating the genre. His « do-it-yourself » writing tends to disengage the novel from its relationship to the sacred and to myth by defining its status as radically secular and marginal within the constellation of « modern » values. Relinquishing traditional esthetics, however, Passion questions the hierarchies upon which the system of the perspective, the order of the narrative and the metaphysical couple of the copy and the original are based.