Contenu du sommaire : Paroles d'excentriques : fictions américaines récentes.

As suggested by the oxymoronic title Margaret of the Imperfections, Lynda Sexson's art of fiction writing implies a tension between perfection and imperfection. This paper will analyse how she presents and represents her Ars Poetica : how to choose the germ for a story, how to make it grow, what recurrent figures correspond to this tension.

In The Hungry Girls and Other Stories, Patricia Eakins uses similes extensively, often eluding the object compared in a maze of references. She varies the modes of comparison and utlimately modifies the standard comparative forms in the language. Comparisons are meant to bridge the gap between things and language, forever approximating what the description is trying to convey, as if the teller were commemorating the fictive time when things and language were one. Eakins builds up a mythical origin of language in which tales and songs are materially binding and may be powerfully destructive as well as seductive.

This paper examines three instances of narrative eccentricity in Cheever 's fiction. Grounded on a close reading and analysis of excerpts from "The Death of Justina", The Wapshot Chronicle and Falconer, it argues that, instead of being treated as superfluous outgrowths and unnecessary deviations, the quirks of the narrative should be viewed as fruitful margins in which, thanks to a dreamlike process of displacement, the text reveals its latent contents.

The opening pages of A Frolic of His Own resort to a type of narration familiar to the readers of Gaddis 's previous novels, with the dialogues conveying most of the narrative information while the narrator 's interventions are confined to a few descriptive sequences. Yet, the inclusion of other kinds of writings and the proliferation of stories grafted to the main plot dissolve the unity of a presupposed central narrative. This paper tries to examine the constant displacement of the narrative from one area of the text to another, which is also linked to an interrogation on language through its uses and abuses in the legal jargon forming the substratum of the novel's fictional world.

In McCarthy's Blood Meridian the reader is constantly made to hesitate between opposed and fluctuating modes of reading. The act of witnessing (certainly a crux of the novel as is implied by its opening words "See the child") and that of interpreting undergo a severe crisis, not only through the deviation of such conventions as the use of an epilogue and chapter headings, but more forcibly through the shifts in focalization. These shifts occur in such ways as to deepen the rift between the characters' external and impersonal perception, and a more mythical vision which remains however just as distanced and inadequate for the reader. Sight, blindness and the ultimate disappearance of various pieces of evidence, tracks or symbols in the novel bear out this overall crisis stating a break in the dialectic of fact and meaning.

As repeatedly asserted (by Deleuze and Genette, among others), there is no repetition without variation, and the resulting gap is-almost invariably-filled with comment, as if it were in the nature of repetition to gloss on its own occurrence. Distance and comment being also inherent in ironic discourse, this essay focuses on the way DeLillo 's writing exploits the affinities between repetition and irony.