Contenu du sommaire : L'Amérique entre science et fiction.

One of few nineteenth-century explorers to achieve popularity in the U.S., John C. Fremont promoted innovative scientific methods. This paper focuses on his use of the daguerreotype, especially in 1853, and the unusual attention he paid to his daguerreotypist Solomon Carvalho 's work. This seems to have reflected Fremont's political aims. From his attitude, as well as from Carvalho's narrative, it appears that the daguerreotype, while providing a "scientific" guarantee, served a promotional goal, and contributed to a mythological image of the West.

With The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, published within months of the actual discovery of the Antarctic continent, Poe wrote the obviously fictitious tale of a voyage of exploration to the South Pole but carefully disguised his artistic enterprise "under the garb " of a scientific and realistic account. The text thus exhibits what may be called "referential markers" intertwined with their rhetorical counterpart, "fictional markers" highlighting its literary nature. The two series of apparently contradictory signs constantly intersect without ever cancelling each other and generate the final whiteness, a representation, perhaps, of the writer's annihilation into his own creation.

The reader of White Noise stumbles repeatedly against opaque units, spectacularly unrelated to the on-going narrative. Rather than brush these difficulties aside as unimportant quirks we propose to take them seriously and even to claim centrality for them, emboldened as we are by various "order from noise" theories (Bateson, Atlan, Hofstadter, Morin, Castoriadis). Analyzing representative examples of local obscurities (from oxymoron to paradox and tangled hierarchies) we try to show their role in the global economy of the novel.

If logic and mathematics as scientific languages are meant to bring out order in the world, they cause disorder when pervading other languages. This paper examines how DeLillo's End Zone pictures the dysfunctioning of speech and the helpless linguistic fight of those who try to restore order.

Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers' fifth novel, is a scientific fiction. Most of the action takes place in a computer laboratory where the protagonists, a computer scientist and a writer, are working together in order to perfect a computer with an immense knowledge of literature, and capable of analyzing literary texts. Powers updates one of the central myths of occidental literature : the creation of an artificial being, capable of thinking as a human being does, and arousing both hopes and fears in its observers. The novel ultimately questions the boundaries between what Charles Percy Snow has called the "two cultures" (i.e. science and the humanities).

The American movie industry has undoubtedly lost a large part of its artistic creativity since the beginning of the blockbuster era in the seventies. No doubt Star Wars or Jaws were important movies, but they opened up for the industry an era in which the special effects, the overblown noisy soundtrack and the numerous (and often incoherent) action scenes have become a standard. The question is now to know if there is a way back for American cinema. But such a situation must not prevent an objective analysis of the technological fictions made in Hollywood, those films in which techonology becomes a subject (Jurassic Park) or a power (Mission : Impossible). From Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg has been exploring the connections between technology and the mystical contact with otherwordly forms, the sublime emotion in front of a revelation, revisiting a traditional form of the Hollywood biblical or religious melodrama. Moreover, Jurassic Park takes the dinosaur park as a metaphor for both the power of technology and the power of the image, the power to provoke a mystical revelation. Whether it succeeds in doing so or whether it resolves itself into an enigma, a sign to be decyphered, gives the film its dynamics.

The decline of the movie theater is perhaps one of the most significant manifestations of the evolution of the US movie industry. Consequently, the emergence of new technologies (television, cable, home video, to name but a few) has been interpreted as a sign of the potential demise of the Hollywood cinema. Movies are sometimes depicted as little more than commodities peddled to the general public by an entertainment industry obsessed with state-of-the-art technology and profit rather than artistic achievement. By focusing on spectatorship as well as the exhibition end of the film trade, this paper endeavors to show that these new communication technologies cannot really be construed as a threat to the Hollywood cinema, or for that matter to cinema at large.