Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

10will try to provide an explanation of how the missed encounter might be read through tropologyand how it becomes itself the trope of modern America. Revisiting the literature on the missedencounter, the dissertation begins from the premise that there is a missed encounter at the centerof everything and claims that the proper referent of the missed encounter lies as much in thesphere of the linguistic as in the extra-linguistic (material and ideological) reality. By holding thatpoint, by staying focused on the narrative scenes of the missed encounter, we can make itpossible to relocate the “missed encounter” within the realm of the subject and its variouspsychological, political, and historical realities. Only through reading literature as the site and citeof the residuum or the Lacanian Thing can we have a grasp on the non-literary or politicalunconscious, of the literary texts. If we limit the “missed encounter” to translucent intrusion ofthe Thing (the kernel of the Real) that must always be chased but can never be attained, werelegate it to constitutive impossibility. Indeed, there is a traumatic absencewhat Lacan calls a“missed encounterat the heart of the classic American literature. My primary concern is totracethrough an anasemic reading that brings together various discourses on subjectivity,signification, and traumathe roots of the missed encounter and to show how the temporality ofthe signifier ultimately meets the temporality of the Tuché.The aim of the dissertation is to revisit, through the study of Hawthorne’s The ScarletLetter and Melville’s Moby-Dick, the missed encounter and point to the impossibility inherent toit. Why Melville and Hawthorne? We will see in many instances that Melville wanted somethingfrom Hawthorne, something Hawthorne could not give. In fact, Moby-Dick could be read asMelville’s letter to Hawthorne. Hawthorne and Melville: two major figures of the Americanliterary canon, two friends, two interrelated perceptions of the word and the world. There is