Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

226Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, adeconstruction avant la lettre, serves as a bridge between the anxieties of “symbolization” and thedynamics of Orientalism. Although Luther S. Luedtke’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romanceof the Orient offers an analysis of Hawthorne’s involvement in the symbology of the Orient, itdoes not account for the suspension of meaning between failed symbol and obscure allegory anddoes not offer a satisfying analysis of the various stains and symptoms that determine classicAmerican literature. It is within this context of debate that this chapter will reconsider certainassumptions about the plethora of missed encounters in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s texts. Myargument is that fiction, much like any other discourse, is, clearly, overcharged with theory and incharge of the representing the missed encounter, while assuming an inscrutable charge ofeffect/affect. The shift from the modern to the postmodern, from the literary to the non-literary,and from the local to the global, from reality to the Real, and so on is always already shaped bythe economy of the missed encounter.Many Western and Eastern critics consider the union of the East and the West impossibleand speak about the encounter as an antagonistic one. Using Freudian and Lacanianpsychoanalytic models, the object of my analysis is not to study the sites of the presence ofAmerica in the literary and cultural imagination of Europe (which has been the focus of manystudies and critics). However, the focus of one major part of this chapter is the missed encounterbetween the Orient and the Occident, and particularly America and the various directions andforms this missed encounter takes and entails. In order to define itself, America had to constructand eventually destruct its Other(s). In other words, to emerge as a modern nation state, Americahad to have Others. Said’s Orientalism lays bare these binary constructions. He sees Orientalism