Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

42writing/reading itself. The missed encounter is, for Hawthorne, a matter of the impossibility ofwriting history from the perspective of romantic narrative and symbolization.To grasp the extra-literary dimensions of American literature while maintaining a deepappraisal of its literary qualities, recent critics of American literature were faced with thechallenge of interdisciplinarity. By asking what direction “the writing of literary history [may]take in the aftermath of deconstruction,” (83) Gregory S. Jay’s America the Scrivener:Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History argues that the archival recovery of Americanhistory and literature can only be the result of interdisciplinarity. According to him, “each writeroffers a powerful example of the interplay among the literary, the historical, the political, and thesubjective” (xii). It is within this context of debate that this chapter will revisit certainassumptions about the traumatic missed encounters in Hawthorne’s textencounters between thecharacters, between the reader and the text, between letters, between the living and the dead, andbetween the author/archivist and the archive.Studying Hawthorne’s conception of the missed encounter, and in light of psychoanalysisand deconstruction, I shall examine how the missed encounter unfolds in the realm of the archiveand in trauma. The temporality of Hester’s scarlet letter alludes to the temporality and materialityof the Real. However, this symbol acquires its signification within the epistemic and ideologicalcontexts of nineteenth-century American literature and its obsession with staging the challenge ofinterpretation or what Irwin calls “reciprocal questions of the origin and limits of symbolizationand the symbolization of origins and ends” (xi). Accordingly, stable meaning and coherentsubjectivity are under siege and threatened by the multiplicity of interpretations.