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Vol. 03 No. 2, April 2004

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/31205

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    Contents - Belphégor Vol 3 No 2
    (2004-04) Frigerio, Vittorio
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    Perrot, Jean, ed. Pinocchio. Entre texte et image. Bruxelles: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, 2003. 269 p. ISBN 90-5201-171-0
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004-04) Vernier-Larochette, Beatrice
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    Monstruosité et réflexion métalittéraire dans Le Fantà´me de l'Opéra de Gaston Leroux
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Santurenne, Thierry
    Hidden between the lines of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera is a reflection on the relationship between the popular writer and official literature, illustrated metaphorically through the image of the Opera itself. Their ambiguity is evidenced by the characteristics of the writer's representative in the novel: Erik, the "phantom". His monstrosity is both a symbol of the marginal position of the popular writer, and the sign of the writer's familiarity with a fantastic universe marginalized by "academic" authors.
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    Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Morrey, Douglas
    Like her last film Beau travail (1998), Trouble Every Day (2001) sees Claire Denis taking a sexual narrative that has been familiarised through theoretical (often psychoanalytic) interpretation and filming it in such a way as to rediscover the strangeness at its heart. Beau travail's somewhat predictable tale of latent homosexuality emerging in the homosocial arena of a military camp was rendered ambiguous by the film's troubling fascination with powerful male bodies. Trouble Every Day, meanwhile, evokes two archetypal sexual metaphors that have been explored at length by critical theory: the Romantic cliché of the woman whose pathological sexuality necessitates her imprisonment in a gothic mansion; and the figure of the vampire as metaphor for a predatory sexual appetite. But these overly familiar narrative tropes are newly invigorated by Denis's singular approach to filmmaking which challenges our hasty interpretation in a number of ways: Through the imaginative use and abuse of stars and star personas (Béatrice Dalle's sexual hysteria and Vincent Gallo's lupine features and rampant egotism); Through the elliptical, not to say minimalist, approach to narrative;Through the discreet appeals to genre (the gothic locations, the vampire movie that never quite declares itself as such);Through the use of music; But, perhaps most of all, through Denis's filming of bodies and landscapes, bodies in landscapes and bodies as landscapes, all of which, in Trouble Every Day, turns around the obsessively recurring image of a woman's naked body covered in a blood that may or may not be her own. This article presents a close textual analysis of Denis's film, exploring the ways in which the details listed above serve to trouble our confident reading of the film by insisting on the unutterable strangeness of desire.
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    Robot géant: De l'instrumentalisation à  la fusion
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Suvilay, Bounthavy
    Through the history of a sub-genre of science-fiction (cartoons featuring giant robots), this article attempts to identify how the robot switches roles, going from simple instrument to essential part of the plot. The various types or relationship between the machine and those who guide it reflect real-life technical developments. They show an ever-closer link between the mechanic and the organic. Thus, Japanese science-fiction is a mirror of the sociocultural history of a country that has undergone an accelerated process of industrialization (during the Meiji period), that has made reconstruction and technological development its main goals in the post-war era, and that nowadays has to deal with growing social disengagement.
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    Il terrore e lo sguardo
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) La Polla, Franco
    What is horror's discourse and what is the discourse on horror? The inventor of terror is power – a concept of power that has its ultimate horizon in the divine. But in hell, on the screen or on the page, horror is elsewhere. Whether it is "hybris" or sin, fear has a different origin. Fear is in the eyes. Fear is the awareness of being the object of another's scrutiny. The cause of fear is not that "increment" that comes about with the realization that something abnormal is happening, but the "lack" that we perceive when we are being observed - what Lacan calls "le trou du sujet" (the emptiness in the subject). The legions of monsters we have inherited from tradition are figures born of a necessity to cover up this lack, as well as historical evidence of the repressive power that generated them. Structurally, they are the trace of the activity of the subconscious from which they originate, which we constantly transform into fear.
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    Horreur des villes maudites dans l'oeuvre de H. P. Lovecraft
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Sayer, Frederic
    Howard Phillips Lovecraft is forever weaving the same spider-web, in which both his hero and his readers invariably get caught. The real curse of his ancient cities (R'lyeh, Innsmouth, Arkham, Marblehead, Kingsport, Dunwich and so on...) does not originate in their chaotic, neo-gothic architecture, nor in their degenerate inhabitants and their pagan cults. It is rather to be found in the combination of attraction and repulsion that these elements produce for the hero, who is a true double of the reader. The exploration of these cities is the equivalent of a dive in a deep inner space, where sexual and masochistic scenarios are repeated compulsively, until they provoke that shiver of fear that is also pleasure. That is the paradoxical curse of the cities' symbolic spaces, where both the fanatical author and the fanatical reader are irresistably attracted by the hybrid and viscous bodies of their inhabitants. This compulsive repetition is in our view the main reason for the numerous continuations of Lovecraft's work by other authors. The cursed city is the symbolic space of sexual disgust and fear of contact with the other. It is such a powerful archè that it allows this narrative universe to be continued through the work of a wide variety of authors.
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    Mécanismes d'apparition de la terreur dans les légendes fantastiques de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Schreiber-Di Cesare, Christelle
    Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Spanish writer, 1836-1870) is the author of a series of fantastic "legends", featuring mysterious and unknown worlds, constructed to evoke feelings of fear and terror in the reader. One of the sources of terror romantic writers used to prefer, was the suggestion of the existence of diabolical powers. The romantics were fascinated by popular superstitions, as well as by black masses, and were convinced that each man is prey to both the divine and the diabolical. In Bécquer's legends space is modified in order to appear more terrorizing. Deep forests and old ruins bathed in unusual lighting abound. His writing style itself is punctuated by enumerations, hacked punctuation and word repetitions. Together with sets of images that express a feeling of vagueness, elusiveness and imprecision, it creates a mood of constant uneasiness. Anxiety is increased by nocturnal settings, menacing sunsets and starless skies, that evoke the superstitious beliefs of times gone by, when the night was the reign of the Sabbath and crime struck at midnight. Terrifying events also often happen at set dates: Christmas Eve, All-Saints-Day. Bécquer's stories bring back to mind the superstitious character of the Middle-Ages and the weight of religion, when the people's fear of divine punishment was such that all activities were organized according to a precise calendar. Bécquer's characters seem perfectly ordinary. That only enhances the terrifying impact of the sudden onset of the fantastic. Bécquer often uses stock characters from medieval popular culture such as the shepherd or the troubadour, who are more open to supernatural beliefs. The terror they feel when confronted by mysterious happenings creates a doubt in the mind of the reader, that lasts until the explosion of the fantastic element in the story. Other characters are skeptics, or appear to be, even though in their deepest heart they also believe in the supernatural, but are unwilling to admit it. Their oscillations between doubt and belief enhance the feeling of suspense and make the final scene all the more terrifying. Bécquer's style itself aims to create a feeling of terror. His stories are full of deliberately vague expressions such as "I thought I heard" or "I believed I could see". Metaphors and comparisons abound, made even more disquieting since the narrator and the characters are unable to clearly express what it is they are seeing. Hearing and eyesight are mobilized to perceive the fantastic, but the coming of the terror is prepared just as much by the power of the imagination. The effects of terror, however, are concrete: the heart breaks, jaws snap, hair stands on end. Finally, most legends end tragically, with death or insanity. The feeling of terror and anxiety does not fade away. Each tragic end is like a small apocalypse, mirroring the universal, ancestral fear of death.
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    La Lecture du fantastique: Terreurs littéraires, peurs sociales
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Soldini, Fabienne
    In recent years, horror stories have become more and more popular with a socially diverse reading public. This article, based on a study of readers' approach to horror stories, will deal with how artificial fears are constructed. First, we will examine what motivates people when they read fantastic horror tales. Secondly, we will attempt to define the cognitive and emotional implications of narrative fear. Third, we will deal with how these tales are read and how readers approach or avoid narrative fear. Finally, we will show how, sometimes, these strategies fail and fictional fear becomes real.
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    Horreur et fantastique: L'Animalité dans le film Nosferatu de Murnau
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Margat, Claire
    Fantastic and horror, as they are experienced through literature, do not create fear in the same way. The feeling of the fantastic comes from the acceptance of the existence of a strange and disquieting alternate universe. This universe can sometimes provoke terror, but never horror. The fantastic and horror are antagonistic forces that attract and repel each other at the same time. Horror reduces. It reduces life to organic matter and the living to substance. The fantastic arises from an opposite tendency. It moves towards alterity, even though its movement is interrupted by fear of loss. In Murnau's film Nosferatu, however, fantastic and horror are not incompatible: the visual poetry of the images carries a soupçon of horror that does not take away from the feeling of the fantastic.
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    La Terreur des 'Maîtres du temps' fantastiques
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Dufayet, Nathalie
    Forever concerned with objectivity, the 19th century opens the era of triumphant positivism. All sciences, from physics to history, will therefore deal exclusively with facts, their analysis and the links between them. Fantastic literature works against the hegemony of scientific thought. It portrays a more or less mythical and distant past as the source of the disquieting events that dog its (anti) heroes. The power of the past over the present becomes an archetype, embodied in certain characters I call, somewhat ironically, "the masters of time". This category includes various specialists of the human sciences: archaeologists (La Gradiva by Jensen), librarians (La Cour de Canavan by J.P. Brennan), historian (Number 13 by M.R. James, an exemplary text), etc. These specialists are the representatives of the new attitude of man, that aims to analyze reality and neutralize it by framing it within the leading epistemological context. This article will show how the past becomes dominant in these narratives, functioning within a circular system that ensures the alienating recurrence of this "contaminated" time. Rather than dealing strictly with the anti-scientific or anti-modernist perspective inherent in such a view, this article examines the portrayed perversion of the human sciences, as the fundamental component of a formal universe that reveals the specificity of fantastic fiction. This is done largely through an analysis of M.R. James' Number 13. In the countless reflections between the subject, reality and fiction, the article attempts to understand the phenomenology that leads us progressively from the "inside" to the "outside", from the terror of epistemological time to that of the personal time of the reading experience.
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    Psychological Terror and Social Fears in Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Bettanin, Giuliano
    Science-fiction and horror are closely related genres, both belonging to the larger domain of fantastic literature. They share a partly common history. This article aims to examine how Philip K. Dick, one of the most important science-fiction authors of the twentieth century, approached horror themes. The main horror-related themes in Dick's novels are: - apocalyptic post-nuclear war scenarios (Breakfast at Twilight)- fear of foreigners in the cold-war world of the fifties (Martians come in Clouds, Explorers We)- some aliens and robots- an original mystical-religious theme (Upon the dull earth, Faith of Our Fathers). This article deals mostly with Dick's short stories and one of his first novels, Eye in the Sky. This novel blends horror elements with Dick's well-known topic of an opposition between a subjective and an objective universe. It also mixes religious and social themes and shows how Dick both uses and interprets paranoiac delusions (one of the most important aspects of gothic novels and a constant element of his work).
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    Horreur, hyperbole et réticence chez Lovecraft
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Lazzarin, Stefano
    The work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) represents a kind of « discursus interruptus » on horror and on the literary language that can best represent it. Lovecraft invents a new kind of horror, more hyperbolic than that of his predecessors. What makes it wholly special, however, is that he manages to weave a rhetoric of the inexpressible around an object that is inexpressible by definition. This article offers an examination of certain aspects of Lovecraft's poetics of supernatural horror, concentrating on its most perfect embodiment: a structure presenting several superimposed levels of horror, that can be found in tales such as The Rats in the Wall, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Mountains of Madness, The Shadow out of Time.
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    Un Souvenir d'enfance de J. R. R. Tolkien
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Thibault, Franck
    Tolkien's work is home to many terrifying monsters. The spider is one of its most peculiar. It is constantly present in his novels and undergoes changes in its role and function. Tolkien does not use the spider simply to play with the avowed queen of the bestiary of terror, nor to just evoke one of mankind's ancestral fears. From the giant spiders of Mirkwood Forest in The Hobbit, to the awful Shelob of The Lord of the Rings and the equally scary Ungoliant of The Silmarillion, Tolkien makes its creature a progressively complete incarnation of Evil. The spider, however, also has a specific function within the plot and within the hero's path towards initiation. Finally, Tolkien's spider works as a kind of symbolic core that refers the reader back to his own terrors as much as to those who have secretly haunted the author since childhood.
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    La Planète Mars dans les romans de science-fiction anglo-saxons des années 1990: La Peur du monstre de pierre
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2004) Villers, Aurelie
    When it deals with the planet Mars, nineteen-nineties science-fiction faces an alternative: either the heroes adapt to Mars' hard conditions (and that's "pantropy"), or they adapt Mars to make it livable for human beings (and that's "terraformation"). But no matter whether they want to cultivate it, as in the first case, or to exorcise it, as in the second, the nature of this planet remains terrifying and monster-like. The fear it inspires, then, is inscribed in its soil and its rock. Mars is a monster of hardness, cold and death. The planet becomes a mineral monster, and its first inhabitants take on the same characteristics by a process of metonymy.
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    Gely, Cyril et Eric Rouquette. Signé Dumas. Les Impressions Nouvelles. Paris, Bruxelles, 2003. 93 p. ISBN : 2-906131-66-0.
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre., 2004-04) Frigerio, Vittorio
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