The Construction of Bodies. Experimental Writing in France and Québec (1970-2020)

The French and Québécois poetic scenes of the ‘70s share an "obsession for body, text, and writing," Nicole Brossard writes. This dissertation focuses on a transatlantic generation of writers emerging from an intense moment of linguistic and political theorization of both writing and bodies. I explore how the latter merge with text and writing to behin objects of theory, investigation, and poetic construction. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno named “construction” as a paradigm of modern art ; semiotics united writing and reading around the “construction of meaning.” In this dissertation, I propose the concept of “construction of bodies” to define the new approaches to writing bodies that emerge from what Adorno calls “experimental comportment.” I provide a historical and conceptual categorization that takes two major forms. The first, responding to constructivism, defines bodies as artefacts borne of writing and constructed as text. The second, responding to social constructionism, presents bodies in conflict between extraliterary discourses of power and how writing might deconstruct these definitions. This dissertation comprises three studies. The first defines the conceptual and metaphorical bind between body and text; the second focuses more closely on the construction of gendered bodies; the third explores the biotechnological implications of the concept of construction, notably through a dialog with disability studies. I define the construction of bodies as a poetic, political, and historical paradigm whose generational importance reveals itself in various forms within a French and Québécois corpus centered around Anne-Marie Albiach, Nicole Brossard, Dominique Fourcade, Liliane Giraudon, and France Théoret.