Écriture autobiographique et sceau cicatriciel dans L’Ascension du Haut Mal de David B.
This thesis aims to detail the peculiarities of the autobiographical speech in Epileptic to capture the poetics signature of David B. as a scar seal reporting the fraternal disease and letting him deal with it, through autobiographical strategies strengthening textually and visually the identity of the author-character in the story. The first chapter is a study of self-narratives in comics. A historical overview of the development of the French autobiographical comics in Europe allows us to include Epileptic in the protest movement led by alternative publishing houses in the early 1990s. Then the state of play in terms of theories of autobiography in comics establishes the criteria by which this work responds to the autobiographical genre. The next two chapters correspond to the major axes of the self-referential discourse in Epileptic: the assumption of an autobiographical pact and the story of the construction of identity of the author. The second chapter explains the means by which formal hybridity, fantasy dimension and intertextual abundance of the work studied alter the autobiographical pact without breaking it. The third chapter demonstrates that the identity development of the character of David B. responds to a logic of opposition, beside his brother, society and even reality, visible even in the aesthetics of the author. The analysis of symptomatic graphics and thematic marks of David B.’s signature as defenses against the tyranny of the illness is performed.
Contemporary comics Autobiography Self-narrative Illness Resilience