Bruit blanc ; suivi de Les dispositifs sonores dans la poésie de Marie Uguay et de Joséphine Bacon
This research-creation M.A. thesis explores the narrative avenues of the impacts of sound and its effects to control the body. The creative writing work will show the mechanisms, feelings, and the conscious or unconscious constraints that are facing different characters with the urban soundscape. Those mechanisms, whether they are interiorized or not by the characters, will open a reflexion on the dispositif, as imagined by Foucault and later interpreted by Agamben. The dispositif (or apparatus) creates, between the subjectivity on which it acts and all of the contents it holds hidden or unhidden, a « process of subjectification » or « desubjectification »: it organizes, it creates a network of forces upon the subject. Bruit blanc, the creative writing work of this thesis, places characters that are hunted by ideals of a liberation of the body by music, whether this liberation − or its failure − is spatial, temporal, social or psychic. This work will also give space to an analysis of two poetry booklets: Un thé dans la toundra/ Nipishapui nete mushuat (2013) by Joséphine Bacon and L'Outre-vie (1979) by Marie Uguay. Those authors create upon reading a sonic and vocal dimension, a sensibility − even a hypersensibility − to hearing, especially through the teueikan in Bacon's poems and through racines sonores (« sound roots ») for Uguay. Their books present many esthetical and philosophical considerations on hearing as a physical and physiological phenomenon: sound becomes a vector throughout which we can imagine subjectivity in unsettling spatial and temporal possibilities that the body seems to forbid. R.Murray Schafer names « schizophonia » the splitting between what makes the sound and what transmits it which comes with the proliferation of recording technologies. This delayed connection to music that can be produced far from the bodies of musicians (when concerning instrumental music) plays a role in this network of forces, in this apparatus that keeps our interest. How can we think those effects of decontextualisation? Bruit blanc embodies the modalities and the effects of an enunciative voice that lives with different representations of a body hearing as a receptor of delayed realities, allowing to imagine the body in unquieting ways;to think about the possibility of listening to others, and to the listening of otherness.
Marie Uguay Joséphine Bacon Sound studies Contemporary poetry Creative writing Desubjectification Places and spaces Postcolonialisme Postcolonialism