« Le désert progresse » : mirages postmodernes de l’Ouest américain dans les fictions françaises et québécoises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the representation of the American desert in contemporary French and Québécois fiction, where it is often portrayed as an expanding, destabilizing force that overwhelms the narrative space. It investigates how Francophone authors engage with this landscape through a postmodern lens that reflects anxieties about American cultural and geopolitical dominance, while also exploring the desert as a space for narrative experimentation. The analysis engages with how the notion of desertification shifts from its colonial connotations – tied to France’s civilizing mission in the Sahara – to a broader metaphor for environmental collapse and civilizational decline. Drawing on narratological, comparative, and ecocritical methodologies, this study identifies recurring textual strategies, including narrative embedding, the aesthetics of the abyss, and the destabilization of linear temporality. It situates the desert as a narrative and geographic interstice, where Hollywood influence, colonial legacies, and European sensibilities intersect to form a network of aesthetic and ideological tensions. The findings reveal that Francophone fiction moves beyond a simple rivalry with U.S. cultural production, shifting from initial postmodern estrangement to a more autonomous reappropriation of the desert, especially in the Québécois context, where decolonial and ecological concerns reshape the desert imaginary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".