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Drawing on Jacques Lacan's discourse of the capitalist and recent discussions on the sinthome, this thesis offers an art-historical and critical account of the prominence acquired by the figure of the doll in European and American visual culture since 1989. A paradigmatic figure of the historical avant-gardes, and of Surrealist photography in particular, the life-size doll has been typically associated to the Freudian uncanny as return of the repressed and its connections to castration and lack. This thesis argues that this theoretical framework has become inadequate, both to account for the aesthetic and formal qualities of the contemporary forms of the doll, and to relate to the new subjective structures of the current discourse of civilisation. The thesis discusses recent photographic and cinematic works that can be seen to register an aesthetic and psychological shift in the way the life-size doll is put at work. There are case studies on Olivier Rebufa's photographic series Bimbeloterie (1989-2016), Stephan Gladieu's photographic documentary Silicone Love (2009), about the life of men living with sex dolls, Laurie Simmons's large-scale, pictorial photographic project The Love Doll (2009-11) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007, Gillespie), featuring a life-size doll as a non-human actor. Articulating psychoanalytic aesthetic theory with a cultural history of dolls, I start this project through an analysis of the modernist treatment of inanimate human replicas, mapping its traditional theoretical links to the notions of mimicry, the informe, the uncanny, the punctum and the (Lacanian) picture as field of the gaze. Working through a consideration of the historicity of the unconscious and of the particular organisation of jouissance within the discourse of the capitalist, in the subsequent chapters I offer close formal analyses of works that explore the figure of the doll in its implications with a condition of visuality and a structure of subjectivity unconcerned with lack and desire. The heightened hybridity of these art forms is analysed through a consideration of the doll's traditional implications with doubling, narcissism and the maternal, in view of the post-Oedipal ramifications of the capitalist's discourse. Trying to think aesthetically through the new clinical and theoretical territories opened by recent Lacanian debates about new symptoms, ordinary psychosis and the sinthome, this thesis problematises a traditional understanding of the doll as emblem of a traumatic encounter with the repressed and of visuality as field of the gaze. The doll emerges in this study as a narcissistic supplement, rather than a cypher of anamorphosis. In conclusion, the thesis argues that the contemporary doll is a device allied to the effort of creating a modicum of psychic consistence, at a time when the crisis of desire, as an effect of what has been called the ‘evaporation of the Father', imposes an individual creative solution to the problem of the Real.

Abstract: This thesis explores how the couple form is represented in four filmic objects: Her (2013), Bladerunner 2049 (2017), Ex Machina (2015), and “Be Right Back,” an episode of the TV series Black Mirror. I will argue that each of these films demonstrate that the couple fixates on the discreteness between the self and an ecological/ontological other. Further, the form is maintained through the repetitive pursuit of impossible closure, a teleology for teleology’s sake that reinscribes the couple’s ties to reproductive futurity. I will read the copy as motif within these objects, using it to elaborate on this pursuit of closure, showing that exchanges of coupled desire are dictated by their coherence or incoherence with a presupposed individual fantasy. I will argue that the copy in these films demonstrates a different approach to temporality and desire, one that emphasizes the convergence of multiple experiences and perceptions to produce an effect that is momentary and contingent, instead of presupposed. Exploring Lee Edelman’s figure of the sinthomosexual and its differing relationship to the copy, I will describe how Her and “Be Right Back” feature an alternate relationship to the sinthome that holds what is interpreted as meaning by the individual and what exists outside that meaning in tandem, and therefore facilitates the emergence of a new intimacy outside the hegemonic couple form.

Abstract: The dissertation focuses on the temporal-spatial representations of the ecological ideologies of modernity in the writings of Canadian authors Georges Bugnet, Sheila Watson, and Howard O’Hagan, Russian authors Andrei Bitov and Tatiana Tolstaia, and Polish author Czesław Miłosz. The concept of ecology is used in a broader sense, based on its etymology of “dwelling-saying,” whereby the ecological ideologies of modernity are examined as both explicitly stated and implied in the narratives and descriptions, reflections and beliefs regarding the proper dwelling place of humans, their ethos. Temporal-spatial unity, or “chronotope” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, is posited as the main principle of artistic organization of the ecologically relevant narratives. Chronotope sustains the works’ ecological and ecomimetic field within its given ideological and artistic perspectives (optical, mythological, or philosophical) and points to a wide range of artistic representations. Some of these representations include the paradisiac chronotope of origin fantasies, the cyclic time of nature and of the mythologized construction of natural humans, the places of the meeting of pre-modernity and modernity, along with the symbolism of elements and landscape formations. The eco-ideological stances and perspectives assumed by particular characters, narrators, or by ekphrastic descriptions are unraveled in connection with identified effects of defamiliarization, inherent to the discussed writings that make ecology as human dwelling-saying their key inquiry. The underlying methodological tools for the interpretations of ecological ideologies and the strategies of their defamiliariation are philosophical concepts of Jacques Lacan (the Symbolic, object petit a, Borromean knot, sinthome, foreclosure) and Martin Heidegger (Dasein, Ereignis, concealedness-unconcealedness, physis). Posing the human subject as an entity of time, Miłosz in his poetry and prose (the novel The Issa Valley) is preoccupied with the ontic multiplicity and at the same time individuality of beings. His poetic perception is grounded in the corporeal propinquity between subject and object, but he seeks the meaning beyond the earthly domain of Eros in the field of primordial time. Miłosz’s efforts at laying bare the gap between the environment and our perceptions, necessarily subjected to systems of signification, as well as his longing for the mystery of the originary event that marks our transcendence into time, echo in Bitov’s prose (the novellas “Man in a Landscape,” “Birds” and “Dacha District,” and the novel Awaiting Monkeys) as a systematic suspicion with regard to our capacities of unobstructed viewing of landscape, paired with a series of defamiliarizing techniques that, by estranging the environment as our home of being, paradoxically help make it closer and fuller. The origin fantasies, vital in the writings of Miłosz and Bitov, find their ideological counterparts in Georges Bugnet’s novel The Forest, which breaks down the enlightenment colonialist and Romantic ideologies revolving around the idea of the virgin wilderness. The defamiliarization of ecological ideologies in Bugnet, as well as in Watson’s short story “Rough Answer” and her novel The Double Hook, is enriched by genderly marked spatial elements of the environment that procure a peculiar distribution of ecomimetic characteristics of masculine and feminine chronotopes. Characteristic of The Double Hook and O’Hagan’s novel Tay John trickster narratives, deprived of auctorial authority, help uncover the ideological aberrations by contrasting the Symbolic and the pre-Symbolic chronotopes and by demythologizing historically and philosophically significant stances of humans in their relations with environment. The originary event of its appropriation in the discourses of modernity, in which the cyclic time of myth changes to linear time of history and the immediate environment becomes a subject to ecology, rendering the environment as human’s home of being estranged in the Symbolic order, is at the centre of the discussion of Tay John and Tolstaia’s novel The Slynx. The ideologically marked environmental chronotopes, functioning as objects-causes-of-desire, and the prevalence of origin fantasies are the main threads that tie together the selected authors and their works. The identification and problematization of ecological ideologies and their temporal-spatial representations in non-related national literatures open literary studies to the new field of interpretational capacities that ecocritique invests into the discipline of comparative literature.