Le Phénomène des textes jumeaux : l’acte d’autocorrection (dialogue entre Andreï Tarkovski et Arséni Tarkovski, et autres exemples de textes jumeaux d’un écrivain/artiste des XXe et XXIe siècles)

Doctoral thesis (2023)

This thesis analyses the texts of authors who developed the capacity to regularly apply different systems of expression in their creative writing/art. These writers/artists generally experiment with ... [more ▼]

This thesis analyses the texts of authors who developed the capacity to regularly apply different systems of expression in their creative writing/art. These writers/artists generally experiment with poetic/prosaic, verbal/visual forms or several languages. One of the artistic results that they can produce, consciously or unconsciously, is a “twin text,” the object of the current study. The objective of the present research is to establish the concept of twin texts as a cultural supranational phenomenon, propose a method to identify and study them, and suggest reasons why the author creates them systematically. The twin texts are two or more « texts » (verbal and/or visual) that are linked to each other on the thematic level by repeating their images or plots or by showing the same characters, often in a contradictory way. Twin texts can be the result of a non-monolingual situation and non-identified artistic position of an author. For these reasons, we find twin texts among émigré and translingual writers, « non-professionals » (prose writers creating poems or artists applying verbal forms of expression, and vice versa), and other writers/artists whose identity can be defined as « multiple ». By elaborating a series of images, the author of twin texts is placed in a situation described by Mikhail Bakhtin as polyphonic. By being above the meanings his/her works contain, the author of twin texts establishes a space for dialogue. In other words, the writer/artist is not above the text, but above all the texts, « avant-texte », to borrow this term from genetic criticism. [less ▲]