| dc.description.abstract | Michel Leiris is an unusual writer in the French literature of the twentieth century. Leiris is not only interested in the past memory, but also in the ephemeral dream which is one of the favorite subjects of writing in his entire life. Different from other contemporary writers, Leiris has published his only collection of dreams entitled Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour, when he was alive. This peculiar work is a kind of autobiographical writing based on the author’s adventure between day and night, wakefulness and sleep, clarity and confusion. As a matter of fact, it should be considered as a profound unconscious investigation of the author himself.
This thesis is mainly a study of Michel Leiris’s texts of/about dreams and his paradoxical position toward the psychoanalysis through the writing and rewriting of his dreams. In chapter one, the method of the interpretation of dreams established by Freud and the use of dreams by the surrealists will be briefly introduced. In doing so, we hope to determine how much the psychoanalysis and the surrealism influence Leiris in his conception of the dream and how Leiris describes and constructs his world of dreams out of these two models. In the second chapter, with the analysis of figures, symbols and fragments, we aim to explore the dream texts respectively on the levels of narrative, language, form and style in order to uncover the mystery of the author’s dream world. In the final chapter, the emphasis will be put on the process of rewriting, so as to decipher and explain the numerous changes from Journal to Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. In turn, the examination of the transformations from one text to another helps to reveal the ambiguous attitude of Leiris toward the psychoanalysis.
The (re)writing of the dreams is a complex and fabulous work that transforms the floating images into words. With the dreams, we find an important piece of puzzle which completes the whole life the author has always strived to seize.
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