Explorer les marges du ‘gothic villain‘ dans Le Moine (1796) de Lewis et Dracula (1897) de Stoker : représentations de l‘abjection dans les ‘transcréations‘ cinématographiques de Dominik Moll (2011) et Francis Ford Coppola (1992)

Abstract

Although the eras, places and protagonists underlying the diegesis of these two bestsellers (written in English but whose French translation was just as resounding) are different, Lewis and Stoker, a hundred years apart, achieve a representation of abjection that feeds on the same aesthetic of horror (theorized by Ann Radcliffe) which served as a pillar for the development of a whole section of the “fantastique-merveilleux”, a todorovian category rooted in the unexplained supernatural, in a context where the devil seems to explicitly or implicitly pull several strings. From this perspective, with the help of a few case studies centered mainly on two manifestations of the abject — the corpse and the satanic presence, we propose to question the film adaptation of these two novels to answer the following question: does abjection — both in its psychological and phenomenological dimension as developed by Julia Kristeva, and in the cultural or anthropological aspect, as developed by Georges Bataille, although solicited in both novels, export as effectively among moviegoers who, on the one hand, are overexposed to an escalation of macabre images in Coppola‘s Dracula, while, on the other hand, they must imagine them in Moll's Monk?