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Ausoni, Alain. "En d'autres mots : l'écriture translingue de soi." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e06d8806-9bc2-4be1-ab9a-c1b63ba38541.
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For several reasons, translingual writers, defined here as authors who write in a language that is not their native one, have gained increased visibility in recent years. This is particularly true in the context of French literature where, more frequently than before, and with a more explicit recognition of their particular status, translingual writers have received important literary prizes and have been welcomed into the French Academy. Central to this recognition is their rich and diverse mobilisation of life writing, a corpus curiously neglected in the study of the phenomenon of literary translingualism. This thesis focuses on the writers Andreï Makine, Hector Bianciotti, Vassilis Alexakis, Nancy Huston, Agota Kristof and Katalin Molnár. It demonstrates that the translingual experience, in its capacity to question one's sense of self and provide novel tools for the exploration of one's personal history and subjectivity (conceived as an experience in language), appears eminently suited to the genre of life writing and that, in the current configuration of the French literary space, life writing is demanded from translingual authors. It proposes an original cartography of contemporary translingual literature in French, suggesting that more than any similarities in the conditions of their literary adoption of French, what creates family resemblance between translingual writers is the types of relation with their adopted language that are constructed in their autobiographical texts.
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Ménard, Valérie. "L'influence de Réjean Ducharme chez les écrivains de la génération x." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=83128.
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Generation X has often been defined as being without role models or inspiration. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect a sizeable amount of intertextual references in several Quebecer books written by authors of that generation. In Quebec, these young writer's influences are as distinct as they are diverse, varying from Kerouac to Hemingway and from Sartre to Camus. But concerning their Quebecer role model, one name continually returns, that of Rejean Ducharme.The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the presence of ducharmesque universe in three Generation X novels, namely Le souffle de l'harmattan by Sylvain Trudel, Vamp by Christian Mistral and La rage by Louis Hamelin. Within these novels, we will attempt to find the trail of three typical elements to Ducharme's work: the rejection of conformity, the contempt towards a consumer society, and the substitution of a utopian universe for reality.
According to Francois Ricard, Ducharme belongs to what he calls the "generation lyrique", which is the eldest baby boomers, while Generation X is composed of Baby Boom's youngest members. Interestingly enough, one should expect such a generational conflict between these two cohorts to incite Generation X writers to despite their predecessor. Hence, this thesis will conclude with a few tentative explanations as to why Generation X authors were so driven to choose Rejean Ducharme, a member of the "generation lyrique", to be their role model.
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Boardman, Kirsty Louise. "Notions of time and epoch in contemporary French fiction : Montalbetti, Lenoir & Pireyre." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16398.
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This thesis examines the notions of time and epoch through the works of three contemporary French authors: Christine Montalbetti, Hélène Lenoir and Emmanuelle Pireyre. The theoretical framework for this study draws upon literary criticism, time studies and cultural theory: it investigates in particular the ways in which literary fiction may respond to what has been called a ‘culture of speed' in capitalist economies of the twenty-first century. This culture of speed is traced back two major epochal shifts: the revolution in information technology, which has permitted the generating and sharing of information at exponentially higher speeds, and an increasing consciousness of the vast time cycles within which we might situate our own epoch or individual lives. This work considers the ways in which this collective and paradigmatic shift might be reflected in literary fiction. It examines the representation of new information technologies within these literary works, focusing in particular on the texts' representations of obsessive or compulsive uses of technology and the kinds of anxieties emerging as a result of the ubiquity of these devices. It further questions whether new aesthetic trends, what has been called a ‘post-internet aesthetic', may be emerging in literary fiction in light of some of these changes. Further investigation of the representation of diegetic time within these texts demonstrates that these literary works appear to resist the current time culture of speed and simultaneity, embracing instead the literary devices of repetition and digression while maintaining a dilatory pace. This study also considers the emergence of ‘short-termism' and insularity within these literary texts as reflecting a wider societal trend, especially in light of recent theoretical work on the vast timescales (for example those of the planet's climate cycles) that have become increasingly present in political and journalistic discourses.
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Lhote, Florence. "Poétique de la distance: la guerre d'Algérie et les lettres françaises, 1987-2010." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209009.
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Notre thèse a pour enjeu la poétique de la distance dans les fictions de dix écrivains français et francophones de la seconde génération de la guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962), c'est à dire à distance de cet événement. Leurs fictions, publiées entre 1987 et 2010, interrogent la transmission et la filiation.Doctorat en Langues et lettres
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Downing, Lisa Michelle. "Desire and immobility : situating necrophilia in nineteenth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ccbb5b9e-58da-4d36-901b-bd71112f3c05.
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Bolding, Sharon Lynn Dunkel. "When worlds collide : structure and fantastic in selected 12th- and 13th- century French narratives." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0002/NQ27109.pdf.
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Nardout, Elisabeth. "Le champ littéraire québécois et la France, 1940-50 /." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=72078.
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The decade 1940-1950 represents a decisive stage in the evolution of the relations between the Quebec literary scene and France. Whereas before the war, literary discourse keeps on upholding, in a dogmatic way, the superiority of French culture and literature, the next period is characterized, on the contrary, by a reassessment of this postulate.The historical circumstances justify the setting up of exceptional institutional conditions. Some French writers and critics, in exile in North America, partake, to varying degrees, in the French Canadian literary scene. The backing of these intellectuals is not unrelated to the process of modernization and autonomization undertaken at that time by the major sectors of the Quebecer literary apparatus.
A conflict of interest in the publishing sector as well as ideological differences spark a controversy between Robert Carbonneau and some members of the Comite National des Ecrivains. This "quarrel", to quote Charbonneau, is an unprecedented example of direct confrontation between Quebecer and French literary agents. On this occasion, Robert Charbonneau redefines French Canadian literature outside of France's sphere of influence, France being a country whose status he wishes to limit to that of just one foreign reference among many.
This desire for autonomy can also be found in literary texts which, using means available to them, bear witness to an appreciable decline of the French literature. But whereas literary discourse attempts to resist annexation to French literature, the literary apparatus is subject, upon the Liberation, to a material and symbolic domination by the French authorities, a domination it cannot fight. In this respect, the conditions of literary production in the fifties are paradoxical since the text, while voicing its rejection of the French institution and its French Canadian identity, continues to receive its ultimate consecration from France.
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Handa, Atsuko. "Bridging Sōseki and Murakami : the modernity of Japan through modernist and postmodern prose." Monash University, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5230.
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Turner, Robert Charles Grey. "Counterfeit culture : truth and authenticity in the American prose epic since 1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709455.
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Ganofsky, Marine. "Night in eighteenth-century French libertine fiction (1730-1789)." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610662.
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Dufresne, Virginie. "De Versailles à Clarens : nature et politique dans les jardins littéraires de l'âge classique." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99589.
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During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French garden history witnesses the triumph and then the decline of the French formal garden, to which succeeds the fashion of landscape gardening of foreign inspiration. Integrating and nourishing this debate, the literary texts of that period enable to grasp the stakes that it brings up. The garden notably lends itself to the expression of an emerging sentiment of nature, as well it also serves that of a political thought enlightened by new ideas. Effectively, the treatment that these texts give to the garden is a witness to the revival that installs itself in the way of conceiving nature, and the relation that nature holds with man and the art of the gardens. The garden's topic and scenography are a testimony of changes that in turn affect its imaginary and that of the walk. Finally, the critical discourse exploits the analogy that establishes itself between the art of the gardens and the exercise of power, polarizing the debate around the political metaphor.
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Patterson, Jonathan Hugh Collingwood. "Representations of avarice in early modern France (c.1540-1615) : continuity and change." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610850.
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Monette, Isabelle. "Récritures de récits criminels en France sous l'Ancien Régime." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79966.
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Three original stories are the basis for our study of rewriting during the French Ancien Regime: the story of Thibaud de la Jacquiere, that of the "sorcier Gaufridy" and that of the Marquise de Ganges, which Sade will rewrite as a novel. Having all originated from a "canard", they appear in the 1679 edition of the Histoires tragiques of Francois de Rosset, and two of them can also be found in Francois Gayot de Pitaval's Causes celebres. Each of these stories was rewritten by different authors at least three times. Using Gerard Genette's theory of the narrative, we will analyse the processes of transformation that the rewriting operates in the text, as well as the changes it imposes to its original meaning. The number of rewritings of each text---up to five for the Marquise de Gange---is a testament to the importance of textual reappropriation as much as it shows the relevance of a study which brings to light the role of rewriting in the survival of these stories.
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Harper, April. "Images of adultery in twelfth and thirteenth-century Old French literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14654.
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This thesis examines literary images of masculinity and femininity, their function and depiction in marriage roles and homo-social relationships in the context of crisis: wifely adultery. The study is heavily reliant upon vernacular texts, especially Old French works from the twelfth and thirteenth century including works from the genres of romance, lais, fables, and fabliaux. Latin works including historia and prescriptive texts such as customaries, penitentials, etiquette texts and medical and canon law treatises are also used to contextualise themes in the Old French literature. The introduction summarises modern literary and historical criticism concerning sexuality in the Middle Ages. It then discusses the influences of the Church, philosophy, medicine, natural theory and society on medieval definitions of sexuality to contextualise the literature which is focal to this thesis. The following four chapters each consider a single character in the adulterous affair: the adulteress, the husband, the lover and the accuser. The literary images of each character are analysed in detail revealing the diversity of depictions between and also within genres. This enables the identification of medieval sexual constructs, challenging some previous critiques of representations of sexuality in the Middle Ages. The final chapter explores the language by which the sexual act is presented. Furthermore, it shows how language is used and occasionally abused in committing, prosecuting and evading punishment for adultery and how it can be wielded as a weapon of women. Through the focus of a body of literature rich in depictions of sexuality, this thesis questions the misogynist overtones often attributed to medieval literature. The diversity of images shows that the literature illustrates a wide range of opinions and ideas reflective of the complexity of sexuality in medieval society.
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Leskinen, Saara. "Reliable knowledge of exotic marvels of nature in sixteenth-century French and English texts." Thesis, Warburg Institute, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.564418.
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Lee, Jason Eng Hun. "'All is not Well in the world' : critical cosmopolitanism in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/197089.
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This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader.
The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness.
Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.published_or_final_version
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Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
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Schmid, William A. (William Albert). "An Analysis of Elements of Jazz Style in Contemporary French Trumpet Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332815/.
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French trumpet works comprise a large portion of the contemporary standard repertoire for the instrument, and they frequently present unique stylistic and interpretive challenges to performers. The study establishes the influence of jazz upon Henri Tomasi, André Jolivet, Eugène Bozza and Jacques Ibert in their works for solo trumpet. Idiomatic elements of jazz style are identified and discussed in terms of performance practice considerations for modern-day trumpeters.
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Schaper, Benjamin. "Poetik und Politik der Lesbarkeit in der deutschen literatur." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8e1e8c05-c0f9-4dda-ad9b-b208ded2432b.
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In 1990, German literary critics agreed that the end of the Cold War should mark the end of politically committed post-war literature. The political caesura prompted a debate about the future of German literature during which the concept of 'readability' evolved as a contested issue. It was championed in particular by the author Matthias Politycki and the publishers Uwe Wittstock and Martin Hielscher. Ever since, 'readability' has remained a benchmark for authors and critics alike in the battle for value and success. The thesis will establish a theoretical basis for 'readability' that draws on narratology, the Aristotelian concept of 'mimesis', classical rhetoric, and the poetics of contemporary authors who explicitly engage with 'readability'. Discussion will centre on the novel since this genre has been the focus of debate ever since the novel gained prominence with the rise of the reading middle classes in the eighteenth century. An analysis of the historical role of 'readability' will demonstrate that the debate as it manifested itself around 1990 developed out of a specifically German tradition, in which authors and critics alike viewed it as potentially in conflict with true art. In 1990, German literary critics agreed that the end of the Cold War should mark the end of politically committed post-war literature. The political caesura prompted a debate about the future of German literature during which the concept of 'readability' evolved as a contested issue. It was championed in particular by the author Matthias Politycki and the publishers Uwe Wittstock and Martin Hielscher. Ever since, 'readability' has remained a benchmark for authors and critics alike in the battle for value and success. The thesis will establish a theoretical basis for 'readability' that draws on narratology, the Aristotelian concept of 'mimesis', classical rhetoric, and the poetics of contemporary authors who explicitly engage with 'readability'. Discussion will centre on the novel since this genre has been the focus of debate ever since the novel gained prominence with the rise of the reading middle classes in the eighteenth century. An analysis of the historical role of 'readability' will demonstrate that the debate as it manifested itself around 1990 developed out of a specifically German tradition, in which authors and critics alike viewed it as potentially in conflict with true art. The thesis will demonstrate that 'readability' is key to understanding the debates about German literature in an era of globalisation when readers are more attracted to works by foreign authors than to works by German ones. It will examine how writers such as Helmut Krausser, Daniel Kehlmann, and Thomas Glavinic have exploited the opportunities of the changed parameters by writing and promoting 'readable' books. It will further explore to what extent 'readability' has opened up new avenues even for authors like Felicitas Hoppe and Ulrike Draesner, who distrust the quest for 'readability'. The thesis will conclude with a reflection on the prospects for 'readability' in the current literary landscape in Germany.
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Campeau, Sylvain 1960. "Poésie et discours poétique au Canada français (1889-1909)." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36560.
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In 1892, in one of his characteristic attacks, Arthur Buies denounced the "deplorable" style of certain young French-Canadian writers of the day. The "jeunes barbares", as he called them, published in small magazines such as Le Recueil litteraire and L'Echo des jeunes, and were strongly influenced by French fin-de-siecle writing (the decadent and Symbolist schools in particular). The creation of the Ecole litteraire de Montreal in 1895 can be seen as a continuation of these varied literary endeavours. Quite aware of the criticisms leveled at young writers by Buies and others, the members of the Ecole viewed their association as both a literary circle and a training ground. The Bulletin du parler francais au Canada , founded in 1902, approached the issue of the poor quality of spoken and written French in French Canada from a more philological angle. It was in the Bulletin... that Camille Roy published his articles on French-Canadian literary history and his famous conference on the nationalisation of French-Canadian literature (in 1904--1905). This text was to have an influence so far-reaching that the Ecole litteraire de Montreal, in its second incarnation, espoused---albeit with some reticence---certain of the "pre-regionalist" values it promoted. The texts published in the Ecole's magazine, Le Terroir (1909), clearly indicate this.This thesis analyses the diverse modernist and pre-regionalist discourses present from 1889 to 1909, taking into particular account the variations in their antagonism (which manifested itself in a number of short-lived quarrels), with a view to providing a more complete and nuanced picture of the period than previous studies have done; it explores, in the process, the less well-known antecedents to the period which was to follow, a period during which the opposition between the regionalists and the "exotiques" came to a head.
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Duce, Cristy Lee. "In love and war : the politics of romance in four 21st-century Pakistani novels." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of English, 2011, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/3127.
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Writers of fiction have long since relied on love, romance, and desire to drive the
plots of their work, yet some postcolonial authors use romance and interpersonal
relationships to illustrate the larger political and social forces that affect their relatively
marginalized experiences in a global context. To illustrate this literary strategy, I have
chosen to discuss four novels written in the twenty-first century by Pakistani authors: Tbe
Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan, The
Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam, and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. With the
geographical origin of these writers as a common starting place from which to compare
and contrast their perspectives on global politics, their understandings of gender, and
their perceptions of how the public and the private constitute and intersect each other, I
will use postcolonial theory to dissect the treatment of romance in their respective novels.v, 85 leaves ; 29 cm
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Ma, Chun-laam, and 馬鎮嵐. "Characterization of detective figure as a site of negotiation of modernism and postmodernism in the 21st century." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47055376.
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Pinson, Guillaume 1973. "Fiction du monde : analyse littéraire et médiatique de la mondanité, 1885-1914." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102151.
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This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction.A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper.
The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.
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Fahmy, Miriam. "Le discours sur la fin de la littérature en France de 1987 à 1994 /." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79937.
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The "essai crepusculaire" was one of the most popular literary genres during the 1980's and 1990's in France. Among those, the essays warning of the impending end of French literature offer a view of the world which idealises the past while condemning a shameful present in order to justify the return of lost values.Our project consists of an analysis of the argumentative rhetoric contained in the four essays of our corpus, which together form the Discourse on the death of French literature. We studied how the authors set up an argumentative construct likely to convince the reader that French literature has fallen into decay. By analysing the rhetorical processes as well as locating the tacit discourse, we sought to single out the ideology which they promote and to make out the contours of the literary ideal which they delineate. In light of these observations, we ended with the broad outline of a typology of the genre, liable to exemplify all "essais crepusculaires".
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Duggan, Lucy. "Reading the city : Prague in Czech and Czech-German narrative fiction since 1989." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3827cf9c-fa91-4fb5-aa7e-8942de885729.
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In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.
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Robert-Nicoud, Vincent Corentin. "The world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1c0536cf-ffcf-4324-a626-19075e1acca8.
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To call something 'inverted' or 'topsy-turvy' in the sixteenth century is, above all, to label it as abnormal, unnatural and going against the natural order of things. The topos of the world upside-down brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, wives command their husband and rivers flow back to their source. This thesis undertakes a detailed account of the development of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture. By examining different uses of this topos - comic, moralising and polemical - it relates the transformations of the topos to religious, social and political conflicts of the period. To explain the shift of this topos from comic and moralising device to satirical and polemical tool, this thesis argues that troubled times produce troubled texts. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, two kinds of evidence will be examined: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present diachronic evidence of the 'polemicisation' of the topos of the world upside-down in literary genres of the period (adages, paradoxes and emblems) and within François Rabelais's body of work; Chapter 3 and 4 provide synchronic evidence of the polemical use of the topos of the world upside-down during the French religious wars in Huguenot and Catholic polemic and in depictions of socio-political turmoil. Charting the variety of uses of the topos of the world upside-down throughout the sixteenth century, this thesis connects the world upside-down and its historical context; and contributes to the scholarship on religious polemic.
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de, Vivanco Camillo. "Misanthropy in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Thomas Bernhard." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.712505.
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Gagné, Marie 1961. "Le mouvement "Tel Quel": neo-avant-garde et postmodernite." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74534.
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Cette etude propose une analyse de "Tel Quel" en tant que mouvement de neo-avant-garde situe a la frontiere de la modernite et de la postmodernite. Nous y considerons tous les textes de creation (roman et poesie) publies dans la collection "Tel Quel" entre 1960 et 1982, sans negliger l'etude de leur rapport avec la reflexion theorique exposee dans les essais et les articles de la revue. Cette these represente en meme temps un effort de synthese des principales typologies ou tentatives de definition proposees par la critique occidentale pour caracteriser les mouvements litteraires issus des societes post-industrielles: modernite, postmodernite, modernisme, postmodernisme, avant-garde, post avant-garde et neo-avant-garde.
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Jones, Suzanne Barbara. "French imports : English translations of Molière, 1663-1732." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8d86ee12-54ab-48b3-9c47-e946e1c7851f.
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This thesis explores the first English translations of Molière's works published between 1663 and 1732 by writers that include John Dryden, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and Henry Fielding. It challenges the idea that the translators straightforwardly plagiarized the French plays and instead argues that their work demonstrates engagement with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts. It asks how far the process of anglicization required careful examination of the plays' initial French national context. The first part of the thesis presents three fundamental angles of interrogation addressing how the translators dealt with the form of the dramatic works according to theoretical and practical principles. It considers translators' responses to conventions of plot formation, translation methods, and prosody. The chapters are underpinned by comparative assessments of contextual theoretical writings in French and English in order to examine the plays in the light of the evolving theatrical tastes and literary practices occasioned by cross-Channel communication. The second part takes an alternative approach to assessing the earliest translations of Molière. Its four chapters are based on close analysis of culturally significant lexical terms which evoke comically contentious social themes. This enquiry charts the changes in translation-choices over the decades covered by the thesis corpus. The themes addressed, however, were relevant throughout the period in both France and England: marital discord caused by anxieties surrounding cuckoldry and gallantry, the problems of zealous religious ostentation, the dubious professional standing of medical practitioners, and bourgeois social pretension. This part assesses how the key terms in translation were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into close contact with new French terms.
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Papanikolaou, Dimitris. "Singing poets : literature and popular music in France and Greece /." London : Legenda, 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=016510046&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
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Wilton-Godberfforde, Emilia Eleni Rachel. "Mendacity and the figure of the liar in seventeenth-century French comedy." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609698.
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Heiberg, Sarah Charlotte. "La répresentation de l'identité dans la littérature de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique /." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=98927.
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The goal of this thesis is to explore the ways in which identity is represented in French Caribbean literature (Guadeloupe and Martinique). Literature is often the place where Caribbean writers explore new ways of defining themselves. This quest for an authentic cultural identity can be mostly explained by the colonial legacy of the French Caribbean.This study will first explore the important role of re-writing history. It will then examine the Creolite movement and the way in which the Creole language and culture are celebrated in literary texts. Finally, it will look at how the French Caribbean define their relationship to the Other. The authors studied for this thesis are Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Conde.
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Wilson, Jean. "Images du clown dans la littérature française du XXe siècle." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=64067.
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White, Claire. "Work and leisure in late nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610774.
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Ferguson, Samuel James. "Diaries real and fictional in twentieth-century French writing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b90b6015-0de9-41a8-b852-b16f0cb69540.
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Whereas the relationship between real autobiography and its fictional forms has been studied at length, the equivalent relationship for diaries has barely been acknowledged, let alone explored. This thesis follows the history of diary-writing – as a field that includes real and fictional diaries and the complex relations between them – in twentieth-century French writing. I take as my starting point the moment in the 1880s when, following a series of successful posthumous diary publications, a new generation of writers became aware that their own journaux intimes would probably come to be published, with considerable consequences for the way their literary œuvre and their very persona as an author (or their textual author-figure) would appear to readers. Of this generation, André Gide exerted by far the greatest influence over the course of diary-writing, and four works in particular experiment, in extremely diverse forms, with the literary possibilities of the diary: Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891), Paludes (1895), Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and his Journal 1889–1939 (1939). After the Second World War, diary-writing continued to draw on forms established by Gide, but now inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject: Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947–62) cast light on attitudes towards the diary at the time of a theoretical exclusion of the writing subject; Roland Barthes experimented with diaries at the point of a return of the writing subject (1977–79); and Annie Ernaux's published diaries between 1993 and 2011 demonstrate the role of diary-writing within the modern field of life-writing. Rather than making a gradual progress towards literary recognition, this history of diary-writing shows that, in a great variety of ways, diaries have consistently been used for their marginal or supplementary role, which simultaneously constructs and qualifies a literary œuvre and author-figure.
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Margrave, Christie L. "Women and nature in the works of French female novelists, 1789-1815." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6391.
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On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, Souza and Staël – re-appropriate nature in order to reclaim the voice denied to them and to their sex by the society in which they lived. The five chapters of this thesis are structured to follow a number of critical junctures in the life of an adult woman: marriage, authorship, motherhood, madness and mortality. The opening sections to each chapter show why these areas of life generated particular problems for women at this time. Then, through in-depth analysis of primary texts, the chapters function in two ways. They examine how female novelists craft natural landscapes to expose and comment on the problems male-dominant society causes women to experience in France at this time. In addition, they show how female novelists employ descriptions of nature to highlight women's responses to the pain and frustration that social issues provoke for them. Scholars have thus far overlooked the natural settings within the works of female novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, a re-evaluation of these natural settings, as suggested by this thesis, brings a new dimension to our appreciation of the works of these women writers and of their position as critics of contemporary society. Ultimately, an escape into nature on the part of female protagonists in these novels becomes the means by which their creators confront the everyday reality faced by women in the turbulent socio-historical era which followed the Revolution.
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Giuliana, Chiara. "Negotiating home spaces : spatial practices in Italian postcolonial literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9764.
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Wilson, Rachelle. "Historical Memory and Ethics in Spanish Narrative." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062813/.
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This study traces the current status of Spanish ethics as seen through the optics of historical memory. Starting from the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the thesis relates contemporary themes to their proposed origin throughout three additional distinctive eras of the 20th and 21st century in Spain: 1982-1996 (Socialist Spain), 1997-2010 (Post-modern Spain), and 2011-present (current Spain). Spanish narratives ranging from Los Abel by Matute, La magnitud de la tragedia by Monzó, "Fidelidad" of Ha dejado de llover by Barba and Las fosas de Franco by Silva are contextualized through their ethical architecture, in accordance with their socio-political context, and relationship to past historical traumas. This work proposes that the themes of anticlericalism, the pursuit of social equality, anti bureaucracy, and political distrust are trends culminating from Kohlberg's third level of morality. The thesis aims to be an exposition and legitimization of different ethical schemas that might otherwise be polarized as wrong and inferior by others.
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Holgate, Ben. "Porous borders : the amorphous nature of magical realist fiction in Asia and Australasia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32abdfeb-baa7-40ee-b721-89b66bc74043.
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This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Imagined pasts, suspended presents South African literature in the contemporary moment." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244.
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Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
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Glaser, Catherine. "Clinique et roman de la folie, 1860-1910." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=72763.
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Nyambi, Oliver. "Nation in crisis : alternative literary representations of Zimbabwe Post-2000." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85652.
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Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The last decade in Zimbabwe was characterised by an unprecedented economic and political crisis. As the crisis threatened to destabilise the political status quo, it prompted in governmental circles the perceived 'need‘ for political containment. The ensuing attempts to regulate the expressive sphere, censor alternative historiographies of the crisis and promote monolithic and self-serving perceptions of the crisis presented a real danger of the distortion of information about the situation. Representing the crisis therefore occupies a contested and discursive space in debates about the Zimbabwean crisis. It is important to explore the nature of cultural interventions in the urgent process of re-inscribing the crisis and extending what is known about Zimbabwe‘s so-called 'lost decade‘. The study analyses literary responses to state-imposed restrictions on information about the state of Zimbabwean society during the post-2000 economic and political crisis which reached the public sphere, with particular reference to creative literature by Zimbabwean authors published during the period 2000 to 2010. The primary concern of this thesis is to examine the efficacy of post-2000 Zimbabwean literature as constituting a significant archive of the present and also as sites for the articulation of dissenting views – alternative perspectives assessing, questioning and challenging the state‘s grand narrative of the crisis. Like most African literatures, Zimbabwean literature relates (directly and indirectly) to definite historical forces and processes underpinning the social, cultural and political production of space. The study mainly invokes Maria Pia Lara‘s theory about the ―moral texture‖ and disclosive nature of narratives by marginalised groups in order to explore the various ways through which such narratives revise hegemonically distorted representations of themselves and construct more inclusive discourses about the crisis. A key finding in this study is that through particular modes of representation, most of the literary works put a spotlight on some of the major talking points in the political and socio-economic debate about the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, while at the same time extending the contours of the debate beyond what is agreeable to the powerful. This potential in literary works to deconstruct and transform dominant elitist narratives of the crisis and offering instead, alternative and more representative narratives of the excluded groups‘ experiences, is made possible by their affective appeal. This affective dimension stems from the intimate and experiential nature of the narratives of these affected groups. However, another important finding in this study has been the advent of a distinct canon of hegemonic texts which covertly (and sometimes overtly) legitimate the state narrative of the crisis. The thesis ends with a suggestion that future scholarly enquiries look set to focus more closely on the contribution of creative literature to discourses on democratisation in contemporary Zimbabwe.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die afgelope dekade in Zimbabwe is gekenmerk deur ‗n ongekende ekonomiese en politiese krisis. Terwyl die krisis gedreig het om die politieke status quo omver te werp, het dit die ‗noodsaak‘ van politieke insluiting aangedui. Die daaropvolgende pogings om die ruimte vir openbaarmaking te reguleer, alternatiewe optekenings van gebeure te sensureer en ook om monolitiese, self-bevredigende waarnemings van die krisis te bevorder, het 'n wesenlike gevaar van distorsie van inligting i.v.m. die krisis meegebring. Voorstellings van die krisis vind sigself dus in 'n gekontesteerde en diskursiewe ruimte in debatte aangaande die Zimbabwiese krisis. Dit is gevolglik belangrik om die aard van kulturele intervensies in die dringende proses om die krisis te hervertolk te ondersoek asook om kennis van Zimbabwe se sogenaamde 'verlore dekade‘ uit te brei. Die studie analiseer literêre reaksies op staats-geïniseerde inkortings van inligting aangaande die sosiale toestand in Zimbabwe gedurende die post-2000 ekonomiese en politiese krisis wat sulke informasie uit die openbare sfeer weerhou het, met spesifieke verwysing na skeppende literatuur deur Zimbabwiese skrywers wat tussen 2000 en 2010 gepubliseer is. Die belangrikste doelwit van hierdie tesis is om die doeltreffendheid van post-2000 Zimbabwiese letterkunde as konstituering van 'n alternatiewe Zimbabwiese 'argief van die huidige‘ en ook as ruimte vir die artikulering van teenstemme – alternatiewe perspektiewe wat die staat se 'groot narratief‘ aangaande die krisis bevraagteken – te ondersoek. Soos met die meeste ander Afrika-letterkundes is daar in hierdie literatuur 'n verband (direk en/of indirek) met herkenbare historiese kragte en prosesse wat die sosiale, kulturele en politiese ruimtes tot stand bring. Die studie maak in die ondersoek veral gebruik van Maria Pia Lara se teorie aangaande die 'morele tekstuur‘ en openbaringsvermoë van narratiewe aangaande gemarginaliseerde groepe ten einde die verskillende maniere waarop sulke narratiewe hegemoniese distorsies in 'offisiële‘ voorstellings van hulself 'oorskryf‘ om meer inklusiewe diskoerse van die krisis daar te stel, na te vors. 'n Kernbevinding van die studie is dat, d.m.v. van spesifieke tipe voorstellings, die meeste van die letterkundige werke wat hier ondersoek word, 'n soeklig plaas op verskeie van die belangrikste kwessies in die politieke en sosio-ekonomiese debatte oor die Zimbabwiese krisis, terwyl dit terselfdertyd die kontoere van die debat uitbrei verby die grense van wat vir die maghebbers gemaklik is. Die potensieel van letterkundige werke om oorheersende, elitistiese narratiewe oor die krisis te dekonstrueer en te omvorm, word moontlik gemaak deur hul affektiewe potensiaal. Hierdie affektiewe dimensie word ontketen deur die intieme en ervaringsgewortelde geaardheid van die narratiewe van die geaffekteerde groepe. Nietemin is 'n ander belangrike bevinding van hierdie studie dat daar 'n onderskeibare kanon van hegemoniese tekste bestaan wat op verskuilde (en soms ook openlike) maniere die staatsnarratief anngaande die krisis legitimeer. Die tesis sluit af met die voorstel dat toekomstige vakkundige studies meer spesifiek sou kon fokus op die bydrae van kreatiewe skryfwerk tot die demokratisering van kontemporêre Zimbabwe.
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Stone, Katherine Mary. "Gender and German memory cultures : representations of National Socialism in post-1945 women's writing." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708863.
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Yillah, Dauda. "Post-war French writings on Black Africa : the ambiguities and paradoxes of a cross-cultural perspective." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6fed22a9-2401-45ef-b492-aa0e5ee65163.
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Edward Said stresses the politically and ideologically skewed nature of western imperial responses to colonised or formerly colonised cultures and peoples, articulated in a variety of media, including scholarly and imaginative writings, which are inflected by the various kinds of power (political, intellectual, cultural and moral) that the West has wielded and continues to wield over non-Western regions of the world. While recognising the pathbreaking import of Said's work, critics have pointed out his blindness to the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of the discourse of Empire within the western-authored texts that he discusses. Even where he does consider the issue of resistance and opposition to Empire by western intellectuals, he still stresses the complicity of their texts with the processes of Empire. If one were to pursue the logic of such criticisms to its limit and apply it to the intellectual resistance generated from the centre in the context of the post-War dismantling of European overseas empires and its aftermath, one might be tempted to conclude that such resistance constitutes an unqualified disruption of colonial modes of apprehending difference. Against the backdrop of such readings of Said, this thesis examines the issue of cross-cultural representation in a selection of mainstream metropolitan French writings relating to black Africa produced between 1945 and the present. It brings together scholars and writers like Gide, Sartre and Griaule, some of whose works relating to black Africa belong to the first decade of the post-War period marked by France's continued colonial presence in the continent. It also considers other scholars and writers like Dumont, Conchon, Verchave and Le Clézio, whose books appeared in the second and succeeding decades of the period. The overall aim is to identify the ways in which these writers respond individually and collectively to black Africa often construed as a paradigm of cultural difference, and to consider whether such cross-cultural responses, given their historical context, can be described as being invariably a function of the changing relations between France and black Africa. What forms do the cross-cultural responses take? What cultural assumptions and ideological motivations shape those responses? Are the responses entirely disruptive of colonial modes of relating to difference? If not, what are their aporias, their ambiguities and paradoxes? My conclusion is that while Sartre and others relate to black Africa with unmistakeable empathy, their positive cross-cultural disposition does not necessarily enable them to attain a relationship with the peoples and cultures of Africa which is an equipollent relationship between equals.
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Gagné, Marie 1961. "1968, théorie et praxis de "Tel quel" dans "Logiques" et "Nombres" de Sollers." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63765.
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Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
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The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.
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Campbell, Stephanie 1983. "Le sublime, le grotesque et le meurtre spectaculaire : l'esthétique de la violence dans le drame romantique." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=116056.
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This thesis focuses on the representation of physical violence in the first Romantic French dramas of the 19th century. Before 1829, the Classic movement forbade spectacles of violence in the major theatres. However, with the production of the first Romantic play, Henri III et sa cour, the stage was transformed into a space of murder, physical brutality and suicide. In this study, we will interrogate the reasons for which violent acts reappear on the French stage. The influence of the guillotine will be examined as well as the sublime and grotesque nature of murder. The theories of Christine Marcandier-Colard, which explore the supreme beauty of criminality, will lead us to determine which ideologies are communicated through the depictions of death. We will also analyze the reaction of the public in regard to brutality in the theatre, as well as the role that violence plays in the development of a new society. Although violence inherently possesses a destructive value, its aesthetic value in the theatre advocates a veritable evolution of the French society towards democracy.
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Molkou, Elizabeth. "Contributions d'ecrivains juifs a la problematique de l'autofiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=37784.
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The present literary production in France indicates the return of the subject, which has been proclaimed dead since the New Novel. With the proliferation of autobiographical texts in the nineteen-eighties, a generalized movement towards an aesthetic genre valuing this particularity was noticed. This proliferation renders the scope of this literary form immense. It covers a range from strictly historical texts, including autobiographies, memoirs and intimate journals to semi-referential texts, qualified as autobiographical fictions, "autofictions" or again "factual fictions". Midway between the autobiography and the novel, autofiction, this little studied literary practice, inaugurates a new writing form which we believe constitutes one of the boldest modern incarnations of the writing of the self. This thesis considers the possibility of a correlation existing in the problematics of autofiction and those of Jewishness in writing. Already off-centered, the Jewish writer, can be seen as the emblematic figure of the writer himself. Drawing on a corpus of four writers (Serge Doubrovsky, Marcel Benabou, Regine Robin and Patrick Modiano), we examine the structure, as well as its functionning rules, woven through texts sharing Jewish authorship. These writers pose, each from his own specific perspective, the problem of Jewishness in writing. This correlation brings to light the exemplary nature of these texts with regards to the more generalized and thus far unprecedented strategy that is autofiction. The intersection of these historically marked problems, autofiction and Jewishness in writing, leads us inevitably to further reflection upon the tragedy of modernity, the Shoah and its omnipresent shadow in the works of our corpus.
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Al-Hassan, Hawraa. "Propaganda literature in Baʻthist cultural production (1979-2003) : the novels of Saddam Hussein as a case study." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648424.
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Johnson, Alfred B. "Net work : social networks, disruptive agency, and innovation in Howells, Fitzgerald, Heller, Pynchon, and Gibson." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1343471.
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This study uses concepts from network science to analyze the agency of outsider characters who cause change or disruption without necessarily securing economic or political power for themselves. Network science as theorized by thinkers like Duncan Watts (Six Degrees, 2003) and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Linked, 2002) explains social networks in terms of social structures: clusters of people, bridges between them, pathways through them. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1971) suggests that new notions must enter public or personal awareness on "surfaces of emergence"—institutions like families and social groups. Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1974) looks at inventive ways that users repurpose products, both industrial and cultural, and so become "secondary producers." To analyze the influential-outsider agency of the fictional characters featured in this study, I theorize the clusters, bridges, and pathways of network science as surfaces of emergence on which "secondary productions" can appear and then spread through a social network.The introductory chapter explores and explains the general application of network science to literary criticism. In subsequent chapters, I use a networks-based approach to examine the agency of William Dean Howells's Tom Corey (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1884), F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), Joseph Heller's Milo Minderbinder (Catch-22, 1961), Thomas Pynchon's Pierce Inverarity (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965), and William Gibson's Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition, 2003). These characters do unusual things with and from the subject positions in which they find themselves, and—whether or not they are or remain marginalized characters in their social systems—they are innovative and influential in ways that other characters do not understand or anticipate. All five novels depict the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices as a process of unplanned, non-coercive social negotiation, where innovation can originate with any person or group of people in the social network and is dependent on the complex interaction of liminal notions and mainstream thinking. The networking approach to these novels clarifies the ways that their authors have imagined social networks to function and the particular interactions they have imagined to lead to change or disruption.Department of English
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Soulard, Louis. "La génération X dans le roman québécois actuel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23244.
Full textAbstract:
The following Master's thesis is proposing the analysis of five novels, written between 1988 and 1993, by five young Quebec writers. The object of this research is to study the representation of "generation X" in these five texts. The introduction of the thesis establishes the parameters of the "generation X", which comprises people born between 1959 and 1974. This definition constitutes the basis of our comparison between the concept of "generation X" and the main characters of the novels, who are "fictive" members of this generation.The rest of the thesis includes three chapters, devoted to the following themes: the politic perception of young characters, their economic situation and their attitude toward society. Necessarily, our analysis also considers the difference of perception between "baby-boomers" (people born between 1944 and 1959) and "generation X". This comparison is essential because "generation X" defines itself in opposition with adults values and institutions: reject of political power and authority, reject of work, instruction and money, refusal to integrate society.
The main purpose of this analysis is to see how the present Quebec novel integrates, assimilates and thinks the socio-historic context where it takes place, and how it could possibly renew the forms and the style of Quebec novel in general.