The literatures of Immigration from North Africa to France represent one of the constitutive fields of investigation for Postcolonial Francophone studies. As such, approaches to this are often locked in a postcolonial perspective. Through my courses in 20th century literature, I discovered several aspects of literature of immigration that relate to French popular literature. In light of this, my dissertation establishes a link between these two literary genres by analyzing the evolution of urban spaces in the Parisian periphery. The primary objective of this dissertation is to translate aspects of the contemporary issues of the French banlieues from a purely postcolonial perspective to questions of institutional choices in French city planning over the course of the past hundred and fifty years. The underlying assumption is that the spatial transformation that has taken place has affected the social interactions of the inhabitants and contributed to the evolution of a working class mentality. The expectation is that in-depth understanding of this interaction will allow me to explore the socio-cultural situation in France’s suburbs today. Beginning with the renovation of Paris, undertaken by Haussmann in the second half of the nineteenth century, each of the five chapters of my dissertation corresponds to a particular moment of this evolution. For every chapter, I analyze the characters’ relationships with their spatial surroundings, as well as the nature of their social interactions with other residents. The first novels are the only ones of my corpus set in the interior part of Paris. As more and more of the urban working class is driven outside of the city limits by the renovations and the rapidly developing industry in the periphery, the texts illustrate the increasing social isolation and loss of agency for the characters. In aligning popular literature and literature of immigration on the same axis, my focus lies primarily on the geographical space, the banlieue, and its transformation in time.

This dissertation examines the different ways in which Edouard Glissant, Kateb Yacine and William Faulkner combine landscape, history and identity in their work. The depiction of landscape in literature is not new, but the French Romantics in the 19th century, for instance, tended to describe the beauty of landscape without conceiving any rapport between landscape and humankind, and thus created a gap between the two. For Kateb and Glissant, landscape is also a witness of History. The (hi)story of their respective communities has been confiscated and shattered by the respective colonizers, hence the necessity to recreate it through the poetics of land. However, because of the different contexts some differences in the conception and use of landscape arise between these three writers. In the case of Kateb Yacine, the Algerian landscape is the repository for the ancient history of North Africa. The North African people have to turn to their landscape in order to recreate their history and redefine their identity. For Edouard Glissant, the landscape was an accomplice of the Caribbean People. When the slaves escaped the plantation confinements the wilderness was their only refuge. It is then essential for the Caribbean community to take roots in this land in order to create its own history. In the case of William Faulkner, the land of his "Yoknapatawpha county" is presented as the podium where some injustices in the South took place, such as the dispossession of Indians, the spoliation of their lands, slavery, and above all the tragedy of the Civil War.

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Thesis / Dissertation ETD / application/pdf

M.A. (French) / This study examines the Comptes amoureux, Le Printemps and L'Esté, three frame novels of the sixteenth century in which the setting plays an important rôle. The setting in both the framework and the seven interpolated tales of the Comptes amoureux by Jeanne Flore is largely responsible for their thematic cohesion. Since parts of the volume have been lost, a garden is the only remaining setting in which the storytellers are presented. The garden constitutes a charming spot, containing many features traditionally encountered in descriptions of literary pleasances, including a preponderance of elements representing Venus. These emblems keep the theme of love, illustrated in each of the interpolated stories, constantly in view. Jacques Yver's work, Le Printemps d'Yver, contains five stories about love narrated by a group of storytellers who have retired to a country seat created by fairy enchantment. Since the frame narrative has been developed more in this collection than it appears to have been in the admittedly fragmentary Comptes amoureux, it permits the detailed description of the many distinguishing features of the gardens in which the company sit, particularly of various emblems of Venus. These garden settings provide a great many motifs which are taken up by the storytellers in their narrations, establishing an intimate relationship between the setting and the themes of the stories and thereby constituting an important difference between Le Printemps and the other two works. In this frame novel, settings within the stories themselves are not usually elaborated. Those which are presented in detail mirror the setting in which the storytellers are gathered, further strengthening the cohesion between framework and tale. The evocation of Venus, together with the motifs introduced by the outstanding features of the gardens, strengthen the bond between the disparate narratives, drawing attention to the subject of love and contributing greatly to the thematic unity of the work. In Benigne Poissenot's volume, L'Esté, the setting is not approached in the same way as it is in either of the other two works. As in the case of Le Printemps, it is painted in detail in the frame narrative rather than in the interpolated stories, but here the resemblance ends. The debates and stories are launched in three comparatively unadorned places. Although two of these are reminiscent of the attractive settings encountered in the other two works, the author emphasises their utility rather than their beauty. This incongruity, combining a down-to-earth backdrop with the often idealistic stories, constitutes the most striking feature of this volume. Unlike the traditional settings in the other two frame novels, the decor of L'Esté, by its very distance from the conventionally idyllic, ndermines the serious nature of the themes discussed, producing a mildly satirical effect. Thus, the setting in each of these three frame novels plays an instrumental, and unique, role in establishing the overall unity of each work.

The goal of this thesis is to establish if the dynamic model of ecological organization at a distance reflect the same influence or different influences than the ones which acted upon the areas in the vicinity of the city. In order to accomplish this, existing studies of Phipps, Baudry and Burel measuring the ecological organization of a rural landscape in two segments submitted to a low urban pressure (between 1 Km and 10 Km from the city) and high urban pressure (less than 1 Km to the city) will be used. The problem is seen from a landscape point of view, from the organization measured in time and from the variable effect of the urban pressure. With the results of this study, we should be able to complete the picture of the study of the dynamic of the ecological organization of a landscape in view of the distance to the urban center. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

La thèse porte sur l’ensemble de l’oeuvre poétique de James Sacré, poète français contemporain né en 1939 à Cougou (Vendée). Comme son titre l’indique, elle aborde les problématiques liées à la représentation poétique du paysage, de l’autre et de l’écriture elle même. Ces trois figures capitales de l’oeuvre constituent un socle à partir duquel se déploie laréflexion poétique de J. Sacré et sa pratique de l’écriture. Écriture pratiquée et figurée, donc, essentiellement comme relation désirante au monde, à autrui et à la langue. Aussi la réflexion tente d’aborder l’écriture poétique comme dynamique visant à rétablir une continuité entre le texte et ses objets de désir, l’horizon référentiel du réel et l’allocutaire. La perspective critique adoptée, en pensant le poème non pas comme objet mais comme phénomène, empruntelargement à deux disciplines qui ne relèvent pas de la critique littéraire, la phénoménologie et la psychanalyse. Elles permettent d’éclairer l’éloquente ouverture au monde et aux autres qui caractérise le lyrisme de J. Sacré. Chaque partie de la thèse décrit donc les articulations d’une triple relation de désir dans le cadre d’un axe majeur de la poétique sacréenne. Le premier correspond à la représentation littéraire du paysage en tant qu’il est le milieu du rapport à autrui, et qu’il suscite un questionnement récurrent sur l’incapacité de la langue à restituer pleinement le réel. L’écriture du voyage met également en jeu la relation de désir aux paysages étrangers et à ses autres. Finalement la mise en abîme de l’écriture figure l’entreprise poétique comme composition d’un paysage textuel et comme relation amoureuseau lecteur. / The thesis concerns the whole James Sacré’s poetic work, contemporary French poet born in Cougou (Vendée) in 1939. As its title indicates it, it deals with problems connected with poetic representation of the landscape, the other and the very writing. These three major faces of the work establish a base from which spreads the poetic reflection of J. Sacré and hispractice of the writing. Practised and figurative writing, thus, essentially as desirous relation to the world, to others and to the language. Hence, the reflection tries to approach the poetic writing as dynamics to restore a continuity between the text and its object of desire, the reference horizon of the reality and the addressee. The adopted critical perspective, bythinking of the poem not as object but as phenomenon, borrows widely from two disciplines which do not recover from the literary critic, the phenomenology and the psychoanalysis. They allow to enlighten eloquent opening to the world and to others whom characterizes the lyric of J. Sacré. Every part of the thesis thus describes the articulations of a triple relation ofdesire within the framework of a major axis of the Sacrean poetics. The first one corresponds to the literary representation of the landscape as it is the environment of the connection to the other, and as it arouses a recurring questioning on the incapacity of the language to restore completely the reality. The writing of the journey also puts at stake the relation of desire in the foreign landscapes and to its others. Finally the ‘mise en abîme’ of the writing represents the poetic enterprise as composition of a textual landscape and as love relation to the reader.

La présente étude s'intéresse aux popula-tions installées en Irlande avant l'arrivée du christianisme (aux environs du Ve siècle de notre ère), et plus précisément aux bâtisseurs des tombes à couloirs du Néolithique ainsi qu'aux Celtes. L'omniprésence d'une com-posante féminine symbolique dans les pay-sages pré-chrétiens (qu'ils soient naturels, mégalithiques ou littéraires) est au centre de cette analyse, qui prend en considération le caractère matrifocal des sociétés archaïques et en évalue l'impact sociétal et rituel chez les Celtes. La thèse examine la spécificité de la perception des reliefs et l'expression sym-bolique de la représentation. Cette dernière se traduit chez les populations du Néolithique par une féminisation du paysage au travers des modifications délibérées de lieux naturels ou la création de sites clefs (tels que Brú na Bóinne ou Loughcrew). Nous montrons aussi que cette perception de l'espace comme fé-minin fut relayée chez les Celtes par la créa-tion de mythes mettant en scène des figures féminines divines ou évhémérisées transfonc-tionnelles. Le rapprochement proposé entre les créa-tions de ces deux groupes humains distants de plusieurs millénaires (de - 3500 à 700) vise à montrer qu'il existe dans les deux cas conception similaire de la terre d'Irlande comme féminine. Pour ce faire, la thèse met en relation plusieurs disciplines. La confron-tation des documents archéo-mythologiques révèle une continuité chronologique dans les représentations qui est liée à l'assimilation de l'héritage culturel indigène par les Celtes venus du continent. Nous avançons l'idée que l'osmose entre ces deux cultures a donné naissance à une identité celte insulaire unique, fortement ancrée dans la terre d'Irlande.

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