Adam von Trott zu Solz was a participant in the German resistance to Hitler and to the National Socialist government. This thesis will describe his early life, his education and his political formation. Trott's foreign policy initiatives in England and his efforts to reactivate plans for a coup d'etat during the summer of 1939 will be examined.

This thesis is a study of one of the most important national statesmen, politicians, and economists in the history of Turkish republic: Celal Bayar. It will analyze his impact on the Turkish revolution and the evolution of the nation's politics. Celal Bayar, Turkey's third president did not fit the mold of his country's top politicians of the day. He was essentially different from all the other key players of his generation in terms of his background, education, experience, career path, and even length of life. Those who have written about him have for the most part been either uncritical admirers or bitter enemies. Though he held, in turn, the positions of Minister of the Economy, Prime Minister and President (he was the first civilian to hold this part) during one of the most critical periods in Turkish political history. Thus, he was overshadowed by his predecessors Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Ismet Inonu. Yet his very uniqueness makes him an apt subject for study. / Celal Bayar deserves our attention because he undertook crucial responsibilities and duties in the social and economic transformation of Turkey. In an era of strong state policies that made up for the weakness of the social classes, Bayar was the founder of the nation's mixed economy. During the Turkish revolution and the subsequent formation of a united Turkish society, he devoted himself to the development of the national economy. Throughout his political career he exercised a decisive influence over the evolution of the country's politics, economy, society, and foreign relations. Despite his importance, there is a general dearth of academic studies in English about him---a situation that this study seeks to correct.

The initial part of this M.A. thesis is a fiction describing a travel to Greece; it deals with separation, memories and identity. / The following part is an essay on memories and filiation in Le temps qui m'a manque, by Gabrielle Roy. Four reminiscences will be scrutinized: her mother's house, the satin collar, the medals and the seagulls. The first one is about continuity and identification (the mother's house); the second and the third ones, the satin collar masking the unfinished hem, the medals relating to owing, illustrate a filiation based on want. Lastly, the memory of the seagulls synthesizes the light and the dark sides of the mother-daughter filiation, the daughter leaving her mother (rupture) to fulfill her mother's as well as her own dream of freedom (continuity).

This thesis is a comparative analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries du promeneur solitaire and Gabrielle Roy's autobiography (La Detresse et l'Enchantement and Le temps qui m'a manque) and establishes that these two works are testamentary autobiographies, that is, autobiographies written with the awareness of approaching death. We first show that both Rousseau and Roy link their ultimate autobiographical desire to the imminence of their own death. We then show that their autobiographical activity is not only motivated by death, but, moreover, that it allows them in a certain sense to live it already, since what this activity allows them to do is, for them, similar to what they long to do in the afterlife. We suggest, finally, that this activity, which allows them to bequeath an ideal picture of themselves that will survive them, gives them a hold on their immortality.

A thematic and formal analysis of Jean-Aubert Loranger's poetic tale "Le Passeur" [1920], and of Gabrielle Roy's novel La Montagne secrete [1962], shows that the construction of the two heroes' respective identity is directly related to the representation of small and large rivers in the two stories. Considering the generic difference between the two texts, these similarities---which are shaped up in a four steps "organizing scheme"---suggest the existence of a real structure in the construction of the modern identity (quebecoise). La Grande traversee, an historical novel about the massive Irish emigration of 1847, narrates the quest of identity of Seamus Doyle, while following the same four steps of this particular movement.

Simone Weil is best known to the world as a mystic and a philosopher. She died in 1943 at the age of 34, ostensibly because she refused the hypernutrition prescribed for the treatment of her tuberculosis. Shortly after her death, thanks to the posthumous publication of her work, she was recognised as one of the twentieth centuries most original thinkers in areas as diverse as philosophy, political history, religion, and ethics. Few writers have delved into the foundational relationship she discerned between a destructive form of suffering she called "affliction" and the experience of divine love. The present dissertation exposes how this fundamental relationship lies at the centre of Weil's life and thought. / First, we correlate biographical details of Weil's life with key insights into the reality of affliction. Second, the nature of human suffering is treated as a theological concept. Through Weil we consider the limits of creatureliness to the point at which one no longer feels a part of the human community. Third, we examine Weil's insight into the radical possibility of love in response to the annihilating experience of affliction, that is, the experience of God's love for us as well as the possibility of loving the afflicted neighbour. Finally, we consider several critiques of Weil's sense of her own identity as a woman and as a Jew, and the impact of this identity crisis on her unique understanding of the relationship between suffering and the love of God.

Gabrielle Roy kept up, throughout her literary life, a regular correspondence with relatives, friends, business relations and readers: to date, more than 2000 letters have been preserved in different archive collections. The 482 letters she wrote to her husband, Doctor Marcel Carbotte, between 1947 and 1979, form the largest subset of the correspondence; a critical edition of these hitherto unpublished letters is presented in the second part of the thesis. / Surprisingly, the correspondence contains few reflexions of an aesthetic nature, and few explicit traces of the novelist's published work, apart from occasional references to the texts she is working on at the moment she is writing to Marcel. Instead, it is the details of her day-to-day life that Roy describes most abundantly. In the first part of the thesis, we study the letters to Marcel in the light of a possible connection with Roy's canonical work: we start by examining the link between the letter and autobiographical genre; we then show that the letters to Marcel can be read as a personal diary; finally, we suggest that the "autobiographical turn" taken by Roy in both her published work and her letters to Marcel indicates that the letters form part of the same system as the autobiographical works.

This thesis traces the connections between Dorothy Livesay and William Blake, especially with respect to the construction and symbolization of the self. Models of influence relevant to Livesay and Blake are examined resulting in a contextual model of influence which considers artists' "anxiety" and the importance of gender issues. Archival documents supplement, and sometimes transform the implications of, Livesay's poetry and other published works in relation to Blake. The discussion moves from tracing the general points of intersection between Livesay and Blake (ancestors, traditions), to focusing on the different levels of influence that can be claimed between the two poets. The presence of Blake in Livesay's writings is examined closely, especially with respect to the imaginative states which each sets up to describe the self. Finally, Livesay's construction of the journey of her own life and her movement towards an ideal of self-completion which culminate in her celebratory late works are compared with Blake's ideal of the self as set forth in his Prophetic Works.

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