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This thesis examines the appearance, development and use of queer martyrs as they appear in French literature, mainly fiction, during the indicated period. It charts these in relation to two distinct manners of representation used for this leitmotiv. The first, exemplified in Flaubert, approaches it as a vehicle for reconciling divergent, and potentially conflicting philosophies. With the second, observable first in the work of the Belgian Naturalist Georges Eekhoud, the queer martyr becomes a means of asserting a homosexual identity, with chiefly political and pornographic applications.

Whilst Simone de Beauvoir has become an icon of feminism, and The Second Sex in particular been recognized as a point of reference for writers and philosophers worldwide, her reputation in Italy was not established immediately, and there she remains a controversial figure. This study focuses on one aspect of her influence in Italy: the relationship between her writing and that of the Italian best-selling author, Alba de Céspedes. It is the first in-depth analysis of the complex pattern of influence evident in the relationship between what the two authors have described as their most important novels, Les Mandarins and Il rimorso. Part I deals with the historical and theoretical backgrounds to this research. It provides a study of the socio-political events that are relevant to the narrative contents, and an overview of different theories of intertextuality. Part II is a detailed comparative analysis of the novels and establishes for the first time the precise nature of the relationship between Les Mandarins and Il rimorso ideologically and philosophically, as well as intertextually. In particular, this work explores a number of superficial resemblances between the novels’ structures, characterization and thematic content, and it also reveals a more sophisticated relation that is not manifest in the similarities, but rather in the way the texts differ from each other. This thesis brings two significant contributions to literary research: firstly, it will become evident that studies of de Céspedes’ life and works should include close attention to de Beauvoir; and secondly, it is an addition to a popular area of de Beauvoirian studies, that of the charting of the extent of the French author’s philosophical and ideological influence and of its legacy worldwide.

This study explores the masochistic aspects of Decadent literature, which to date have been relatively neglected, or have received only sporadic attention as merely the passive forms of sadism, or sadomasochism (Mario Praz). As Jennifer Birkett suggests, Decadent sensibility and sexuality have arguably less affinity with Sade than Sacher-Masoch. Following Birkett, and utilising Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the independence of masochism from sadism and description of the distinctive aesthetic features of masochistic texts, I investigate masochistic formations in French Decadent texts; the work of Jean Lorrain and of Joséphin Péladan. This study also involves a review of relevant writings by Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysts (Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman); an engagement with current literary-critical scholarship in Decadence (Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Bram Dijkstra and Rita Felski), and in Sacher-Masoch (Nick Mansfield, John K. Noyes, and Anita Phillips), and his influence on Decadent writers.

Notre travail propose un double état de lieu tout en cherchant à placer le roman algérien dans le champ critique théorique. Il s’agit de démontrer comment la qualification du roman algérien comme [francophone] et/ou [postcolonial] impose des lectures-analyses qui échappent à la littérarité du texte, qui lui imposent des codes d’interprétation biaisés et ne permettent pas démontrer la poétique et l’esthétique des textes. Pour cela, il s’agira de dé-lire la critique théorique du roman algérien contemporain, afin de sortir des apories, des lieux communs et des réflexions enjointes à ce dernier qui souvent sont passéistes et datés. Il s’agira de faire l’état des lieux du roman algérien dans un double mouvement, l’état des lieux de ses œuvres et de ses lectures. Le dernier mouvement se veut réflexion clairement libre et subjective qui sera conclusion de notre proposition assumée d’une nouvelle conceptualisation de la production littéraire. L’algérianité littéraire comme nouvelle approche du roman algérien contemporain propose un roman qui ne s’attache plus à faire plaisir à son lecteur en lui racontant ce qu’il connait déjà ou à flatter son égo en lui laissant une béquille pour suivre un récit…L’algérianité littéraire serait une réflexion idéale de l’auteur avec son livre, avec son texte et ses personnages. Le roman algérien contemporain se meut entre une fabula et une utopie, entre mémoire et silence. Et surtout, il est ce qu’il reste à écrire / Our work offers a double state of place while seeking to place the Algerian novel in the field of critical theory. This is to demonstrate how the qualification of the Algerian as novel [francophone] and/or [postcolonial] imposes readings-analyses that are beyond the literacy of the text, which impose biased interpretations codes and do not demonstrate the poetics and aesthetics of the texts. To do this, it will “dé-lire” theory of the contemporary Algerian novel criticism, in order to get out of the aporias, commonplaces and required latter reflections which are often outdated and dated. The second movement will be reading. It’s to the state of affairs of the Algerian novel in a double movement, the state of affairs of his works and his readings. The last movement is clearly free and subjective reflection that will be conclusion of our proposal assumed of a new conceptualization of literary production. The contemporary literary algerianity as a new approach to the Algerian novel offers a novel which attaches no more to please the reader by telling him what he already knows or to flatter his ego leaving it a crutch to follow a story… The literary algerianite would be a perfect reflection of the author with his book, with its text and its characters. The contemporary Algerian novel moves between fabula and utopia, between memory and silence. And above all, it is what’s left to write

Autofiction has been the subject of much critical investigation in France, yet little of this theory extends to contemporary texts. Furthermore, autofictional theory has, until now, neglected the study of ludic performance – an important feature within the genre –, and this thesis contributes to filling this gap in criticism. Through this analysis, I establish the genre's construction as well as the constitution of the autobiographical persona in the autofictional texts of four authors. I argue that in order for autofiction to be considered as a genre, ludic strategies and autofictional personae are critical factors in the genre's construction. I build on previous scholarship of autofiction before discussing the performance of autobiographical personae producing an autofictional body in the works of four contemporary French writers: Catherine Cusset, Philippe Vilain, Chloé Delaume and Éric Chevillard. Each author is analysed in a dedicated chapter exploring their autofictional œuvres, yielding three key trends. These are: the proliferation of intertextual references, ludic representations of the genre, and the creation of an autofictional body by the reader through autofictional personae. In each chapter I examine the construction of these personae, revealing a separation between selfhood constructed in language and questions of the body, both of the autofictional personae as well as characters within the text. Other characters within the texts expose complex constructions of gender that range from a rejection of male characters to the homogenisation of female characters reduced to stereotypes. Depictions of the intimate sphere within autofiction, including relationships and gendered constructs, are analysed in order to situate autofiction as a genre. Through the discussion of autofictional personae pivotal in this conception of autofiction, this thesis posits that representations of the body – within and beyond language – are the key to understanding autofictional performances.

Popular writer and man of the people, Zamenga Batukezanga, in 1971, wrote, using his personal experience, his first book entitled The Ups and downs. In his novel, he describes the life of a young villager, Difwayame, who disenchanted acceded the developed class assigned to fight the customs of his native land. In 1986, he published a book entitled My husband on strike. In this novel, he depicts the life of Laurent Lubaki, disenchanted by his clan adheres first the sect called The world will change, and then a catholic church to fight the customs of his native environment. In1991, he wrote and published A Villager in Kinshasa. In this novel, he showed the reader how Amuly who disillusioned by the mores of Kinshasa’s people returned to the village training first agriculture becomes rich and helps villagers. In 2008, he published a book entitled Forbidden way. In this novel, he describes the Hassein Ben Diouf who disillusioned by the behaviour of his mother leaves the house of his parents and adheres to as path as banned group to fight corruption, prostitution, dictatorship which block the development of his country. After carefully reading the above four novels, one realizes that Zamenga Batukezanga puts bare retrograde and anti-values that are common after the independence of his country. That is why from a book to another, he struggles against the retrograde customs and anti- values by evoking the suffering of young people. He keeps coming in his novels on a thematic or dialectic – disenchantment and commitment. What does he mean by disenchantment and commitment? How the two concepts manifest themselves in the works of Congolese writer? What means has he put at the disposal of young struggling to fight retrogrades customs and anti-values in order to achieve freedom? / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et. Phil. (French)

The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.