Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2006. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Amy Thomas. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-138).

<p> This dissertation demonstrates how characteristics and functions of African and Japanese oral narrative traditions make narratives about the ocean in these traditions useful for exploring some of the complex psychological roles the ocean plays in people&rsquo;s lives. A background of these oral narrative traditions and the main characteristics and functions of African and Japanese oral narratives are identified from the literature, African and Japanese ecopsychological perspectives are outlined, and a hermeneutic methodology applies text analysis to identify connections between humans and the ocean represented in a selection of text versions of ocean oral narratives. African and Japanese oral narratives are transmitted in adaptable yet continuous traditions, reflective of self and group identity, used to serve social and community functions, connected to spiritual traditions, and used as tools for power or resistance to power. Intimate connections between humans and the ocean are represented in the selection of narratives. In African oral narratives, connections are represented including merging identities of the ocean and humans, contrasting of nurturing mother and dangerous mother elements, the ocean bringing children, extreme love, and taking extreme love, connections between the ocean and performance, and representations of the ocean in colonization, slavery, healing, and empowerment. In Japanese oral narratives, intimate connections are represented including magic gifts from the ocean, water deity wives, warnings of fishing, bodily sacrifice, and connections to spiritual traditions, people, and local places.</p><p>

Cette étude porte essentiellement sur quelques auteurs représentatifs de la nouvelle littérature française en Afrique. Nous avons limité le champ aux seuls écrivains ethniquement africains rejetant les Européens nés dans ce continent et les auteurs métro-politains. Les recherches ont porté sur le problème de la langue: adoption suivie ou non de l'assimilation de la culture française. L’autre niveau d'étude comprend l'examen des différentes solutions apportées aux problèmes d’assimilation de la culture occidentale par des personnes dont la culture est essentiellement orientale. Le premier auteur, Kateb Yacine, démontre brillamment qu'il est possible pour un Africain d'utiliser la langue française tout en traitant de sujets et de thèmes uniquement arabes et, qui plus est, de la faire avec une aisance qui rend son oeuvre littérairement unique. Les livres de Chraibi que nous avons analyses portent sur les deux aspects du problème. Les Boucs démontrent la difficulté inhérente dans l’assimilation d'un Arabe au contexte européen. Succession Ouverte nous montre l'impossibilité pour l'Oriental qui a vécu en France de se réadapter à son milieu d'origine. Son retour lui montre combien il est devenu occidental et lui fait constater que les nouveaux pays s'éloignent à pas de géants des chemins tracés par leur tradition. Leur futur incertain semble s'orienter vers des solutions extrêmes rendues plus dangereuses par le vide dû à l’abandon de I'ancienne civilisation. Les élites disparaissent et sont remplacées par des hommes pratiques qui agissent au jour le jour avec l’energie accrue que donne le manque de barrières traditionnelles. Agar de Memmi est le récit d'un échec: celui d'un essai d'assimilation d'une Européenne dans le corps de la vieille tradition judéo-arabe. Memmi insiste beaucoup sur sa qualité de Juif et ses oeuvres sont un reflet de l'avenir de cette minorité en pays arabe. Seule la fuite, une fois de plus, semble être la solution. L'analyse dépeint trés bien les conséquences psychologiques d'un tel échec. Pour l'Européenne c'est l'amertume de n'avoir pas, malgré ses efforts, été acceptéeau sein de ce peuple; pour le Juif c'est un effondrement de son amour propre. II en vient à se mépriser lui-même de n'avoir su opter entre sa femme et sa famille, entre l'Occident et l'Orient. II est devenu une nonentité suspendue entre ces deux irréconciliables. Sembene Ousmane a une attitude délibérément optimiste. Pour lui les problèmes d’assimilation de l'Européen au pays noir sont mineurs et facilement surmontables. De la civilisation occidentale il a une vue pragmatique: point besoin de l'assimiler: il s'agit seulement de l'analyser en vue d'en utiliser les éléments applicables à l'Afrique. L'optimisme de Sembene Ousmane va jusqu'à la vision de son pays dépassant l'Europe en cinquante ans. Deux adoptions lui semblent essentielles pour le succès de l'Afrique: celle des machines et techniques d'une part et d'autre part d'un système social qui insisterait surtout sur la forme coopérative pour les exploitations et sur les syndicats pour les salariés. Notre conclusion constate la disparité des solutions apportées aux problèmes posés au début de l'étude et fait ressortir l'apport original de cette nouvelle littérature dans le courant général de la littérature française. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

It would be overstatement to claim that all of South African literature is characterized by its attention to Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's theoretical interregnum, the temporal period during which “the old is dying, and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci 276). Nonetheless, South African author Nadine Gordimer in her now famous essay, “Living in the Interregnum” (1982), situated the term—as the space between the end of apartheid and the beginning of a new and unforeseeable political paradigm—firmly within South African political consciousness. South African author J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, evasive of overt politics and political representation in his fiction, writes about a different kind of interregnum, one not situated between two orders but instead located outside of all binary relationships. In this dissertation, I read Coetzee's works as political acts of performative displacement that attempt imagined identification with the other, in the form of not only the black characters who are often silent in his texts and white women who often narrate, but also in the form of animals, especially the dogs that populate almost all of his opus. These various entities—black, female, and animal—represent multiple ethnographic subjectivities, none of which belongs to the author who must imagine them. In order to represent this diversity of others, therefore, Coetzee's narrative strategies destabilize expectations and alienate the reader from the willing suspension of disbelief that generally accompanies readings of fiction. Such narrative strategies include free indirect discourse in many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). Such destabilization opens up a space for the audience to examine Coetzee's fiction as texts that allow for interplay between character, audience, and author; the texts function dialogically in the Bahktinian sense, performing various positions rather than presenting one controlling subjectivity.

Includes bibiographical references (pages 236-271). / It is my purpose to show that in Southern Africa African English literature as defined above has absorbed the culture of the West and has begun to reciprocate by adding its own distinctive features. My contention will be based on an investigation of the trends and ideas which appear in the novels, short stories, poetry, drama, autobiographical and critical writing of Africans.

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The goal of this study is threefold. At first, it aims at describing the development of Francophone Negro-African Theater from a dynamic point of view by delineating the different phases of its development. Next, the study investigates the different functions assigned to the dramatic art in francophone Africa. Finally, it opens up new avenues for research in the field of African theater. The development of African Francophone Theater has not been a harmonious process. The colonization of Africa by the Europeans interrupted its growth and introduced new forms of drama that were in blatant contrast with local theater. These new forms of drama threatened even the mere existence of indigenous theater. The introduction of French education and the subsequent influences of the teacher training schools, William Ponty in Senegal and Bingerville in Ivory Coast, are of paramount importance to the creation of literary drama and its development in Francophone Africa that will play a pivotal role in the process of decolonization and nation building. After the Second World War, playwrights divorced themselves from the William Ponty ideology and began questioning the legitimacy of the colonial order. In the euphoria of independences, they celebrate the African resistants and praise the new political leaders. But disappointment soon put an end to the euphoria when they realize that the new African leaders were not living up to their promises. The playwrights commit themselves to denounce and combat injustice wherever it manifests itself even at the highest level of government. However the role of theater as agent of change is limited by its elitist characteristics. Plays are written and performed in French, a language unknown to the majority of the illiterate masses who end up creating their own theater in indigenous dialects. This indigenous drama becomes very popular in inner cities where it voices the concerns of the urban masses. At the same time a revolutionary form of theater addresses the development issues of the people in rural areas. This study acknowledges its own limitations and hopes to encourage new avenues for more research into the field of Francophone African drama.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Limoges, 2005. / Includes abstract in French and English. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 488-507) and index.

Afrikaans, the world's youngest language, is not known to many outside South Africa. Mahala, a novel in that language by a major writer, has been translated as an example of South African literary resources yet to be made accessible to English readers. Chapter One (the Foreword) contains historical notes on the Afrikaans language and on Barnard's biography, including his publications and literary awards. Chapter Two is a complete translation (currently the only one) of Chris Barnard' s Mahala. Analysis of and comment on Mahala are reserved for Chapter Three (the Afterword), wherein the structure of the novel is discussed, selected characteristics of the book compared with those of recognized English writers, and commentary upon translation supplied. The Bibliography contains reviews of Mahala, backgrounds of South African literature, the history of Afrikaans, aspects of translation, and dictionaries.

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