Omeros, le long poème du Saint-lucien Derek Walcott, est mis en relation avec le recueil Moi, laminaire... du Martiniquais Aimé Césaire et avec le roman Otra vez el mar du Cubain Reinaldo Arenas. Dans ces trois oeuvres, la focalisation sur la Grèce antique permet aux trois auteurs de réinvestir les paysages antillais. Cette pratique du détour constitue une esthétique antillaise commune : le passage par des motifs grecs donne lieu à des constructions textuelles originales de ces paysages antillais. Dans une première partie, nous étudions les stratégies mises en place pour montrer le paysage à partir de sculptures grecques et de personnages grecs incorporés aux paysages. Dans une seconde partie, nous montrons comment l'imaginaire grec nourrit l'art de la métaphore chez Walcott. Dans Omeros, l’artisanat de la pêche [coupe et fabrication des gommiers, sciage et évidage des troncs, navigation, pêche à la nasse] constitue une mise en abîme de la technique walcottienne. La fonction de la mer dans le roman Otra vez el mar confirme l'antillanité de la composition d’Omeros. Dans la troisième partie, nous étudions les relations entre discours et paysages. Chez Walcott, la mangrove permet le renouvellement de la mémoire antillaise de la traite. Chez Césaire, ce milieu lagunaire constitue une réponse métaphorique au contexte politique martiniquais. Enfin, dans Omeros, la représentation de l'oralité créole est associée au motif de la cendre et de la forêt saint-lucienne. Finalement, nous affirmons que la variété des procédés esthétiques chez Walcott se fonde sur la diversité des paysages antillais. / Omeros, the long poem written by the Saint-Lucian Derek Walcott is analyzed in relation with the poetic collection Moi, laminaire… by the Martiniquan Aimé Césaire and with the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’s novel Otra Vez el mar. In their works, the focus on Ancient Greece enables the authors to reinvest the West Indian landscape. This common practice of the detour creates a common West Indian aesthetics: the use of Greek motifs gives birth to original textual constructions of Caribbean landscapes. In the first part, we are studying the strategies set up to portray the landscape through Greek sculptures and characters involved in the landscapes. In the second part, we are showing how the Greek imagination nurtures the art of the metaphor in Walcott’s work. In Omeros, the fishing craft [the cutting of the gommier trees, the sawing and the hollowing out of their trunks, for the building of the canoes, navigation and net fishing] reveals the techniques at work in Walcott’s writings. The function of the sea in Arenas’s novel confirms the West Indian aspect in the aesthetic process of Omeros. In the third part, the relations between discourse and landscapes are brought into light. In Walcott’s work the mangrove allows the renewal of the Caribbean memory of the slave trade. In Césaire’s work, this lagoon environment constitutes a metaphoric response to the Martiniquan political background. Then, in Omeros, the representation of creole orality is linked with the motif of the ashes and the Saint Lucian forest. Finally, we assert that the diversity of Caribbean landscape sets in motion Walcott’s poetics.

Notre sujet de réflexion consistait à penser à ce qui fait lien entre la littérature francophone d’Afrique noire et antillaise, en plus de l’histoire. Nous nous sommes penché sur les stratégies d’écriture déployées par les écrivains, pour se démarquer, pour signifier leur existence, Partant de la pratique du marronnage comme phénomène historique lié à l’esclavage, nous avons amorcé une réflexion sur sa transposition littéraire, à partir de la mythification de la figure du Marron, par des auteurs comme Dayot, Houat, et plus récemment Glissant et Chamoiseau, qui ont pu développer une esthétique de la survivance, valoriser l’ identité du Marron, héraut du peuple antillais dans la résistance à l’esclavage. L’essentiel de notre travail a porté sur l’élargissement de ce thème du marronnage aux périodes coloniale et postcoloniale, en posant comme postulat l’hypothèse de l’existence d’une forme de marronnage intellectuel comme fondement d’une esthétique négro-africaine, instauré par les précurseurs de la Négritude, Senghor et Césaire, dont le travail le plus original, mais souvent négligé, a été la conquête d’une langue de la négritude. Les écrivains contemporains francophones d’Afrique noire, à l’instar d’Alain Mabanckou et de Fatou Diome, dans un contexte inscrit dans une dynamique mondialiste et un espace littéraire conditionnés par les diktats d’une critique eurocentriste, ont pratiqué une forme de marronnage ( trans) esthétique, mais aussi par une surconscience linguistique redoublée, en développant des stratégies destinées à inscrire subversivement au cœur de la langue l’empreinte d’une déviance revendiquée, comme seul moyen de signifier son identité. / Our subject of reflection consisted in thinking of what makes link between the French-speaking literature of subsaharian Africa and the Antilles, in addition to the history. We dealt with the writing strategies deployed by the authors, to stand out, to reveal their existence. On the basis of the French word “marronnage”, taking its name from Spanish “Cimarron” used to qualify this historical phenomenon related to slavery, we started to think about its literary transposition. The literary mythologizing of the Maroon by authors such as Eugène Dayot, Louis-Timagène Houat, and more recently Glissant, has enabled to develop aesthetics of the survival, to value the identity of the Marron, herald of the Antillean people, in the resistance to slavery. The main part of our work was about the extension of this theme of the marronnage to the colonial and postcolonial periods, by setting as postulate the hypothesis of the existence of a form of intellectual marronnage as foundation of negro-African aesthetics, established by the forerunners of the Negritude, Senghor and Césaire, whose most original but often unknown work was the conquest of a language of the negritude. The French-speaking contemporary writers of subsaharian Africa, for instance Alain Mabanckou and Fatou Diome, in a context of an internationalist dynamics and a literary space conditioned by the diktats of an eurocentrist criticism, applied a form of ( trans ) esthetic marronnage, but also with a doubled “linguistic surconscience”, by developing strategies intended for subversively setting at the heart of the language the print of a claimed abnormality, as only means to make their identity known.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é estudar, de forma relacionada e comparada, quatro poetas de quatro diferentes países latino-americanos: César Vallejo, do Peru; Aimé Césaire, da Martinica (Antilhas Francesas); Jorge Luis Borges, da Argentina; e Carlos Drummond de Andrade, do Brasil. Cada um desses poetas é tido como poeta nacional de seu país, com relevância histórica e mundial incontestável. A perspectiva do trabalho é a comparação de como cada poeta resolve o problema de constituir uma lírica ao mesmo tempo moderna e nacional na periferia do capitalismo. Esses problemas serão discutidos do ponto de vista da crítica imanente, tal como foi desenvolvida pela tradição crítica brasileira, que estuda a formação e configuração da literatura nacional em países periféricos. / This research has the purpose of studying, in the connective and comparative way, four poets of four different Latin American countries: César Vallejo, from Peru; Aimé Césaire, from Martinica (French Caribbean); Jorge Luis Borges, from Argentina; and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from Brazil. Each of these poets is known as a national poet of his own country, and all of them have unquestionable historical and international importance. The perspective of this work is to compare how each poet solves the problem of establishing a poetry at the same time modern and national in the periphery of capitalism. These problems will be discussed by the point of view of immanent criticism, as it was developed by the brazilian critical tradition, in his studies concerning the formation and configuration of literature in peripheral countries.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é estudar, de forma relacionada e comparada, quatro poetas de quatro diferentes países latino-americanos: César Vallejo, do Peru; Aimé Césaire, da Martinica (Antilhas Francesas); Jorge Luis Borges, da Argentina; e Carlos Drummond de Andrade, do Brasil. Cada um desses poetas é tido como poeta nacional de seu país, com relevância histórica e mundial incontestável. A perspectiva do trabalho é a comparação de como cada poeta resolve o problema de constituir uma lírica ao mesmo tempo moderna e nacional na periferia do capitalismo. Esses problemas serão discutidos do ponto de vista da crítica imanente, tal como foi desenvolvida pela tradição crítica brasileira, que estuda a formação e configuração da literatura nacional em países periféricos. / This research has the purpose of studying, in the connective and comparative way, four poets of four different Latin American countries: César Vallejo, from Peru; Aimé Césaire, from Martinica (French Caribbean); Jorge Luis Borges, from Argentina; and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from Brazil. Each of these poets is known as a national poet of his own country, and all of them have unquestionable historical and international importance. The perspective of this work is to compare how each poet solves the problem of establishing a poetry at the same time modern and national in the periphery of capitalism. These problems will be discussed by the point of view of immanent criticism, as it was developed by the brazilian critical tradition, in his studies concerning the formation and configuration of literature in peripheral countries.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis argues that all literature is subject to ‘afterlife,’ a continual process of translation. From this starting point, this thesis seeks to answer two questions. Firstly, how texts demonstrate this continual translation; secondly, how texts should be read if they are understood as constantly within translation. To answer these questions, this thesis seeks to develop a model of textuality that holds afterlife as central, and a model of reading based on this concept of textuality. Chapter One explores how following through the implications of Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s usages of the term ‘afterlife’ in their writings on translation, language and history necessarily implies a model of textuality. The model of reading that this thesis seeks to develop focuses on language and history, as Benjamin and Derrida define these as the parameters within which translation takes place. This study emphasises textuality itself as a third parameter. Chapter One also describes how, following Benjamin and Derrida, language and history are conceived as inescapable, repressive systems. This, paradoxically, allows for the concept of ‘messianicity’ – the idea that all language, and every historical event, has the potential to herald an escape from language or history. By definition, because language and history are all-encompassing, this potential cannot be enacted, and remains potential. An innovation of this thesis is to understand textuality itself as having ‘messianic potential’; all texts have the potential to escape textuality and afterlife, by reaching a point where they could no longer be translated. Understanding texts as having messianic potential, but always being subject to afterlife, is the basis of the model of reading described at the end of this chapter. Due to the ways Benjamin and Derrida suggest we recognise messianic potential, texts are read with a dual focus on their singularity and their connections to other texts. This is achieved through the ‘text-in-afterlife,’ a concept this thesis develops that understands texts as inextricable from the texts they translate and the texts that translate them. Chapters Two, Three and Four test and complicate this model of reading in response to texts by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire and Jorge Luis Borges. Concepts of textuality and reading are therefore developed throughout the thesis. The three key texts are read with focus on their individual relationships with language, history and textuality, and their connections to the texts they translate. Critics have linked Joyce’s Ulysses to multiple other texts, making it seem exceptional. However, the concept of messianicity shows that Ulysses is important precisely because it is not exceptional. Césaire’s Une Tempête demonstrates how a text can interact with several translations of ‘the same’ text simultaneously, and also that, although language and history are structured by colonialism and are inescapable, there is a huge potential for translation within these terms. Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote’ demonstrates the form of texts’ continual translation in afterlife by describing a text that is verbally identical to the text it ‘translates,’ yet is nevertheless different in ‘meaning’ from its original. Borges’ fiction also highlights the endless potential for translation that is inherent to all texts. Through four chapters, this thesis develops a model of textuality that understands literature as defined by an almost endless potential for translation. The value of reading texts in the terms of ‘afterlife’ is to emphasise literature’s immense potential: all texts are continually translated in relation to language, history and textuality, and continually reveal further texts.

This work is dedicated to francophone authors : Aimé Césaire and Mohammed Khaïr- Eddine, to their creation and to the epoch when it was written. Even though they were originated from different countries (Martinique and Morocco) and from different epochs (before and after the decolonization), their poetics are similar in many points. Even if their historical experiences are closely connected by phases of french colonialism. The goal of this work will be to compare their poetics and to analyse how the epoch influenced and interconnected those two authors, and how they reacted to it. In the first part the common will to renovate their national literature will be described and their means to achieve this goal will be explored. The following part will be concentrated on the work of those two writers, on the characteristic attributes, on the recurrent symbols in their works and on the significance of the place of birth. The last part will be dedicated to the context, in which the authors wrote, and will clarify how the context unit or divide them. In this work, we will continuously compare common aspects of their poetics and in the same time the modification of those aspects during the transition from the colonialism to post- colonialism. Then, we will explain how this passage of the regime changed the...

La controverse des écrivains étiquetés « francophones » en 2006 indique la fin du « paradigme national de littérature ». Ce paradigme se construit sur trois unités : la langue, le peuple et la littérature. Fortement centralisée, la France est l’État qui a le mieux réussi à souder la nation et la littérature ; cette liaison se réalise par la territorialisation. Ceci dit, pour penser au contraire la littérature sans territoire et en dehors du paradigme national, il faut l’examiner en termes de la dissémination et de la déterritorialisation, ce qui devient d’ailleurs de plus en plus visibles aujourd’hui. Cette thèse discute le monde et la littérature dans l’optique de la Relation d’Édouard Glissant. Il observe trois trajectoires tracées par les écrivains modernes. La première part du Centre vers la périphérie, qui s’inscrit dans le contexte de la colonisation européenne du monde. La deuxième va dans le sens opposé, de la périphérie vers le Centre, ce qui correspond à la montée des coloniaux en Métropole ainsi qu’à leurs pensées anticolonialistes. Or, ces deux trajectoires sont identiques tant qu’elles s’articulent autour de la dichotomie Centre/périphérie et donnant corps à la Relation concentrique du monde. En revanche, la troisième démolit la dichotomie Centre/périphérie, errant d’une périphérie à une autre et réalisant la Relation interpériphérique. Appuyé sur le couple conceptuel d’arborescence et de rhizome proposé par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, cette thèse cartographier ces deux sortes de Relations. Elle vise de révéler le devenir-rhizome du monde en étudiant les œuvres d’Aimé Césaire, de Kateb Yacine et d’Édouard Glissant. / The controversy of so-called “francophone” writers in 2006 indicates the end of “national paradigm of literature”. This paradigm consists of three unities: language, people and literature. Because of its highly centralized system, France is the State that succeeded the most in bundling its nation and literature. Their tight connection is assured by the principle of territorializaion. Then, in order to think about literature without territory and outside national paradigm, it is necessary to examine it in terms of dissemination and deterritorialization, which are becoming increasingly visible today. This dissertation discusses about the world and literature in perspective of Édouard Glissant’s concept of Relation. He observes three trajectories that modern writers have drawn. The first trajectory departs from the Center to periphery that conforms to European colonization over the world. The second trajectory goes from colonial periphery to the Center, which corresponds with the migration of colonized people to Metropolitan France as well as their anti-colonial thoughts. Though, these two trajectories seem identical so far as they are constructed by Center/periphery dichotomy, realizing a concentric Relation of the world. The third trajectory, however, demolishes such Center/periphery dichotomy, by wandering from a periphery to another periphery and realizing the inter-peripheral Relation. Applying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s pair of concepts, Tree and Rhizome, this dissertation maps those two sorts of Relations. It reveals the becoming-rhizome of the world by studying the literary works of Aimé Césaire, Kateb Yacine, and Édouard Glissant.

This dissertation contends that The Tempest by William Shakespeare plays a seminal role in the development of postcolonial literature and criticism because it was created in a moment when the colonial system that was now falling apart was just beginning to come into being. Creative writers and critics from the Third World, particularly Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and the First found that the moment reflected in The Tempest had something very specific to say to a generation coming of age in the postcolonial world of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. I establish that a significant discourse that begins in the Nineteenth Century and intensifies in the Twentieth depends on The Tempest to explore the nature of colonialism and to develop an understanding of the postcolonial world. I then examine the role theories of adaptation play in understanding why The Tempest assumes such a crucial role and determine that the most useful model of adaptation resembles the method developed by biblical typologists which “sets two successive historical events [or periods] into a reciprocal relation of anticipation and fulfillment” (Brumm 27). I ague that postcolonial writers and critics found in The Tempest evidence of a history of colonial oppression and resistance often obscured by established historical narratives and a venue to explore their relationship to their past, present, and future. Because my argument rests on the contention that The Tempest was created in a world where colonialism was coming into being, I explore the historical context surrounding the moment of the play’s creation and determine, in spite of the contention of many historians and some literary critics to the contrary, the forces bringing colonialism into being were already at play and were having a profound effect. After briefly illustrating the historical roots of several popular themes in The Tempest that postcolonial writers have embraced, I turn to the work of writers and critics from the Third World and the First to show how The Tempest plays a significant role in postcolonial studies.

This dissertation contends that The Tempest by William Shakespeare plays a seminal role in the development of postcolonial literature and criticism because it was created in a moment when the colonial system that was now falling apart was just beginning to come into being. Creative writers and critics from the Third World, particularly Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and the First found that the moment reflected in The Tempest had something very specific to say to a generation coming of age in the postcolonial world of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. I establish that a significant discourse that begins in the Nineteenth Century and intensifies in the Twentieth depends on The Tempest to explore the nature of colonialism and to develop an understanding of the postcolonial world. I then examine the role theories of adaptation play in understanding why The Tempest assumes such a crucial role and determine that the most useful model of adaptation resembles the method developed by biblical typologists which “sets two successive historical events [or periods] into a reciprocal relation of anticipation and fulfillment” (Brumm 27). I ague that postcolonial writers and critics found in The Tempest evidence of a history of colonial oppression and resistance often obscured by established historical narratives and a venue to explore their relationship to their past, present, and future. Because my argument rests on the contention that The Tempest was created in a world where colonialism was coming into being, I explore the historical context surrounding the moment of the play’s creation and determine, in spite of the contention of many historians and some literary critics to the contrary, the forces bringing colonialism into being were already at play and were having a profound effect. After briefly illustrating the historical roots of several popular themes in The Tempest that postcolonial writers have embraced, I turn to the work of writers and critics from the Third World and the First to show how The Tempest plays a significant role in postcolonial studies.