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No description available.

Twentieth-century scholars have extensively studied how Rousseau's domestic discourse impacted the patriarchal ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contributed to women's exclusion from the public sphere. Joan Landes, Lynn Hunt, and many others, argued that the French Revolution excluded women from the public sphere and confined them to the domestic realm. Joan Landes also argued that the patriarchal discourse was a mere reflection of social reality. In The Other Enlightenment, Carla Hesse argues for the women's presence in the public sphere. One of the goals of this dissertation is to contribute to the debate by analyzing the content of the counter-discourse of selected women authors during the revolutionary era and examine how they challenged and subverted the patriarchal discourse. In the second chapter, I reconstruct the patriarchal discourse. I first examine the official (or legal) discourse in crucial works which remain absent from major modern sources: Jean Domat's Loix civiles dans leur order naturel and Louis de Héricourt's Loix eccleésiastiques de France dans leur order naturel. Then I look at how scientists like Monroe, Roussel, Lignac, Venel, and Robert used discoveries regarding woman's physiology to create a medical discourse that justifies woman's inferiority so as to confine them into the domestic/private sphere. I examine how intellectuals such as Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Coyer and Laclos, reinforced women's domesticity. In chapter 3, I examine women's participation in the early stage of the Revolution and the overt attempt by some women to claim their place in the public sphere and to challenge and subvert the oppressive patriarchal discourse through their writings. Chapter 4 focuses on Olympe de Gouges's theater and a specific example of subversion of the patriarchal discourse: I compare the father figure in Diderot's La Religieuse and de Gouges's play Le Couvent, ou les Voeux forcés. Finally chapter 5 examines women's involvement in the French Revolution after 1794 and Constance de Salm's attack on patriarchy.

The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.

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Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

En commençant son étude critique sur Camus, Pierre de Boisdeffre,dans (Métamorphose de la littérature, Proust, Valéry, Cocteau, Anouilh, Camus, Sartre, Verviers, Marabout Université, 1974, p.309), fait le constat suivant:"l'Europe depuis Nietzsche, est à la recherche d'un cinquième Evangile. Qu'elle exalte les nourritures terrestres ou qu'elle communie à sa propre nausée, la littérature contemporaine n'a plus qu'une seule certitude: elle sait que Dieu est mort et s'efforce de le remplacer par l'Homme." En méditant la pensée de Camus à travers ses essais philosophiques, il semble que, même si dans un entretien sur la révolte, ce dernier déclare qu'"il n'est pas humaniste", la question du comment l'homme doit vivre avec ses semblables dans le monde et en société, est au centre de la réflexion philosophique camusienne. Car, l'époque de Camus fut celle où la vie humaine comme valeur et la dignité de l'être humain, furent soumises à une dure épreuve d'être respectées par chaque homme et en tout homme. D'où l'intérêt que l'oeuvre de Camus porte sur la question de la "vitalogie": L'homme peut-il vivre heureux sans le secours de Dieu? Oui ou non, l'homme, peut-il se tuer volontairement ou bien tuer les autres sans raison? L'homme peut-il détruire le monde qui le porte sans détruire sa propre vie? En effet, loin de voir dans la mort raisonnée et dans le suicide une valeur, Camus considère qu'ils sont plutôt un mal que les hommes doivent éviter et faire éviter les autres dans le "vivre-ensemble." C'est pour cette raison que la pensée philosophique chez Camus présente comme l'une des caractéristiques majeures, la "passion de vivre" de l'homme et pour l'homme, car la vie est, selon lui, une valeur cardinale qui doit être respectée en tout être humain dans la communauté qui voudrait être juste, paisible, libre, solidaire et unie. A cet effet, nous soutenons la thèse suivante: La pensée camusienne est une "vitalogie" paradoxale, c'est-à-dire qu'elle est debat philosophique sur la vie de l'être humain, en tant que valeur fondamentale, dans ses rapports avec Dieu, le monde et les autres. Par conséquent, une société dans laquelle les hommes sont habités par la passion de bien vivre et mieux vivre ensemble, il y a une exigence impérieuse pour eux de promouvoir et de crer les valeurs qui favorisent le respect de l'être humain et de sa vie. La vitaogie camuusienne est indissociable de la vision qu'on se fait sur l'homme ici et maintenant, en tenant compte des contradictions ou des antinomies du "oui" et du "non" de l'existence. Selon Camus, en effet, la mission principale de l'homme dans le monde est de vivre: "Oui, mais je n'aurai rien manqué de ce qui fait toute ma mission et c'est de vivre." (Carnets I.p.92). La pensée camusienne est donc une vitalogie. Mais comment l'homme doit-il vivre? Celui-ci, pense Camus, doit devenir "créateur" des valeurs de la justice, de la liberté, de la solidarité, de la paix, de l'amitié et de la fraternité entre les hommes et être courageux, pour assumer la responsabilité de sa vie et de son destin dans le monde, en évitant d'aliéner son esprit dans les illusions, dans quelque absolutisme qu'il soit ou dans un pessimisme tétanisant. Au total, l'homme doit prendre en main sa destinée, en vue de la "joie vivre", sans pour autant perdre de vue que celle-ci ne se sépare pas non plus du "désespoir de vivre." <p> / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.