No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of French and Italian, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

The subject of this thesis is the contemporary literature written by the sons and daughters of North African immigrant families in France. Its main area of investigation is the place of this literature in the French literary field, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, and the discursive features which motivate the ethnic based label of “Beur literature”. The study has a double approach in investigating both the argument for the socio-ethnic categorisation, and the reception of this literature in the French press. The literary corpus consists of twenty works from 2005 and 2006 by eighteen Beur writers. Thirteen of these works are subject to literary analysis. These are novels by Akli Tadjer, Zahia Rahmani, Faïza Guène, Mabrouck Rachedi, El Driss, Mohamed Razane, Houda Rouane, Nora Hamdi, Nor Eddine Boudjedia and Touhami Moualek, and three autobiographical narratives written by Razika Zitouni, Abel El Quandili and Aziz Senni. The press corpus from the corresponding period covers 14 titles of French national and regional daily papers, 8 titles of weekly general press and 6 titles of periodicals of literary and social debate. According to my hypothesis, the Beur fiction and the autobiographical narratives of my corpus are based on a common discourse that is expressed through certain literary means. A frequent strategy found in the novels is the subversion of French classics. Another feature is the constant referral to the French republican values. The novels share the latter of these two strategies with the autobiographical stories. This can be interpreted as resulting from a communication between a literary discourse and a social discourse which points toward a common ideological foundation. It also reveals the specific “Frenchness” of a literature that is often classified as “francophone” rather than “French” literature. The study of the journalistic reception confirms this aspect by the frequent referral of its authors to their ethnic and social origins.

Thesis (MA (Modern Foreign Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The publication in 1983 of Medhi Charef’s novel Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed marked the beginning of Beur literature, a collection of narratives concerning the lives of individuals of North African origin in the French suburbs. The term “beur”, derived from the double inversion of the word “arabe”, would become synonymous with “Maghrebians” and be used to define a cultural movement claiming its uniqueness. Beur writers or those who make use of Beur heroes in their novels reveal, often in autobiographical form, the daily experiences of a marginalized minority living in identical socio-economic conditions, which are sources of conflicts, whether latent or manifest, with the dominant culture. The sensitivity of Beur writers as manifested in their writings enables us to obtain images of the lives of people living in shantytowns or the large conglomerations on the outskirts of French cities. However, this literature provides more than just a simple description of context or situation, since it also contains the verdict of young Beurs on the legitimacy of the established social order and their strategies to transform or to adapt to this order. Work, home, school, politics or affective relations are concrete examples of areas where the individual is faced with an established system of values and norms, inequality of resources and convergent or divergent interests that need to be taken into account during the process of exchange in order to satisfy his/her needs. In this interdisciplinary research we apply the sociological concepts of exchange and conflict theory in order to disclose the strategies used by characters in Beur novels to adapt or free themselves from given conditions of exchange and power configurations on different social markets of exchange.

No description available.