This master's thesis deals with the reification, or transformation into objects, of the female characters in Michel Butor's La Modification. It is our contention that the two female characters, Henriette and Cecile, function not as characters, but as objects: they are unable to take up subject positions, and they have the same roles as the other inanimate objects in Butor's work. The critical analysis is based in part on existentialist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, as well as feminist rereadings of these theories. We have also used several critical and theoretical works on the object in the "Nouveau Roman", in the novels of Michel Butor, and, specifically, in La Modification. / The first chapter deals with the work of several feminist theoreticians, who claim that woman is objectified in patriarchal society because she has no access to subjectivity, be it through the means of action, of vision, or of language. In the second chapter we discuss critical writings on the treatment and role of the object in Butor's work, writings which claim that these objects have a specific role to contribute to the characterisation of the main character, and to allow this main character to take up a position as subject. In the third chapter we examine the link between these two critical fields. The female characters in La Modification are objectified because they are not able to assume subject positions, they have no access to subjectivity through action, vision, or language. In addition, the female characters have the same narrative role as the other objects in the novel.

Andre Langevin's novels, Evade de la nuit (1951), Poussiere sur la ville (1953), Le temps des hommes (1956), L'elan d'Amerique (1972) and Une chaine daps le parc (1974) show numerous lonely characters. Abandoned, secluded or uncivilized, they remain unable to communicate with others: "C'est ce rapport difficile et jamais termine de l'individu avec "autrui" qui constitue la trame essentielle et la continuite de l'oeuvre romanesque d'Andre Langevin", wrote Jean-Louis Major in 1977, in an article about the author. / The purpose of this study is to look at the representation of the "Other" when it refers specifically to a woman. The feminine characters in Langevin's novels are shown as strangers: obviously different from men, women are struck by passions that are unknown and incomprehensible to the male heros or to any other man of her environment. In the first part, this study will demonstrate that the majority of heroines lived a painful chidhood with an absent father and an unkind mother. The second part will look at the love relationships of the female protagonists, unions that remain disappointing and are doomed to failure. Finally, the conclusion will examine the tragic death of several heroines (suicide, death in child-birth...). / This study of Andre Langevin's feminine characters relies on the feminist critic, using, among others, the work of Barbara Godard and Lori Saint-Martin. This model will offer an innovative perspective of a literary work that has been greatly studied, but for which one important aspect appears to have been neglected: women who inhabit it.

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This dissertation seeks t o achieve three objectives: (1) to draw attention to the genre of the "Dorfgeschichte," (2) to examine "Dorfgeschichten" which were highly acclaimed in nineteenth century Germany, but are dismissed by literary scholarship today, (3) and most importantly, to adjust decades of inveterate and misleading critical responses with regard to the writers Berthold Auerbach and Jeremias Gotthelf. Although Auerbach's Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichten were received with great enthusiasm by the literati in nineteenth century Germany, his contribution to the genre is diminished by literary critics and historians today. Some, such as Hermann Boeschenstein, claim that the author "was merely ... sugar-coating the realities of peasant life , while having no real contacts with it . "On the other hand, although the majority of Gotthelfs shorter narrative works receive little scholarly attention , the consensus of critical opinion in regard to the author is that he possessed an "unexcelled insight into the peasant's inner life ." On the basis of my close analysis of Auerbach's and Gotthelfs respective texts : Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichten (1843-1854), and Kleinere Erzahlunaen (1838-1852), [More abstract follows] / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

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The purpose of this paper is to examine both the women in Hemingway's life and his works, to search for influences exerted by the biographical women, to categorize the fictional women, and to draw whatever conclusions the evidence may justify.

Given that the role of Heinrich Heine as a precursor to Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized and examined in the critical literature, this dissertation aims to explore congruities in their respective poetic universes, by conducting a parallel reading of the image of woman in their poetry. Contrary to a feminist critique, which denounces the writers' reductive and hence misogynist use of such images, we will remove the anathema momentarily in order to allow a discourse of love to be expressed, in a complex language which reveals the fears and desires of the loving subject in the 19th century. / The representation of the woman by Heine and Baudelaire points to a rupture characteristic of modern poetry. In accordance with the principle of irony, in which a strategy of evasion and detachment is employed, the various female characters presented by the two poets can never be reduced to the two-dimensionality of a pure object. The relationship to woman is marked by distance, suffering and dissonance. Occupying a liminal position between life and death, between animate and inanimate, the image of woman exercises a power of seduction which constitutes a challenge to the social order, extended from its margins. / The image of the prostitute will be analyzed in terms of its close relationship with the metropolis. Subsequently, Freudian theories will shed light on the stakes of the erotic experience which occurs in contact with the demimondaine. The symbolic exchange established with the commodified body of the prostitute ends in the transmission of illness, and ultimately, in the woman's death. In a vain attempt to control his fear of death, the modern poet displaces this fear onto an object as other: the female cadaver, whose horrible beauty emits a "disturbing uncanniness". The object of desire, put to death in this manner, returns to haunt the fetishist, even to take vengeance in the form of the vampire woman whose body resists death, but breathes it into the one she seduces. Finally, through the images of the statue and the sphinx, the poets reveal a divine and revolutionary dimension in the realm of love.