Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Antoine Spacagna, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 19, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 48 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

The present thesis focuses on French Caribbean fiction writers (from Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana) in Czech translations. The principal subject of the thesis are the specific challenges that translators have to face when translating these authors into Czech. The description of these challenges is preceded by a general presentation of this type of literature. Chapter 1 traces the development of French Caribbean literature (the concepts of francité, négritude, antillanité, créolité and littérature-monde) and defines its characteristic features (especially communication settings and language choices) from the point of view of postcolonial theories. Chapter 2 adds more features by using the comparison of literary translation and postcolonial writing, revealing that they share certain principles and methods. Specific questions and challenges related to the translation of Caribbean literature are also treated in this chapter. Chapter 3 addresses the issue of French Caribbean fiction in the Czech Republic. It lists sources of information, published translations and reactions to these translations in Czech press and analyses the Czech literary market. The chapter is concluded by a summary of the reception of this literature in the Czech Republic. Chapter 4 analyses the latest...

This work is a comparative study of the influence of the pan-Africanist discourse of ethnographers Dr. Jean Price-Mars of Haiti and Dr. Arthur Ramos of Brazil, and its impact on the respective literatures and cinemas of the two nations. Beginning in the first quarter of the 20th Century, and stemming from a developing auto-ethnography undertaken by the two scholars, a growing concern over defining cultural identity inspired a generation of writers to appropriate ethnographic methodology and apply it to their fictional works. The discourse of representation, which looked to popular sources for inspiration (Haitian Indigénisme and Brazilian Regionalismo, or which rebelled against literary conventions (modernists of both nations), gave rise to a contentious dispute over a State-sanctioned national identity versus a cultural identity spearheaded by the literati. In looking at the battle over signification, I examine the development of an ethnopoetics in the works of such writers as René Depestre, Jean-Baptiste Cinéas, Jacques Roumain, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz, Mário de Andrade and others, that is persistently used to subvert and oppose the official discourse of the State and its allies. Following the model provided by the Indigénistes, Regionalists and Modernists, and utilizing the framework of French filmmaker Jean Rouch's conceptualization of ethnofictions, the final chapter of the dissertation examines the blurring of the lines between narrative cinema and documentary as a counterdiscursive strategy in Haitian and Brazilian films.

Notre travail naît d'une ambition : proposer une définition du réel merveilleux, et déterminer à cette fin s'il s'agit d'un genre littéraire, ou plutôt d'un ensemble de textes unis par un mode de rapport au monde. A cet effet, nous interrogeons les textes de trois auteurs majeurs du réel merveilleux caraïbe : du cubain Alejo Carpentier, de l'Haïtien René Depestre et du Colombien Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Notre démarche s'intéresse à la visée littéraire du réel merveilleux comme à sa visée anthropologique. Nous cherchons à déterminer chez ces trois auteurs la part du fantastique et la part du merveilleux, souvent en conflit dans leurs textes. Mais nous mettons aussi en lumière les enjeux historiques et culturels de leur écriture. De notre étude, il ressort que le réel merveilleux exprime, à travers des conflits narratifs, les contradictions qui parcourent le monde caraïbe, partagé entre les déchirures de l'Histoire, et l'utopie du Mythe. D'une part il ouvre sur un monde terrifiant : chaos tellurique où se désagrègent les repères spatio-temporels, hantise de la figure du métis, perception enfin d'une histoire pressentie comme un monstre. D'autre part, il ouvre sur ses propres mythes, qui sont souvent des mythes européens revisités : perception cosmique de l'univers, mythologie euphorique du métissage, réconciliation de l'homme avec le monde par une écriture qui conjugue poésie et carnavalesque. Qu'est-ce que donc que le réel merveilleux ? Non pas un genre littéraire ni une esthétique qui se confinerait dans "un réalisme magique" empreint d'artifice, mais plutôt une expression littéraire propre à l'Amérique latine et notamment aux Caraïbes, qui traduit les terreurs comme les aspirations d'une culture et développe sa quête identitaire aux confins de l'Histoire et du Mythe.

My goal is to study the nature of the Marvelous in René Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêves. I want to demonstrate that René Depestre, in his novel, combines a number of surrealist or neo-surrealist premises that have influenced him as a Haitian writer. This goes beyond differences that can be discerned between the "Surrealist marvelous" endorsed by André Breton and the surrealists, and Alejo Capentier's "marvelous real"later proposed by Jacques Stephen Alexis as "marvelous realism" Depestre adapts Haitian natives' perceptions deep-rooted in their historical and social, cultural and religious past and ever-existing political and economical struggle. Taking into account both the surrealist perspective and the Haitian context, I shall address the complexity of the concept of the Marvelous and discuss Depestre's use of "zombification"as a form of metamorphosis, which preserves the mystical nature of Vodou as a religion that syncretizes the Roman Catholic ritual of exorcism of the Christian West and the animist and magical practices inherited from Africa. Scholars have explored the Marvelous and marvelous realism in Depestre's works as a whole, but not in Hadriana dans tous mes rêves specifically. The exclusive nature of this study will show that Depestre draws from Haiti's complex cultural ethos as well as from surrealism'es key principles, to create a hybrid Marvelous typical of Haiti and Depestre'es aesthetic as a writer. / text