Thesis supervisor: Alvin Snider. Includes bibliographic references (p. 214-227).

A partir du repérage d’un point aveugle de la littérature générale et comparée, ce travail vise à faire de la littérature turque le site d’interrogation de la discipline et de l’intelligibilité régionale de la littérature européenne. La mondialisation du discours critique permet de situer la réception de la littérature européenne chez un romancier turc contemporain dans le cadre des échanges littéraires inégaux entre un espace littéraire ancien et très doté et la périphérie turque. Les particularités de ce champ socio-Historique dont Orhan Pamuk est tributaire permettent de comprendre sa trajectoire exceptionnelle, mais aussi son ethos de lecteur de la bibliothèque européenne, marqué par l’excentricité et l’héritage de la dépendance. Dès lors, l’étude du recours d’Orhan Pamuk au roman européen met en valeur trois usages de celui-Ci : un usage mimétique, un usage générique et un usage architextuel dont témoigne la réécriture des Buddenbrook de Thomas Mann. Le recours au roman dostoïevskien met en lumière, quant à lui, l’homologie structurale de deux anciens empires dans le rapport à l’Europe, et révèle à Orhan Pamuk l’intelligibilité des « démons » de la Turquie. Le roman pamukien se présente alors comme une négociation poétique de la dépendance et de l’excentricité de la littérature et du roman turcs. La poétique intertextuelle très appuyée, dans un geste de réécriture du canon (Proust, Dante, Dostoïevski) permet la captation de l’héritage littéraire européen ; la poétique de la taklit, centrée sur les jeux fictionnels et les feintises ludiques, permet enfin de transmuer le complexe de dépendance mimétique dans une nouvelle catharsis romanesque de laquelle émerge la « fiction » de l’auteur pamukien. / Having identified a blind spot in general and comparative literature, this work proposes to introduce Turkish literature as a questioning site within the field which also interrogates the regional comprehensibility of European literature. The globalization of literary criticism allows us to locate the reception of European literature within the work of a contemporary Turkish novelist in the wider context of an unbalanced literary exchange between on the one hand an ancient and rich literary space and the Turkish periphery on the other. The particularities of this social and historical field to which Orhan Pamuk is affiliated account for his trajectory in world literature, while also shedding light on his ethos as a reader of the European library, itself characterized by eccentricity and an inherited dependency. It follows that studying Orhan Pamuk’s use to the European novel brings to light a mimetic, a generic and an architextual use, as shown by his rewriting of Mann’s Buddenbrooks. As for his use of the Dostoevskian novel, it highlights the structural homology of the two former Empires in relation to Europe, and lays bare to Orhan Pamuk Turkey’s “demons” in all their legibility. The Pamukian novel presents itself as a poetical negotiation with the dependency and eccentricity of Turkish literature and the Turkish novel. Rewriting the canon (Proust, Dante, Dostoevsky) with glowing intertextual poetics, Pamuk captures the European literary inheritance ; these taklit poetics, replete with fictional games and playful sham facilitate the conversion of this net of mimetic dependency into a new novelistic catharsis from which the “fiction” of the Pamukien author emerges.

French text / Si nous pouvons constater, d’une part, que l’univers carcéral occupe une place très importante dans les textes de Tahar Ben Jelloun, nous ne pouvons cependant ignorer, de l’autre, les efforts des personnages de la diégèse ben jellounienne pour trouver une libération quelconque. De ce fait, la libération constitue l’objet de notre étude par excellence. Nous avons choisi cinq textes de l’écrivain marocain : Moha le fou Moha le sage (1978), L’enfant de sable (1985), La nuit sacrée (1987), Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001) et Amours sorcières (2003). Après un survol rapide de l’incarcération sous ses différentes formes, allant des plus concrètes aux plus abstraites, nous étudions les paradigmes les plus communs vers lesquels l’homme maghrébin moderne se tourne dans le but de se libérer des carcans qui l’entravent et nous en relevons tour à tour les limitations ou lacunes. Ainsi, nous remettons en question le modèle matérialiste qui échoue pour ce qui de la libération de l’individu en raison de ses excès. Puis, nous étudions le modèle psychologique mettant l’accent sur ses limites dans la mesure où il comprend un mouvement vertical vers le bas. Or, sans un mouvement vers le haut, aucune libération n’est possible. Très particulière à la société maghrébine est la praxis islamique moderne qui, loin de libérer l’individu, ne fait que l’étouffer davantage. Ensuite, nous soulevons des questions au sujet de la sorcellerie et des dangers qu’elle comprend. Loin d’être un élément libérateur, elle constitue un piège. Nous arrivons éventuellement à la seule clé capable d’apporter la libération intérieure au Maghrébin : la métaphysique et, dans le contexte de la civilisation arabo-islamique, il s’agit de l’ésotérisme islamique ou le soufisme. Ce mémoire requiert une approche très scientifique telle que l’exige la nature même de notre problématique. Nous avons opté pour une approche métaphysique pour conduire notre étude à bon port. / If we cannot deny the fact that the realm of incarceration holds an important place in the texts of Tahar Ben Jelloun, we also have to acknowledge the endeavours of the characters to find liberation in some way or another. Therefore, above all else, liberation constitutes the object of our study. We have chosen five texts of the Moroccan author: Moha le fou Moha le sage (1978), L’enfant de sable (1985), La nuit sacrée (1987), Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001) and Amours sorcières (2003). After a quick glance at the different forms of incarceration, starting from the most tangible and moving to the most abstract ones, we study the most common paradigms to which the Moroccan turns to in order to free himself from the shackles that imprison him and we study simultaneously their shortcomings. Hence, we call into question the materialistic model that fails in liberating the individual on account of its excesses. Then, we study the psychological model laying emphasis on its limitations in that it comprises a vertical downward movement while no liberation is possible without an upward movement. Quite specific of the Moroccan society is the modern Islamic praxis that, in lieu of freeing the individual, only stifles him more. Afterwards, we raise questions concerning sorcery and dangers that it represents. Far from being a liberating agent, it constitutes a trap. Ultimately we come to the only key capable of bringing internal liberation to the Moroccan: metaphysics and, in the arabo-islamic context, it is Islamic esotericism or Sufism. This thesis requires a most scientific approach as demands the very nature of our problematic. We have thus chosen a metaphysical approach that best suits our study. / Classics and World Languages / M.A. (French)

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

“Circulating Knowledges: Literature and the Idea of the Library in Renaissance England” pairs literary texts and libraries to illustrate how literary creation and library building in England from 1500 to 1700 were deeply invested in one another. The history of English Renaissance libraries has generally been analyzed from the viewpoints of religious history and historiography, seen by scholars as a story of Protestant librarians attempting to preserve (or invent) a history of Protestant England. Many literary critics —citing Thomas Bodley’s notorious distaste for “stage plaies”—have typically reduced institutional libraries to elitist boogeymen hostile to popular or vernacular literature. Revising these narratives, this dissertation brings together a large corpus, including works by Thomas More, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, to illustrate how literary depictions of England’s fledgling libraries shaped their creation and development, while the practices of these inchoate libraries in turn influenced literary texts. “Circulating Knowledges” advances its argument on several fronts. First, I show that developments (or a perceived lack of development) in library organization, access, and use appeared in literary texts, which often depicted literary libraries in response to these developments. Second, I home in on moments when literary texts that seem not at all interested in libraries become unexpectedly fruitful texts through which to develop literary thinking about libraries. In the process of excavating this literary interest in libraries, I demonstrate that Renaissance literature concerns itself not only with depicting, commenting on, or objecting to the developments in library creation happening during the period, but also in imagining alternative possibilities for how libraries might function, conceptions of a library that often outstripped what was materially possible in the period: these conceptions I term “the idea of the library.” In detailing literature’s preoccupation with developments in Renaissance library systems, I offer new perspectives on the period’s literary attitudes toward the creation, transmission, and protection of knowledge, all questions which the building—or imagining—of a library brings to the forefront.

The thesis deals with a selected literary works by contemporary authors of the Central European area, which are associated with the landscape of Transcarpathian Ukraine. The thesis primarily focuses on the issue of imagining space from the narrator's perspective and a conception of its own identity in a relation to a referenced space, topography, collective memory. The initial precondition for interpreting texts is the peripheral character of the region and its features, such as nostalgy, memories of a place that is no longer, a fascination for exotism etc. Using a literary-comparative approach, the following texts are disscussed: Maroš Krajňak's Carpathia, Ziemowit Szczerek's Přijde Mordor a sežere nás aneb Tajná historie Slovanů, and Jinací by Taras Prochasko. Concerning space visualisation and its narrative potential related to the narrator's identity, the theoretical basis of the work is experimentaly set in a postcolonial framework. As such, the thesis intends to capture the resonance of the material in another culture (ie in the Czech, Slovak and Polish environment). Key words Central European literature, cultural context, periphery, postcolonialism, identity, landscape, Transcarpathian Ukraine

The thesis deals with a selected literary works by contemporary authors of the Central European area, which are associated with the landscape of Transcarpathian Ukraine. The thesis primarily focuses on the issue of imagining space from the narrator's perspective and a conception of its own identity in a relation to a referenced space, topography, collective memory. The initial precondition for interpreting texts is the peripheral character of the region and its features, such as nostalgy, memories of a place that is no longer, a fascination for exotism etc. Using a literary-comparative approach, the following texts are disscussed: Maroš Krajňak's Carpathia, Ziemowit Szczerek's Přijde Mordor a sežere nás aneb Tajná historie Slovanů, and Jinací by Taras Prochasko. Concerning space visualisation and its narrative potential related to the narrator's identity, the theoretical basis of the work is experimentaly set in a postcolonial framework. As such, the thesis intends to capture the resonance of the material in another culture (ie in the Czech, Slovak and Polish environment). Key words Central European literature, cultural context, periphery, postcolonialism, identity, landscape, Transcarpathian Ukraine

In 1530, a German physician named Otto Brunfels published an herbal entitled Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Living Images of Herbs). In it, he planned to map the names of medicinal herbs known in and native to Germany onto their Greek and Latin names. Brunfels’ audience included fellow physicians and in order to assist with the identification of the herbs in his book, his publisher employed a woodcut artist to produce realistic images of them, a novelty in the genre of printed herbals. Over time, Brunfels’ work was superseded by 16th-century botanists and his legacy was relegated to the illustrations of his herbs, while his contributions to the naming and description of them were dismissed as unoriginal. However, a closer examination reveals Brunfels’ herbal as a transitional text bridging the gap between the herbal tradition and the development of the science of botany. In addition to citing Pliny the Elder as his primary authoritative influence, Brunfels also references a number of 15th-century Italian humanist scholars who were neither botanists nor physicians, but who were known for their critiques of the early printed editions of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis and even of Pliny himself as a natural history authority. Thus, Brunfels’ herbal is tied to the manuscript and printing history of Pliny and to humanist attempts to correct and stabilize his text. Moreover, in the course of his work, Brunfels encountered a number of herbs that were known to him, but whose Latin and Greek nomenclature he could not accurately identify. As a result, he was forced to describe in his own words, in original Latin, these herbae nudae with German nomenclature but with unknown Greek and Latin names. In addition, Brunfels encounters considerable disagreement among the ancient authorities about the naming and classification of other herbs and he is again forced to insert his own opinion, which he calls iudicium nostrum. I argue that Brunfels’ original Latin is a very early example of what would eventually become formal botanical Latin. Brunfels’ herbal is situated in such a way that it looks backward whilst simultaneously looking forward. It is an object of reception, appropriating terminology and methods from Pliny the Elder and from the humanist scholars who debated the quality of the printed editions of his work and the accuracy of the information provided in it. It is simultaneously the subject of reception, demonstrating a halting, hesitant vocabulary and style of Latinity that would eventually come to be identified with botany as a discipline. Chapter 1 addresses Pliny’s ideas of what constitutes knowledge (cognitio) about plants in the Historia Naturalis, via his arguments against improper nomenclature (nomina nuda) and the alignment of herbal medicine with magic (magicae herbae). Pliny’s advocacy for proper methodology (experience over book learning) is also examined. Chapter 2 turns to the manuscript tradition of Pliny’s text and the first two printed editions, in 1469 and 1470, which were corrupt and resulted in an unstable, inaccurate text. In Chapter 3, the reactions of the Italian humanists to these early printed editions are considered, along with the transition from critiques of the editors and printers to debates about inaccuracies that can be traced to Pliny himself. Chapter 4 turns to Otto Brunfels and traces his reliance on Pliny as well as on the Italian humanists, especially Ermolao Barbaro, who claimed to “heal” the errors in Pliny and stabilized his text. Brunfels’ original descriptions of herbs are also discussed. In the conclusion, Brunfels’ work is compared with that of botanists who postdated him, including Leonhard Fuchs, Kaspar Bauhin, and Karl Linnaeus.

<p>  </p> <p>Gender, anxiety, identity, and Gawain’s impossible choice have long been identified and examined as worth studying in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em>. By focusing on the different states of dress that Gawain finds himself in, the gendered behaviors he engages in, and the fact that he takes on and wears a piece of woman’s clothing as his own before his final encounter, it becomes clear that Gawain begins to utilize and slip into a gender fluid state of identity. His behaviors in Haut Desert cross gendered lines, but also the lines of private and public identity: Gawain’s fault is revealed at the Green Chapel, when the Green Knight reveals himself to be Bertilak as well as his knowledge of Gawain’s girdle. By taking up the green girdle, Gawain cross-dresses and gains access to alternative courses of action and paths towards virtue and survival. Upon returning to his court, his community must take on the girdle as a token of Gawain himself and integrate it in a way that allows for his gender fluidity to become enclosed within the borders of the chivalric community. Gawain’s survival and the benefit which he brings his court are materially represented by the girdle which stands for both the honorable and shameful, the knightly and the monstrous, and the feminine and masculine. </p>

What is a “Jewish book”? Does the history of Jewish secularism necessarily follow a Christian example? Did the Jews living in early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire understand themselves by the same terms contemporary ones do? This dissertation examines five books printed by Jewish printer Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino (1460[?]-1534) in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in Italy and in the Ottoman Empire, which are posited as ‘secular.’ While Gershom is mainly known in “Jewish bibliography” circles – a concept the dissertation investigates and challenges – as a printer of religious Jewish tomes, a critical microhistorical analysis of the five books, their production, material makeup and reception, reveals a ‘secularity,’ a comfort in being-in-the-world which upends the received temporality of Jewish secularization. In rejecting a retrojection of later ideas of ‘secularization,’ often Christian-inflected and ideologically-biased, onto early modern Jewish cultural production, the dissertation asks that the Jews living in Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire be understood by their own lights. To correctly treat Gershom’s books a critical list of his published titles spanning five languages, was necessary: the dissertation therefore first follows the “political economy of classification” which has historically governed what material has been deemed “the Jewish book,” revealing the embedded discursive biases of this scheme and problematizing some of its techniques. It then moves to investigate the ‘world’ each of five secular books was created and consumed in. The ‘world’ of Isaac ibn Saḥula’s 𝘔𝘦𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭 𝘩𝘢-ḳ𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘪 (1490–1491), a compendium of animal fables and the first Hebrew illustrated book in print, is treated as a series of translations between medieval Spain, northern Italy and modern Germany. What do its woodcut illustrations reveal about the representation of the human, the animal and the Jew in Renaissance Italy? The dissertation contends that they reveal a specific Renaissance visual Jewish being-in-the-world. The ‘world’ treated I a grouping of six epic titles Gershom printed in the early 16th century similarly questions ideas of Jewish visuality and national Jewish literature(s): were these chivalric and macaronic titles ‘Judaized’ as ‘foreign’ material, or did the Jews of Italy read and enjoy them all along? An economy of print reuse in these titles further reveals an economic and cultural circuit between the Marche region and Venice. The ‘world’ investigated in connection with the 1534 𝘚𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘢-𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳, an arithmetic primer by Elia Mizraḥi that Gershom printed in Constantinople is one of a “Trans-Adriatic circuit” of scientific dissemination, following certain problematics of intercultural and inter-religious ‘translation’ in the Renaissance. Is printing ‘Western’? Was a book printed in Hebrew in the Ottoman Empire – one of the first ever – an ‘Italian’ production? Did its different readers – Jewish and non-Jewish – understand mathematics and science as ‘secular’? The ‘world’ which a chapter on a trilingual Christian exegesis of the Talmud (𝘋𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘴, 1518) investigates centers on the question of why a devout Jewish printer would publish a fiercely anti-rabbinic tract. By reading the rise of the 16th-century intellectual-religious phenomenon of Christian Hebraism against the contemporaneous invention of the world’s first Ghetto in Venice, the chapter asks whether the ‘extraction’ of Hebrew and other forms of ‘Jewish knowledge’ during this period can be read as analogous to the rising logic of race, as well as the nascent capitalistic logic of the colony prior to the colony. Questioning and following this ‘early modern extractivism,’ the chapter places 𝘥𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴 in its larger intellectual context, positing a secular Jewish being-in-the-world even within a religiously Christian context, rereading the modern birth of ‘Jewish studies.’ The final chapter investigates some visual aspects of the sumptuous woodcut illustration accompanying a Christian theological title, 𝘋𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘶𝘮 𝘤𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘮 (1507): were they the reason for some bibliographers’ anxieties regarding Gershom’s ‘correct’ religious affiliation? Continuing a discussion on Italian-Jewish worldliness, the chapter fleshes out Gershom’s – and other Jews of the time – adamancy to ‘be in the world’ in which they lived. Taken together, the different ‘worlds’ investigated in this dissertation feature recurring situations of polyglossic hybridity, of ‘diglossia,’ of trans-national circuits operating before the modern formulation of a nation, of a repeated crossing of borders and religious lines of demarcation, of constant translation across and between languages, as well as between the textual and the visual, between the abstract and the material. Gershom himself, the dissertation shows, exhibited a comfort and an ease with ‘being in the world.’ An intervention into both the study of religion and secularity and the history of the book, the dissertation combines insights from Italian history, Ottoman history, Jewish history, book history, art history, sociology, philosophy, and postcolonial and critical theory to counteract a “lachrymose” view of early modern Jewish culture and religion, emphasizing instead its wonderful inventiveness, malleability, intellectual brilliance and its celebration of pleasure.