The other side: collective memory in three novels by Amin Maalouf Collective memory is an expression which is used to describe the way in which societies reflect on their past and ensure their unity in the present. This thesis aims to show how narrative in general, and in particular in the novels of French Lebanese writer, Amin Maalouf, plays a crucial role in the transmission of collective memory. The thesis demonstrates that narrative fulfills this function in three ways. Firstly, narrative gives meaning to past events. Secondly, narrative changes and evolves over time. Lastly, narrative ensures a continual exchange between individual and collective memory. Thus, in its capacity to sustain aspects of individual and collective memory, narrative expresses the values that unite society. Central to our analysis of narrative in the work of Amin Maalouf is the concept of "l'autre côté" or "the other side". This is the expression used by Maalouf when referring to his passion for forgotten or uncomfortable aspects of Western and Arab cultural heritage. By informing the contemporary reader of the shared past, Maalouf strives to build bridges of understanding between the two groups. Maalouf's novels explore themes of origins, of exile and of memory. In the three novels we examine, the narrative is centered on the life of the hero who, endowed with exceptional qualities, is tested by the political and religious challenges of his time. The personal qualities of the hero, revealed in his dealings with the crises which form the particularity of his time, determine the orientation of collective memory. The first novel, Léon l'Africain, published in 1986, is based on the life of Hassan al-Wazzan who lived in Spain, Africa and Rome in the early sixteenth century. Hassan tells the story of his family, and of the political circumstances which led to the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain. The second novel, Les Jardins de lumière, published in 1991, examines the life of the poet, doctor and philosopher named Mani who lived in the third century A.D. In the Epilogue of the novel, the narrator states his intention of challenging the misconceptions and distortions concerning the life of Mani. In the third novel, Le Rocher de Tanios, published in 1993, the narrator sets out to find the truth concerning the events surrounding the birth, life and disappearance of the young man named Tanios, who lived in the narrator's village in Lebanon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009

Notre étude qui reste résolument tournée vers les littératures francophones a pour titre : Afrique réelle et Afrique rêvée dans les romans francophones subsahariens contemporains. L’exemple de : "Balbala", "Aux Etats-Unis d’Afrique" de Waberi (A.A.) et "Le Baobab fou" et "La Pièce d’or" de Ken Bugul. Le tout de cette recherche consiste à observer le processus de reconfiguration de l’Afrique dans les œuvres susmentionnées. Il ne s’agit pas simplement d’analyser l’Afrique réelle, rêvée ou ambivalente. Il s’agit plus difficilement d’observer les procédés textuels par lesquels, le passage d’une Afrique réelle à une Afrique rêvée s’opère et, comment ce va et vient d’un univers à un autre débouche sur un troisième espace qui peut être perçu comme l’Afrique alternative dont aspire en réalité nos auteurs. De plus ces œuvres deviennent de véritables lieux d’une problématisation allant de la mise en évidence des travers de la société à la proposition des solutions préemptives sur le fonctionnement du continent. Pour mener cette étude nous avons utilisé une double méthodologie dont la poétique textuelle de Gérard Genette et la sémiotique interprétative revisitée par Louis Hébert. De ces analyses nous retenons que, dans ces œuvres les auteurs expriment une Afrique alternative. Ils la traduisent telle qu’elle est mais aussi telle qu’ils voudraient qu’elle soit. Mais cette vision du monde n’est-elle pas une simple utopie qui relève de l’ordre de l’inatteignable ? / Our study which is focused on the French literature is titled: Real Africa and Africa dreamt in contemporary Sub-Saharan novels. The example of: “Balbala" and "Aux Etats-Unis d'Afrique" written by Waberi (A.A.); "Le Baobab fou" and "La Pièce d'or" written by Ken Bugul. The importance of this research consists in observing the process of Africa's reconfiguration in the works mentioned above. It is not only about analyzing the real, dreamt, or ambivalent Africa, it is about observing textual methods for which the passage from a real Africa to a dreamt Africa is possible and, how this back and forth of a universe that is lead in a third space can be perceived as alternative Africa that the authors of these texts aspire. Furthermore, these texts become the diagnostic tools of the failings of the society and equally help to provide preemptive solutions on the operation of the continent. To conduct this study, we used a double methodology such as the textual poetic of Gerard Genette and the interpretative semiotic revisited by Louis Hebert. At the end of ours analyses we keep in mind that in these texts the authors express an alternative Africa. They present it as she is, and also the way they would like it to be. But such vision of the world isn't it a simple utopia which falls under the unattainable ?

Cette thèse analyse la différence des occurrences nationales et culturelles qui ont abouti à des cultures et industries viticoles radicalement différentes en France et en Autriche. Bien que les deux pays aient partagé des histoires antérieures à la dissolution du Saint Empire romain germanique, la culture et la relation de chaque pays au vin en tant que produit culturel diffèrent grandement. Dans cette thèse, j'explore pourquoi ces deux cultures ont développé des approches si différentes du vin, de la vinification et du vin.

Ecrivain francophone égyptien, chef de file du mouvement surréaliste au Caire, Georges Henein [1914-1974] fut l’un des esprits les plus subversifs de l’Egypte pré-nassérienne. L’ensemble de sa trajectoire littéraire est traversée par l’idée que l’artiste, pour être moderne, doit se jeter à corps perdu dans la grande « mêlée sociale » : la littérature est une arme du combat politique et l’auteur pratiqua, assidûment et sous toutes ses formes, la polémique. Abordées la plupart du temps sous l’angle de l’histoire des idées ou sous celui de la linguistique et de la rhétorique, les écritures polémiques occupent, dans le champ des études littéraires, une place très réduite. Cette étude, qui s’appuie sur un large corpus emprunté à l’auteur égyptien et qui se fonde sur une approche transversale des textes, voudrait contribuer à forger des outils d’analyse pertinents au-delà d’une œuvre singulière. Par ailleurs, si le principal point de vue adopté est littéraire, l’étude voudrait également jeter les fondements d’une approche interdisciplinaire des écritures polémiques, prenant en compte, en particulier, les apports de la linguistique et de la sociocritique. L’analyse se distingue aussi bien des approches purement internes, qui considèrent le texte comme structure close, que des approches purement externes, qui l’abordent comme simple reflet d’une réalité extérieure. La principale interrogation à laquelle l’étude s’efforce de répondre porte ainsi sur la manière dont le texte polémique organise son articulation avec l’extratextuel, par l’intermédiaire des notions centrales de scène et de représentation polémiques. / The Egyptian, French-speaking writer and leader of the surrealist movement in Cairo, Georges Henein [1914-1974] was one of the most subversive spirits of pre-Nasser Egypt. The whole of his literary trajectory is crossed by the idea that the artist, in order to be modern, must plunge entirely and unconditionally into the great “social fray”: literature is a political weapon with which to carry out social battles and the author must seek assiduously and in all his forms, polemic debates. Approached most of the time from the angle of the history of ideas, or under that of linguistics and rhetoric, polemical writings occupy, in the field of the literary studies, largely a secondary place. This study, which is based on an extremely diversified corpus and which is grounded on a transversal approach to the texts, would like to contribute to forge relevant tools for analysis beyond any singular work herein. In addition, if the adopted point of view is principally literary, the study would like to also propose the bases for an interdisciplinary model useful in the study of the polemical writings, taking approach into account, primarily, the contributions of linguistics and the socio-criticism. Our analysis distinguishes itself from a purely internal approach, which regards the text as a closed structure, as well as from purely external approaches, which approach it like a simple reflection of an external reality. The principal question that the study endeavors to answer deals thus with the way in which the polemical text organizes its articulation with regards to the extra-textual via the central concepts of polemical scene and representation.

This paper examines the interconnections of nature, magic, and violence in the Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales) of the Countess of Ségur and their illustrations. It focuses on the ways in which the Countess reappropriates the framework of the literary fairy tale and subtly breaks with the traditions established by past fairy-tale authors, encouraging a return to nature and a movement away from the perceived corruption of the nineteenth-century city within the context of a timeless magical world. Close study of the Countess’s multiple perspectives on violence as either a motivating form of punishment or as a display of pure malice reinforce the dichotomy of good vs. evil as it is developed in the text, reflecting the author’s desire to create an ordered world in which obedience is rewarded and cruelty is justly punished.

This thesis focuses on Christine de Pizan’s mythological allegoric work entitled Epistre Othéa, written around 1400. True to the beliefs she portrays in many of her later seminal works, such as The Book of the City of Ladies, or The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine displays in this piece a strong didactic vision. The crucial pairing of text and image in the two manuscripts that I chose to focus on prove the power she exerted as a woman and as an artist but also mark her intention to strengthen her moral and political message through the use of different media. The purpose of this thesis will be to analyze the polyphonic voice that emerges from both the textual and pictorial elements of the Epistre in order to decipher Christine de Pizan’s distinctive ideology. I propose to examine the re-interpretation of two mythological figures, Medea and Minerva, in the Epistre and investigate the impact of this conscious manipulation of sources on Christine de Pizan’s overall works. Furthermore, the comparison between the figures of Othea and Christine herself is analyzed as a way to affirm the author’s idiosyncratic stance and delineate the scope of her proto-feminist views.

Le contact avec l’Autre, désigné ainsi en raison de la différence culturelle, de couleur de peau, ou encore de phénotype, a produit un bouleversement profond des structures socioculturelles et des territoires touchés par les systèmes esclavagistes et coloniaux. À présent, les nouvelles générations issues de ces territoires sont confrontées à des mutations que nous examinons pour en dégager les survivances coloniales et les nouveaux phénomènes sociologiques décrits par les écrivains francophones contemporains. Les sujets analysés par ces derniers dans leurs œuvres expriment des interactions fondées sur des différences et/ou des similarités idéologiques, raciales, physiques, culturelles, au sein des trois aires géographiques que sont les Antilles (Martinique/Guadeloupe), l’Afrique (Subsaharienne, noire et francophone) et la France métropolitaine. Le roman devient alors un instrument de dissection des effets de la présence et de la domination de l’idéologie et de la culture occidentales. On y découvre ainsi les différents types de relations, Blanc/Noir, ancien esclavagiste/ancien esclave, ancien dominant/ancien dominé, ancien colonisateur/ancien colonisé, du point de vue de ces auteurs. Dans un contexte social dominé par les déplacements humains et les échanges interculturels, les regards croisés des personnages se focalisent sur les différentes formes d’altérité et d’identité et sur les problématiques actuelles en rapport avec la race, l’immigration, l’exil, le racisme. / The contact with the Other, so called because of its cultural, skin color or phenotype difference, has generated a deep upheaval into the sociocultural structures and affected territories by the slave and colonial systems. Nowadays, the new generation natives of those territories are facing transformations that we are investigating in order to bring out the colonial survivals and the new sociological phenomena described by the contemporary French-speaking authors. The subjects analyzed by the latter in their works are expressing interactions based on ideological, racial, physical, cultural differences and/or similarities, in the three geographical areas: the Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe), Africa (black and French-speaking sub-Saharan) and Metropolitan France. The novel becomes then a dissection instrument of the effects of the presence and the domination of Western ideology and culture. Thereby, we discover the different types of relations, White/Black, former slave driver/former slave, former dominant/former dominated, former colonizer/former colonized, from the authors point of view. In a social context dominated by human movements and intercultural exchanges, the crossed looks of the characters focus on the various forms of otherness and identity and on the current problems in relation with race, immigration, exile, racism.

In the wake of the industrialization, urbanization, and global conflicts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe was forced to call into question its Enlightenment faith. In particular, Bildung—as the cultural education of the individual that emerged out of the Enlightenment—lost its footing amidst experience’s new texture of trauma. This thesis will examine Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, and Michaux’s Misérable miracle as each work pertains to and reconceives of the intertwining of Bildung and elegy, as a literary form both underpinned by and unconvinced of Bildung. For them, I will argue, elegy served as a potential form for re-writing historical indifference and for preparing, through limit-experience and loss, linguistic antidotes for the elision of difference produced in history’s wake.

This Master’s thesis examines the ways in which the Holocaust continues to figure in French-Jewish autobiographical fiction. I examine texts by two leading authors, Georges Perec (1936-1982) and Philippe Grimbert (b.1948). I treat Perec as a first-generation survivor of the Holocaust as he was a child during the war and suffered the loss of both his parents, while Grimbert was born to Holocaust survivors shortly after the war and thus belongs to what has come to be known as the second generation. In both Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) and Grimbert’s Un secret (2004) the body plays a central role as a site on which traumatic memory is inscribed. Trauma also determines the form and language of both novels, influencing not only the narrative structure but also the semantics utilized by the narrators. These post-Holocaust autofictions confront similar themes: both deal with the concept of the “unspeakable” and attempt to address the “emptiness” in the wake of the Holocaust and come to terms with the tremendous loss of life. Although thirty years separate Perec’s W and Grimbert’s Un secret, the overwhelming parallels between the two texts suggest that the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed on from one generation of survivors to the next through the disturbances of language. In my analysis, I illuminate common tropes that appear in these two works as instances of transgenerational traumatic transmission. The introduction provides a description of both works, a discussion of the autofictional genre and its use in both texts, and an overview of the trauma and literary theory with which I engage. The first chapter, “Traumatic Memory and its Inscription on the Body,” offers a close study of the body in both works. Both works juxtapose athletes who possess superior physical capabilities to weaker individuals who are marked by deformities, wounds or symbolic scars. I discuss the location of the narrators’ wounds in both texts and what this might suggest in psychoanalytic terms. I argue the location of the wounds, on the narrator’s mouth in W and on the narrator’s eyebrow in Un secret, are linked to what type of work these narrators undergo throughout both texts vis-à-vis trauma. Specifically, I use Freud’s Das Unheimlich to discuss the wound above the narrator’s eye in Un secret, linking it to the processes of testimony and remembrance. The second chapter, “Doubled Narrators and Narratives,” focuses on the various instances of doubling present in both works. I pay close attention to the doubled narrators, Gaspard Winckler in W, and Simon in Un secret, as well as to the presence of two alternative narratives in each text. I use Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage to support my argument that the doubling present in both texts provides a mirror that is crucial to the narrators’ processes of remembering, witnessing, and recording. In addition, Gabriele Schwab’s text, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma is fundamental to my argument that the legacy of trauma is inherited by the second generation. The third chapter, “The Influence of Trauma on the Production of Time” comprises an in-depth analysis of the poetics of time in Perec and Grimbert. Identifying Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as an influential model for Perec and Grimbert, I explore the opening paragraphs of all three works, noting particularly how the interaction between the adverb “longtemps” and the passé composé destabilizes the representation of time in order to convey the fragmentary nature of memory.

One of the fundamental stories in fairy tale studies is "Cinderella": folkloric designation ATU 510A, the Persecuted Heroine. As Fairy tale and Folklore studies continue to evolve, authors beyond Basile, Perrault and Grimm are added into the Cinderella canon to lend a more nuanced approach to the study of this fairy tale. Yet "Cinderella" is still often interpreted as a tale of feminine submissiveness, in which the heroine is little more than a passive ornament or else a likeable social-climber. These interpretations stem largely from the focus of "Cinderella" stories written by men. Though studies of "Cinderella" are expanding, "Cendrillon", "Aschenputtel", and Walt Disney's Cinderella remain the foundational tales that are thought of when "Cinderella" is mentioned. This research addresses the problem that female writers of "Cinderella" remain marginalized within analyses of the tale. This research considers five versions of "Cinderella" from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, from women authors, mediated in five different formats: literary fairy tale, novel, short story, and poetry. Mme D'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron" and Mlle L'Héritier's "L'Adroite Princesse ou les Aventures de Finette," protofeminist literary fairy tales from seventeenth-century France, present Cinderellas who hail from the birth of the modern fairy tale but show personalities that most do not associate with the princess. D'Aulnoy and L'Héritier's Finettes are dutiful to their family and kingdom, but aggressively pursue their ambitions and secure for themselves both high-status as well as fulfilling futures. Jane Austen's eighteenth-century novel Persuasion brings a sharp contrast to traditional views of the fairy helper. Louisa May Alcott's "A Modern Cinderella: or, The Little Old Shoe" is an American Romantic short story originally published in a little magazine which paints a different perspective on the desires of a nineteenth-century Anglo-women in a Prince. Austen's and Alcott's stories give voice to how they perceive the place women are given in the world and their hostility to the patriarchal structures of their society allude to the rise of 'Defense of Women' literature during their period. Austen and Alcott highlight the restrictions that women face, but do not resign women to the fate of subjugation; instead they insist that women should decide their own fate and never settle for less than they are owed. "…And Then the Prince Knelt Down and Tried to Put the Glass Slipper on Cinderella's Foot," a poem by Judith Viorst from the 1980s, challenges the traditional expectations of the Cinderella cycle. At the sunset of the twentieth century, the poem challenges the typical Cinderella motifs and recursive narrative devices with a second-wave feminist perspective on women's perceptions of their ideas on romantic love and self-love and offers a Cinderella who speaks with her own voice. This research looks at women's culture using the lens of socio-cultural and historical approaches, feminist theory, and global studies to provide insight into each tale. Women authors use the Cinderella tale-type to express the idealized woman, reject literary stereotypes about women, and reveal women's attitude toward love and marriage in their respective cultures. Women who add to the Cinderella cycle use the heroine of their story to assert that women are capable of managing their own affairs and determining their future. Cinderella is adapted to present the image of a woman who successfully navigates her society to seize a fulfilling future. The concept of a 'fulfilling future' is one that begins in magnanimity and evolves into Cinderellas who expect 'princes' to show caring natures or who reject princes who do not meet their expectations. Feminine identity is embodied through retellings of Cinderella in relation to her sisters, her Fairy, her Prince and women's attitudes about their social identity and voice. By considering these previously overlooked contributors to the Cinderella narrative, this research provides different perspectives into women's perceptions of power, autonomy, and love and asks important questions about how women use "Cinderella" to claim their voice.