Throughout their respective bodies of work, both Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor invoke recurring images of the mirror and the mirror-gazing act. Because of the preponderance of these images and because of how they inform our deeper understanding of character, theme, and genre, I argue that these images constitute an important trope in Morrison and Naylor\'s fiction. Although the mirror trope pervades both writers\' bodies of work, it has not garnered significant scholarly attention, particularly with respect to the ways in which the trope highlights an intertextual dialogue between two essential writers of the 20th century American narrative. In this project, then, I conduct an in-depth but by no means exhaustive exploration into the mirror trope. I am specifically concerned with how each writer brings this trope to bear on issues of representation, the politics of recognition, and the dilemma of black female subjectivity and agency in a racist and misogynistic American society. I argue, then, that because the mirror trope is where patriarchal and racist structures of power collide, it signifies a critical point of intersectionality between race and gender. For that reason, the mirror emerges as a space of contestation within these narratives. / Master of Arts

Cette thèse traite de la question des travaux d'aiguille dans la littérature et la culture victorienne. Ils apparaissent de manière récurrente dans les romans britanniques du dix-neuvième siècle et cristallisent bon nombre de sentiments contradictoires qui sont au coeur de la formation du sujet féminin. En dépit de leur omniprésence dans la culture victorienne, les travaux d'aiguille, associés à l'assujettissement des femmes, ont longtemps été déconsidérés par la critique. Cette thèse se propose de porter un nouveau regard sur l'artisanat féminin. A travers l'étude de sources très variées - romans, poèmes, manuels de couture, extraits de presse et les objets eux-mêmes - nous nous attachons à explorer les paradigmes complexes articulés par cette praxis, ainsi que la manière dont les travaux d'aiguille ont participé à l'articulation d'un « je » féminin. Considérée par les Victoriens comme l'activité féminine par excellence, la couture était pratiquée par toutes les femmes de tous âges et de toutes les classes sociales : ainsi, elle était au coeur du vécu et de l'identité féminine. Néanmoins, les travaux d'aiguille s'articulent autour de contradictions: il s'agissait d'une pratique à la fois amateur et professionnelle; ils encourageaient et cristallisaient la domestication des femmes, tout en imitant les modes de production industriels; ils étaient critiqués par bon nombre de femmes qui aspiraient à une plus grande ambition intellectuelle, mais étaient investis par d'autres comme un extraordinaire moyen d'expression. Ainsi, au dix-neuvième siècle la couture n'était pas une activité solitaire, mais plutôt une pratique sociale et discursive qui était pleinement engagée dans les problématiques sociales, économiques et culturelles de son temps. / This thesis deals with the question of needlework in Victorian literature and culture. Needlework is a constant and recurrent motif in nineteenth-century novels, and crystallises the many complex and contradictory feelings of satisfaction or resentment, creativity or censorship, elation or utter dejection that are crucial to the formation of the nineteenth-century female subject. In spite of its ubiquity, however, it has long been ignored or dismissed by critics as trivial, unimportant or revealing of the limitations imposed on Victorian women's lives. This thesis seeks to complicate previous assumptions by taking needlework on its own terms and exploring the complex and sophisticated tenets that underlie it. Relying on a large range of sources - novels, poems, magazines, craft manuals and material objects - this work examines the ways in which sewing has participated in the articulation of female subjectivity. Because it was construed as the ultimate feminine occupation and was undertaken by virtually ail women, regardless of age or social class, it was central to their identities and experience. However, needlework was fraught with contradictions: it was both amateur and professional; it enshrined the domestication of women, but it was closely allied with industrial modes of production; it was resented by many intellectually ambitious women, but was invested by others as a formidably evocative means of self-expression. Rather than a reclusive activity, then, Victorian needlework was a highly sociable practice which was fully engaged in the social, economic and cultural issues of its time.

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The aim of the master’s of literature diploma paper “The Other in Marina Tsvetayeva prose” by a holder of master’ degree Irina Sharanova the essay “My Pushkin” is analyzed,in which M.Tsvetayeva’s conscious and unconscious perception of A.Pushkin as a person and a poet is disclosed with reference to pecularities of a child’s and a mature person’s perception. A.Pushkin is considered by M.Tsvetayeva as “Hers” and “The other” and also as unusual and not a canonical icon. In “The story of Sonechka” the problem of ‘The Other” is contemplated as approaching the miracle of The Other’s event, what helps M.Tsvetayeva to have a sensation of self-respect and value herself in this wopld.

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Gu Taiqing 顧太清 (1799-1877) is one of the most famous and prolific female writers in the late Qing. In this thesis, I focus on her poems and lyrics on three important subjects, self-portrayals, plum blossoms, and Qingfengge 清風閣 (Clear Breeze Pavilion), in her two poetry collections, Tianyou geji 天遊閣集 (Collected Poems of Heavenly Travels Studio) and Donghai yuge 東海漁歌 (Songs of the Fisherman of the Eastern Sea), in order to advance the current scholarship on this female author and Ming-Qing women’s writings and reveal the uniqueness of Gu’s poetry. My study addresses how she represents herself, recounts her life experiences, and engages in the poetic tradition established by men. By examining her voices and images embedded in her poems, I argue that she creates her own expressions of female voices as an elite woman, a mother, and a female companion for her friends and her husband through the incorporation of her life experiences, both inside and outside her inner quarters. Most female figures portrayed by male poets are desired, static, subordinate, and longing for their absent lovers in their boudoir. Differentiating from the common women’s image, Gu shows her literary creation and women’s subjectivity by taking an active role, as opposed to a passive one. She describes a self-contented life and creates a delightful atmosphere in the spatial setting of her inner quarters. She also writes about her activities outside her boudoir and narrates her travel experiences as a female poet in her poems, in which she constructs her image as a subject that appreciates nature and is emotionally attached to her family. Moreover, my study discovers the approaches that she takes to negotiate between her reputation as a talented poet and her image as a learned lady, given the high moral standard expected from the late Qing elite women. Constructing her image associated with Confucian morality, she highlights her dedication to womanly learning and suggests that women’s literary talent and virtue are reconcilable.

This study examines intersectionality, white privilege and essentialism in Toni Morrison’s stories The Bluest Eye and “Recitatif”. Moreover, intersectional markers are taken into consideration to analyze how the characters are advantaged or disadvantaged in the white dominant society of the two novels. Additionally, white privilege is compared to the lack of privilege that the black characters experience and how that further affects them is discussed. Furthermore, the issues that critical race theorists acknowledge with the essentialized approach in movements for social justice will be connected to Morrison’s stories. More specifically, the tendency to overlook intersectionality when essentializing women’s experiences will be connected to how the realities of Morrison’s multidimensional female characters cannot be generalized. In addition, the negative effects white standards of beauty have on the black female characters in The Bluest Eye are examined. It is concluded that black female subjectivity makes the reader better understand the intersectional experiences of the characters and this subjectivity also makes white privilege visible in the stories. Additionally, in “Recitatif”, where the reader does not know the specific race of the characters, conclusions can be made about how race and class intersect by considering historical aspects and how signs of white privilege show up in the story. Although, more important than deciding the race of Morrison’s characters, is for the reader to acknowledge the challenge she creates of considering intersectionality in the story.

L'œuvre d’Amelia Rosselli entend se dessiner, au sein de la poésie lyrique italienne, comme expérience de subversion du processus de sublimation et de stylisation du corps féminin. A travers la traduction et l’analyse de poèmes choisis contenus dans les recueil Cantilena (1953), La Libellula (1958) et Variazioni belliche (1964), nous avons conduit une tentative d’exégèse critique des textes. L’analyse des poèmes se poursuit à travers une pratique dialogique avec le texte poétique, à partir d'un positionnement critique à l’intérieur du comparatisme féministe.En partant de l'idée pétrarquiste d'élimination et de suppression du corps des femmes nous avons démontré comment la tentative d’apaiser la portée potentiellement dangereuse de l’affection amoureuse a donné lieu au déni de la sensualité. Le langage de la douleur transfigurée se traduit dans une poétique du « dispositif sursensuel », un processus semblable à celui que Gilles Deleuze avait repéré dans la personnalité littéraire de Sacher-Masoch. Le processus de subversion qu’on vient d’évoquer est accompagné du bouleversement des rôles traditionnels au sein du canon poétique européen. Ces déconstructions conduiraient à un rejet du corps organique et au même temps à la révélation d’une subjectivité excentrique. La révision des modèles littéraires du canon passe également par le réécriture d'un ensemble de figures féminines du répertoire mythique et littéraire au sein de l’antiquité gréco-romaine, lesquelles, prélevées de l’imaginaire patriarcal, sont réinterprétées et à nouveau poétisées au sein d'un Sujet poétique qui cherche à faire parler la voix d’une poète femme. / Amelia Rosselli’s work took shape, within Italian lyric poetry, as an experience of subversion of the process of sublimation and of stylisation of the female body. Through the translation and the analysis of the content of poems chosen from the collections Cantilena (1953), La Libellula (1958) and Variazioni belliche (1964), I conducted a critical exegesis of the texts. I performed an analysis according to suggestions of a dialogical practice with the poetical text and with a female subjectivity often hidden, anchored to my critical investment inside feminist comparatism. From petrarchist idea of deletion and “suppression” of women’s body – deletion, of which Pasolini talked already in relation to the genesis of Italian poetry and its characterisation of the lyrical canon – I analysed how the attempt to ease the impact potentially dangerous of love affection has caused the denial of sensuality. The language of camouflaged sorrow is then established as a deliberated choice included in some poetics where it is not the statement that reveals, but the poetical word, which in its cryptic canonical measure, is able to make resonate beyond declarations. We can observe the deployment of a “sursensual device”, similar process to what Gilles Deleuze perceived in Sacher-Masoch's literary personality. The process of subversion does not seem a reconstitution of identity roles, but rather a deconstruction of the traditional model. The starting point for the analysis of those deconstructions is based on the hypothesis that the non-functionality of the desiring organisms (desiring subject and desired object) will lead to a reject of the organic and at the same time to a revelation of an eccentric subjectivity. The revision of the literary model of the canon lies in the hypothesis that a set of female figures of the mythical and literary repertoire in Greco-Roman antiquity are placed in the imaginary practice of Amelia Rosselli's poetical writing, with a view to incorporate the nature of the characters born and conceived inside and by the patriarchal imaginary and to form the body of a subject that aims at making them speak through the voice of a female poet.

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