In this thesis, the research focuses on the role and presentation of women in Zulu traditional literature. Employing feminism as a literary canon, the research investigates whether the perceived oppression of Zulu women is reflected in such Zulu folklore. The research aims to establish whether or not folklore was used as a corrective measure or avenue of correcting gender imbalances. This dissertation proceeds from the premise that the traditional Zulu society or culture attached to women certain stereo-typical images which projected them as witches, unfaithful people, unfit marriage partners on the other hand or brave care givers, loving mothers and upright members on the other hand. Using feminism as a scientific approach, the study investigates whether these projections were not oppressive on Zulu women. The study is scientifically organised into various chapters dealing with various subjects e.g. the feminist theory (chapter 2), portrayal of Zulu women in folktales (chapter3), in proverbs (chapter 4) and praise-poetry (chapter 5). The study concludes that the traditional Zulu woman felt depressed by this patriarchal discrimination especially in the marriage situation. In the day and age of African Renaissance, the study recommend that it is imperative for women to mould their children, especially their sons to adapt to the idea that women have changed, they have rights and priviledges which could intimidate their male ego. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African languages)

This thesis project examines the work of three female Nigerian authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta and Chika Unigwe. They are part of a growing number of young African writers who are receiving international acclaim and challenging narratives that have long defined the continent in pejorative terms. They question what it means to be female and African in a transcultural, global world but counter discourses that are both restrictive and prescriptive. Their female characters are not imaged in binary terms as either victims or villains. For all three writers, the African story has to be told in its entirety incorporating what some may argue are negative stereotypes but doing so in a manner that examines and undermines those same stereotypes. For the purposes of the thesis, I focus on their first novels: Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. Chapter One examines Purple Hibiscus and argues that the novel is much more than a coming of age story or, as some critics have posited, an allegory of the postcolonial state. Chapter Two highlights Atta’s use of fairly familiar feminist theories but grounds them in the lived realities of the African city. All three authors are concerned with issues of violence and death. Unigwe’s novel, which forms the focus of Chapter Three, offers a critical perspective on how both of those themes intersect with the increasing commercialisation of global culture. Her characters are female sex workers whose lives are irrevocably altered by the murder of one of their colleagues. I conclude by arguing that the three novels offer a nuanced if not necessarily new understanding of the various social, economic and political forces that continue to shape the lives of women on the continent.

Chapter 1 is the introductory chapter which gives the aim of study, delimitation, scope and methodology. It further presents critical studies that have been done on Feminism. Chapter 2 is devoted to the Feminist theory, the origin of the term stereotype and the diverse schools of thought within the Feminist camp. Feminism from the African perspective, known as Womanism, has been deliberated on. Chapter 3 concentrates mainly on two women authors, Damane and Makhambeni. This chapter looks at how these authors have depicted their female characters. It also examines the stereotypes employed by these female authors. Chapter 4 is devoted to the writing of male authors. This chapter also concentrates on the stereotypes employed by them in their analysis of their female characters. Chapter 5, concludes the study and summarizes the main findings of this review. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

M.A. / This study attempts to trace the interrelationship between literature and its historical contexts in six stories by South African women writers. Six South African writers have been selected because their work foregrounds the theme of oppression and because they are representative of the different groupings of the South African population. In her story "The Sisters", Pauline Smith explores the silencing effects of gender oppression in a patriarchy. In "The Apostasy of Carlina", Bertha Goudvis writes of women-on-women oppression between the white and black races. Jayapraga Reddy explores the complexities of intercultural relationships in "Friends". In "Let Them Eat Pineapples", Lizeka Mda explores the oppressive effects of industrial-development on the tribal system in Transkei. In "Last Look at Paradise Road", Gladys Thomas, like Goudvis before her, focuses on the racial discrimination practised by whites against blacks. Gcina Mhlope reveals women-on-women oppression practised both by white-on-black and black-on-black. A chronological ordering of these short stories reveals certain changes in the extent to which attitudes to oppression are revealed and criticized. This study suggests that while there has not been a significant decrease in the degree of oppression to which South African women have been subjected, the increasing awareness and exposure of gender oppression suggests the promise of self-actualization in the struggle for democracy in South Africa.

Lorsqu’on s’interroge sur l’essor du mouvement féministe dans les pays musulmans, d’autres questions, lancinantes, se font jour. Car l’enjeu culturel, sur fond religieux, d’un islam souvent imbriqué dans la vie politique elle-même, interpelle les féministes et les penseurs de tout l’Occident. En effet, contrairement à ce qui se passe au sein de la civilisation occidentale où généralement s’est transmise une idée de la laïcité bien précise, il n’en ira guère de même dans les pays à prédominance musulmane. Dans ces contrées, la problématique féministe différera sensiblement de celle en vigueur dans les pays occidentaux. Pour les nations soumises à la loi de la charia, le champ d’action du mouvement féministe visera avant tout à libérer les femmes d’une emprise patriarcale qui se réfèrera le plus souvent à de libres interprétations des textes sacrés pour exiger de leur part une soumission absolue. <p>Dans les études sur le féminisme et le genre, l’Arabie Saoudite, il est vrai, constitue « une énigme ». Et c’est précisément ce qui nous a incité à explorer cet univers « voilé » dont nous allons, au gré de notre étude, tenter de « dévoiler » un tant soit peu le mystère.<p>Nous avons entrepris dans ce but une recherche approfondie à propos de l’écriture-femmes saoudienne romanesque depuis son essor en 1958 jusqu’à 2008. Ce sont donc cinquante années d’écriture-femmes saoudienne sur lesquelles nous nous pencherons au cours de notre étude. Le lecteur l’aura compris :le fil conducteur de notre recherche reposera sur l’écriture en tant que vecteur de prise de conscience féministe. <p>En définitive, ce travail se composera donc de trois grandes parties, chacune subdivisée en chapitres. Dans la première partie, nous développerons la question du féminisme en rapport avec l’islam. Le premier chapitre exposera le féminisme et le genre en tant qu’approche méthodologique des discours et des arguments féministes. Le deuxième chapitre traitera de la question de l’islam et de la laïcité. En effet, pour la plupart des pays musulmans, l’islam est une religion d’Etat. La charia est la source principale du droit, voire exclusive dans certains pays, comme en Arabie Saoudite où elle est considérée comme complète, suprême, supérieure à toute loi. Logiquement, une autre question surgira, celle qui sous-tend le troisième chapitre de cette première partie, au cours duquel nous nous demanderons si un « féminisme musulman » représente une réalité vraiment envisageable. La deuxième partie sera censée investiguer le contexte idéologique en vigueur en Arabie Saoudite. Ensuite, nous évoquerons une esquisse de la littérature en Arabie Saoudite et les orientations des écrivains saoudiens et saoudiennes. La troisième partie se centrera sur une analyse thématique de l’écriture-femmes romanesque saoudienne s’étalant sur une période allant de 1958 à 2008. Nous nous étendrons d’abord sur un panorama de cette écriture dans les contrées en général, avant d’aborder les thématiques les plus spécifiques de cette écriture, approuvant qu’il s’agisse d’un pays encore très mystérieux aux yeux des étrangers: l’Arabie Saoudite.<p>Il apparaîtra qu’une parenté certaine entre « écriture » et « militantisme féministe » sous-tend, à l’évidence, l’univers romanesque des femmes saoudiennes. En clair, l’apport de l’écriture-femmes saoudienne a été considérable :elle nous a offert une peinture vivante de l’Arabie Saoudite et de la condition féminine. Elle contribue à l’émergence d’un style de militantisme marqué par son berceau saoudien et, de ce fait, elle participe à l’avènement d’un féminisme proprement saoudien. <p><p><p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Le Mouvement de libération des femmes en France ne fut pas seulement un mouvement politique et social, ce fut également l’une des dernières, si ce n’est la dernière, avant-garde littéraire que la France a connue. Du point de vue international, l’activité des littératrices au sein du Mouvement constitue un des principes distinctifs de la lutte des femmes en France. Les manifestantes qui déposent publiquement une gerbe de fleurs à la femme plus inconnue encore que le soldat inconnu sous l’Arc de Triomphe le 26 août 1970, sont déjà pour certaines – appelées à le devenir pour d’autres – des écrivaines. Dix ans plus tard, le MLF, depuis peu marque déposée à l’Institut national de la propriété industrielle, appartient à une éditrice, Antoinette Fouque, promotrice d’une écriture dite féminine. Dans l’espace circonscrit par ces deux points fixes, paraît un ensemble de textes qui s’inscrivent au sein de deux tendances majoritaires – mais antagonistes – du Mouvement, le féminisme d’une part et la néo-féminité, ou éloge de la différence, d’autre part. En miroir, un double rhizome éditorial se développe, partageant maisons d’édition et revues en deux factions militantes et littéraires bien distinctes. Pendant dix ans, la littérature se met tout autant au service du Mouvement des femmes que le Mouvement irradie la littérature, chacun-e influençant et informant la pratique et la pensée de l’autre. C’est de cette coïncidence entre littérature et Mouvement de libération des femmes que le présent écrit se propose de rendre compte, afin de retracer un mouvement politique qui fut et se fit littéraire, et, dans le même élan, une littérature qui fut et se fit politique. Par là même, la thèse redouble la question posée par tout un mouvement de femmes à la littérature elle-même, contestant ses définitions premières et repoussant les limites qui lui ont été assignées. / The Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) was not only a political and social movement, but one of the last, if not the very last, literary avant-garde that France has experienced. From an international perspective, the activity of the literary women within the movement represents one of the fundamental principles of the fight for women’s rights in France. The demonstrators, who publicly placed a bouquet of flowers for the unknown wife of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on August 26th 1970, are for some, and are soon to become for others, women writers. Ten years later, the MLF, a recently registered trademark with the National Institute for Intellectual Property Rights, belongs to the editor, Antoinette Fouque, promotor of female writing. Within the space determined by these two fixed points, there exists a collection of texts that adhere to two major trends – although antagonistic – of the movement, Feminism on one hand and Neofeminity, or the praise for “difference”, on the other hand. Mirroring each other, a dual editorial form develops, sharing publishers and scholarly journals, into two distinct literary and militant factions. For ten years, literature served the purpose of the Women’s Liberation Movement as much as the latter promoted literature, each influencing and informing the other by practice and thought. It is precisely this coexistence between literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement that the present dissertation proposes to examine, in order to trace the political movement that was and made itself literary, and, by the same token, a literature that was and made itself political. At the same time, the dissertation continues the question asked of literature by an entire women’s movement, challenging its assigned definitions and pushing back its boundaries.

This dissertation argues that Nella Larsen, Tess Slesinger, and Jane Bowles, in a set of novels published between 1928 and 1943, all deployed laughter—not humor or comedy, but laughter itself—to express a critique of the rigid prescription of female subjectivity. In a historical window of epistemic instability, between the earlier dominance of humanist individualism and the subsequent dominance of humanist universalism, these authors reacted against nominally liberatory political movements, such as first-wave feminism and Black “uplift,” that had not in fact challenged an ideal of the sovereign subject still modeled on the white male Euro-American individual. Their objections anticipated, by several decades, later critiques of the subject that emerged in second-wave feminism and post-structuralist theory. Laughter, as Larsen, Slesinger, and Bowles understood, reckons with difference, and not only identitarian difference: when we laugh, we recognize someone or something as different, other, and differently different, otherly other—not a defined other, but a fresh challenge to discursive taxonomy. Moreover, when we laugh, experiencing a material overthrow of subjective control, we encounter the otherness, the multiplicity, of the self ever different from itself. Laughter thus opens the self to difference, inside and out. But the “subversive” force of the laughter of the oppressed can also be coopted and reabsorbed by a dominant social order. This project takes up Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a case study in the limits of the “subversive,” before turning to Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943) as exemplars of a more radical laughing objection to the prescription of subjectivity, and to the dualisms that undergird the subject’s construction: self and other, oppression and resistance, mind and body, thought and feeling, depth and surface. The latter novels laugh a “laughter of the middle”: a materially situated, present laughter, living in the in-between spaces of dialectical discourse; a laughter of the here and now, the ever-shifting ground of a self in pieces.

Submitted by Johnny Rodrigues (johnnyrodrigues@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-10-04T13:44:17Z No. of bitstreams: 1 VANUZA SOUZA SILVA - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCS 2005..pdf: 18489316 bytes, checksum: 61f53d0e72fcaaa8de79ccadf8cf6ac2 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-10-04T13:44:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VANUZA SOUZA SILVA - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCS 2005..pdf: 18489316 bytes, checksum: 61f53d0e72fcaaa8de79ccadf8cf6ac2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Este trabalho discute as condições históricas da construção da autoria e obra de Lourdes Ramalho, percorrendo a trajetória de vida e intelectual da autora, perscrutando as relações que manteve com seus contemporâneos, com os livros que leu e como leu para pensar a maneira como essa autora imprimiu em seus textos a idéia de Nordeste e de nordestino. Pensar a autoria como um lugar histórico e social, significa ao mesmo tempo discutir as brechas e as contradições que também constituem a mesma, por isso a necessidade de ter discutido a idéia de povo enquanto lugar de distanciamento do lugar da autora, o modelo de feminino que a mesma constrói como um lugar de masculinização das mulheres da região, e por fim, a construção do riso em seus textos como um lugar, também, de regramento da inversão dos costumes da cultura nordestina. Inspirada na proposta Foucaultiana de análise de discurso, que sugere ver as relações de poder nas linhas de discurso, as verdades e os embates que são parte de todo escrever, na teoria de gênero de Butler e Foucault que pensam os sexos, os corpos, o gênero como dimensões outras dos discursos que tentam definir uma verdade para os sujeitos, e na proposta de Durval Muniz, que inspira o (re)pensar as identidades sociais, culturais e sexuais que inscreveram uma dada forma de ver e se fazer nordestino, imprime-se nesse texto uma outra maneira de ler a obra de Lourdes Ramalho e tudo o que ela cria, de (re)ver o lugar que ocupa a autoria nordestina e a naturalização que a define, porque as nossas identidades regionais misturadas às identidades de gênero naturalizaram a cultura nordestina e tudo o que nela é produzido, criando silêncios, negando a diferença, a diferença de ser homem, mulher, autor e obra no Nordeste, dentro e fora desse espaço. / This research discuss about the historic conditions of the authorship construction and Lourdes Ramalho's work, going through the authoress' intellectual and life path, descriting the relationships kept with her conteporaneans, with the books that she read and how she read to think about the way how this authores printed in her texts the Northeast and northeast people idea. Think about the authorship as a social and historic place, means at same time to discuss the gap and the contradictions that also make-up itself, that's why the need of have discussed the idea of folk while place of great distance from the authoress' place, the feminine model that herself makes as a place of male-processing of the women on this region, and the end, the making of the lagh in her text as a placealso, about inversion of the rules of the northeast culture uses. Base don the foucaultian proposal of speech analysis, that suggest to see the relations of power in the speech lines, the truths and conflicts that are parto f all the writtings, on the treory about genus of Butler and Foucault that thin about the sex, the bodies, the gens as other dimensions of the speech that inspire the (re)thinking of the social identities, culturally and sexually that mark a way of seeing and making a northeast, it can be found on this text another way for reading the work f Lourdes Ramalho and everything that she creates, to (re)see the place that ocupies he northheaster authorship and the naturalization that defines it, because our regional identities of this genus neutralized the northeaster culture and everything produced on it, producing silences, denying the difference, the difference of being a man, womwn, authoress and work on Northeast, in ando ut this space.

The dissertation Magical Realism in Persian and Saudi Narrative Writing views as essential the assumption that the phenomenon of magical realism is not restricted solely to the cultures with colonial legacy, but is transferable to literary works created under systematic and systemic violence anywhere in the world. Previous research of the dissertation's author proved the existence of parallels in the dynamics of sociopolitical development of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the 20th century, foremost in the power relation of the states to their citizens and in the status of women in the society, while there was a strong tendency towards institutionalization of the traditional patriarchal, androcentric and misogynic societal paradigms since the second half of the 20th century. In the last thirty years, women have countered this situation through increased literary activity that has turned out to be an important means of self-fulfillment and emancipation. The fact that some of the most significant Iranian and Saudi women writers use magical realism directed the research to examination of this concept's relevance for the Persian and Saudi narrative writing, inquiry into the reflection of the gender issues and their comparison in both literatures. A detailed case study of two works, each from one country, led...