My dissertation critically assesses the evolution of Beur productions (1980s - 21st century) with reference to the socio-cultural and economic conditions of their development. I am interested in identity (re)construction in the work of three Algerian origin artists in France: Mehdi Charef, Tony Gatlif and Farid Boudjellal. I examine texts and films like Le thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983), Petit Polio (1999), Je suis né d’une cigogne (1999) and Exils (2004). My interest lies in analyzing the impact that these “minor” artists and their chosen art genres have on mainstream cultural productions. Besides focusing on the second generation immigrants in France (the Beurs), the authors challenge also the canonical “Frenchness” or “Europeanness” beyond borders, thus promoting the concept of cultural hybridity. I argue that constant displacement, change of political, social and cultural contexts have significantly transformed the dynamics between the center and the periphery. Furthermore, I provide evidence that “French” identity has undergone a continuous transformation over time and has become a substantially diverse and lively construct. I stand for a new approach to the fixed French identities, one that includes a pluriethnic and multilingual francophone body, and for a redefinition of cultural boundaries reshaping the relationship between self and otherness. My thesis has two major sections (language and space) divided respectively into four chapters. The first two chapters look at different ways in which the Franco-Maghrebi literature and cinema forge new ways of expression within French language and culture. The first chapter is mainly focused on the importance of mastering French by the Beur artists, while in the second chapter I insist on more elaborate stylistic dimensions such as postcolonial irony in the given texts. The last two chapters critically analyze how the artistic productions of Charef, Gatlif and Boudjellal situate themselves in the French socio-cultural context by trespassing borders of a cultural, literary, linguistic and geographical order. This multiple border crossing leads to a movement of these texts to different locations within the main culture. At the esthetic level, this movement between different borders promotes the innovation and the creativity that the Beur artists bring to France.

My dissertation critically assesses the evolution of Beur productions (1980s - 21st century) with reference to the socio-cultural and economic conditions of their development. I am interested in identity (re)construction in the work of three Algerian origin artists in France: Mehdi Charef, Tony Gatlif and Farid Boudjellal. I examine texts and films like Le thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983), Petit Polio (1999), Je suis né d’une cigogne (1999) and Exils (2004). My interest lies in analyzing the impact that these “minor” artists and their chosen art genres have on mainstream cultural productions. Besides focusing on the second generation immigrants in France (the Beurs), the authors challenge also the canonical “Frenchness” or “Europeanness” beyond borders, thus promoting the concept of cultural hybridity. I argue that constant displacement, change of political, social and cultural contexts have significantly transformed the dynamics between the center and the periphery. Furthermore, I provide evidence that “French” identity has undergone a continuous transformation over time and has become a substantially diverse and lively construct. I stand for a new approach to the fixed French identities, one that includes a pluriethnic and multilingual francophone body, and for a redefinition of cultural boundaries reshaping the relationship between self and otherness. My thesis has two major sections (language and space) divided respectively into four chapters. The first two chapters look at different ways in which the Franco-Maghrebi literature and cinema forge new ways of expression within French language and culture. The first chapter is mainly focused on the importance of mastering French by the Beur artists, while in the second chapter I insist on more elaborate stylistic dimensions such as postcolonial irony in the given texts. The last two chapters critically analyze how the artistic productions of Charef, Gatlif and Boudjellal situate themselves in the French socio-cultural context by trespassing borders of a cultural, literary, linguistic and geographical order. This multiple border crossing leads to a movement of these texts to different locations within the main culture. At the esthetic level, this movement between different borders promotes the innovation and the creativity that the Beur artists bring to France.

Entre les dernières décennies du XXe siècle et les années 1960 naît et se développe en Égypte une importante production littéraire de femmes : des Égyptiennes éduquées en français (comme Out-el-Kouloub et Doria Shafik) choisissent cette langue pour dire les aspirations de la « femme nouvelle », qui quitte alors l'espace privé et confiné du harem pour investir l'espace public et porter haut et fort, malgré les réticences séculaires et les résistances des milieux conservateurs, des revendications sociales (féminisme, nationalisme) et culturelles. Des Françaises comme Jehan d'Ivray ou Valentine de Saint-Point s'installent à cette même période en Égypte, et deviennent les témoins et les actrices de cette Renaissance culturelle. Ces auteures investissent divers genres littéraires comme le roman et la poésie mais aussi l'essai ou l'écrit de recherche universitaire, elles publient dans des périodiques, ou créent des revues pour se dire. Elles mettent ainsi à l'épreuve les catégories opposant genres dits féminins et genres dits masculins. Elles contribuent à élaborer une œuvre interculturelle prenant en compte les traditions génériques françaises et égyptiennes, et proposent un renouvellement de la représentation de la femme et de l'Orient. Les écrits littéraires de femmes rassemblent une production très vaste mais qui demeure pourtant peu connue, peu rééditée et peu lue de nos jours, alors même qu'elle jouissait parfois d'une véritable reconnaissance des lecteurs et des institutions littéraires à l'époque de leur parution. Notre travail a consisté à constituer un corpus, c'est-à-dire à l'identifier, à le rassembler, à le classer avant de l'analyser. Il s'agit d'écrire un chapitre oublié de l'histoire littéraire et de s'interroger sur le statut de la littérature des femmes et de la littérature francophone dans la tradition critique. / An important literary production emerged and developed in Egypt from the end of the 19th century until the 1960's: Egyptian women educated in French culture (like Out-el-Kouloub or Doria Shafik) chose this language to write the ambitions of the “new woman”, who was abandoning the private and confined space of the harem and investing public space to loudly proclaim cultural and social demands (feminism, nationalism), despite secular reluctance and resistance from conservatives. At the same time, French women such as Jehan d'Ivray or Valentine Saint-Point, settled to live in Egypt, and became witnesses and actors of this cultural renaissance. These authors adopted various literary genres such as the novel and poetry but also the essay or academic writing, publishing in periodicals or founding magazines in order to express themselves. They question the contradiction between so-called women's and men's literary genres, while contributing to the creation of intercultural literature which encompasses both French and Egyptian traditions. At the same time, they propose a reassessment of the representations of women and the East. This women's literature forms a large production which nevertheless remains relatively unknown as it is rarely republished or read today, even though it often received considerable attention from both readers and literary institutions at the time of publication. This thesis builds a corpus, identifying, collecting and classifying the works before analyzing them. It aims at writing a forgotten chapter of literary history while examining the status of women's literature and francophone literature in the critical tradition.

ix, 213 p. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT PQ673 .C53 2007 / This dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which the remembered past of childhood is inscribed in four francophone novels written at the turn of the twenty-first century: Nina Bouraoui's L'âge blessé and Garçon manqué, Ying Chen's Le champ dans la mer, and Gisèle Pineau's L'espérance-macadam. These texts belong to a substantial corpus of contemporary narratives in which the remembering of childhood experiences plays a central role. Within that corpus we find a new approach to childhood emerging, one in which an unfamiliar past returns through the remembered voice of a wounded child. This voice overwhelms the text, fracturing the narrative through the irruption of images that it cannot contain. This dissertation is a study of the characteristics of this new "aesthetics of rupture." Memories of childhood in these texts are overshadowed by shattering past events that went unrecognized and unacknowledged. As a result of the wounds inflicted upon the child, the adult narrator remembers the past through physical symptoms of pain. Far from suturing the wounds of the past, remembering childhood becomes an incessant confrontational engagement with past traumas. The reader is then able to hear the scream of the wide-eyed child through a process of empathetic identification with the narrator's visceral memories. My introductory chapters provide a historical context to the development of representations of childhood in French and Francophone literature. Chapter III studies the ways in which childhood memories can actualize the past as a set of interruptive and destabilizing images. Theories of the non-representational revelation of the past serve as a starting point to my reading of Bouraoui's L'âge blessé. Chapter IV concentrates on the affective quality of memories so as to understand the narrator's ambivalent affective relationship to the past of childhood in Chen's Le champ dans la mer. Chapter V attempts to capture the ways in which the memory of a child's voice can be heard as a literary scream in Bouraoui's Garçon manqué. Chapter VI is a reading of Pineau's L'espérance-macadam in which I take into account the unseen gaze of the child to consider the role of hope in this text. / Adviser: Karen McPherson

Dans le domaine des littératures francophones, on peut dénombrer actuellement une vingtaine d’auteurs chinois francophones : Tcheng Ki-Tong, Sheng Tcheng, Chow Ching Lie, François Cheng, Gao Xingjian, Shen Dali, Ya Ding, Dai Sijie, Ying Chen, Wei Wei, Shan Sa, et Ling Xi… Ces écrivains circulent dans différentes cultures, se servent de deux langues, et, par conséquent, leurs écritures mélangent une couleur chinoise avec une couleur occidentale. À travers leurs expériences, nous remarquons que certains d’entre eux ont développé une double pratique artistique, en accord avec leur identité culturelle désormais duelle. Ils construisent ainsi non seulement un pont entre deux langues et deux cultures, mais aussi un pont entre différents médias ou supports artistiques (romanesque et cinématographique ou pictural). Comment s’est développée la littérature francophone chinoise ? Et comment appréhender l’écriture romanesque et la pratique artistique des auteurs francophones chinois ? Centré sur des auteurs francophones chinois et leurs œuvres, notre travail formule une hypothèse sur l’articulation entre interculturalité et intermédialité au sein de la francophonie chinoise. / In the field of francophone literature, there are currently about twenty French-speaking Chinese authors : Cheng Ki-Tong, Sheng Cheng, Cheng Ching, Francois Cheng, Gao Xingjian, Shen Dali, Ya Ding, Dai Sijie, Ying Chen, Wei Wei, Shan Sa, and Ling Xi... These writers circulate in different cultures, use two languages, and consequently their writing mixes a Chinese color with a Western one. Through their experiences, we note that some of them have developed a double artistic practice, in accordance with their cultural identity, which is now dual. They thus build not only a bridge between two languages and two cultures, but also a bridge between different media or artistic supports (novelistic and film or pictorial). How has Chinese francophone literature developped itself ? And how can we understand the novelistic writing and the artistic practice of the French-speaking Chinese authors ? Focused on French-speaking Chinese authors and their works, our research formulates a hypothesis about the articulation between interculturality and intermediality within the Chinese Francophonie.

À l’origine de cette recherche se trouve un débat taxinomique opposant deux points de vue différents sur l’œuvre et l’appartenance ethnique de l’écrivain Marie NDiaye. Sa filiation franco-sénégalaise et sa couleur de peau ont poussé certains critiques à intégrer ses écrits à la littérature noire francophone, alors que la romancière a principalement vécu en Europe et se dit modelée par la mentalité et la culture occidentales. Pourtant, dans ses deux derniers romans, l’Afrique est un élément essentiel de la diégèse. Notre curiosité a été suscitée par ces différents positionnements. Afin de trancher entre la fascination pour un endroit exotique auquel la romancière est souvent associée et une appartenance sans équivoque au champ littéraire de l’Afrique francophone, nous avons mené une étude sur trois niveaux. Le point de départ a été de relever les influences les plus marquantes qui ont façonné les œuvres de Marie NDiaye et de situer les romans du corpus dans une tradition littéraire évidente. La deuxième partie interroge les dimensions narrative et descriptive de Trois femmes puissantes et Ladivine afin de déceler des signes de métissage. Le dernier fil conducteur creuse les figures de l’imaginaire et relie les deux œuvres étudiées surtout aux mythes et aux symboles issus de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine et du catholicisme. Au terme de notre thèse, nous pensons avoir réussi un travail rigoureux dont les conclusions prouvent que la filiation littéraire de Marie NDiaye est du côté de la littérature française. / At the origin of this research is a taxonomic debate between two different views on the work and the ethnicity of the writer Marie NDiaye. Her Franco-Senegalese descent and skin color have determined some critics to integrate her works within the Francophone black literature, while the novelist lived mainly in Europe and said she was shaped by the Western mentality and culture. Yet in her last two novels, Africa is essential for the diegesis. Our curiosity was aroused by these different positions. To distinguish between the fascination for an exotic location to which the novelist is often associated and an unequivocal belonging to the literary field of Francophone Africa, we conducted a study on three levels. To distinguish between the fascination for an exotic location to which the novelist is often associated and an unequivocal belonging to the literary field of Francophone Africa, we conducted a study on three levels. The starting point was to meet the most important influences that have shaped the works of Marie NDiaye and to find the place of the novels of the corpus in an obvious literary tradition. The second part examines the narrative and descriptive dimensions of Three Strong Women and Ladivine in order to detect signs of miscegenation. The last thread studies the figures of the imaginary and connects the two works with myths and symbols derived from the Greco-Roman antiquity and the Catholicism. At the end of our thesis, we think we have achieved a rigorous work which proves that the literary lineage of Marie NDiaye is on the side of the French literature.

Cette thèse se propose d'interroger l'écriture littéraire de l'esclavage dans une perspective diachronique et comparée entre la France et ses colonies et les États-Unis, et en regard de la construction de la mémoire de l'esclavage transatlantique et de sa transmission. La dimension diachronique vise à éclairer l'écriture contemporaine de l'esclavage, notamment à partir d'un constat initial : plusieurs centaines de témoignages d'esclaves – regroupés sous le terme générique "slave's narrative" – ont été publiés aux États-Unis, plus rarement en Angleterre, à partir du XVIIIe siècle ; aucun texte de ce type n'a été recensé dans la sphère francophone. Une disparité saisissante qui a semblé un signe fort à analyser, posant la question des causes ou de l'origine de cette disparité, mais aussi de ses conséquences sur la mémoire et surtout sur l'écriture de l'esclavage. En effet, la littérature africaine américaine est souvent présentée comme une héritière de ces témoignages. Sous la désignation de « neo-slave narratives », la critique américaine a même réuni et analysé nombre de romans africains-américains portant sur l'esclavage depuis la fin des années 60. Point d'aboutissement de ce travail, l'écriture caribéenne francophone de l'esclavage est ainsi appréhendée au regard de la production africaine-américaine et de sa différence notable quant à l'héritage mémoriel et discursif des slaves' narratives. Constatant leur absence dans le champ critique francophone, il s'agit également de proposer les premiers jalons d'un appareil critique et d'une analyse de l'écriture caribéenne francophone contemporaine de l'esclavage ainsi qu'une terminologie générique : récit d'esclave francophone. / This thesis proposes a two-fold examination of the literary writing of slavery in France and its former colonies, and in the United States, using both a diachronic and comparative approach. It also takes into account the perspective of the construction and transmission of the memory of transatlantic slavery. The diachronic dimension adopted in this work aims to enlighten on the contemporary writing of slavery. Indeed, several hundreds accounts of slaves– known as “slave narratives” – had been published in the United States, more rarely in England, as early as the 18th century, but there were no such narratives in the francophone world. This striking disparity turned out to be a case worth analyzing to find out about its causes, its origins and its consequences on both the memory and the writing of slavery. As a matter of fact, African American literature bears the direct influence of these testimonies. Identified as “neo-slave narratives”, African American novels dealing with slavery have been collected and analyzed by critics since the 1960's. The last part of this dissertation focuses on the Francophone Caribbean writing of slavery. It is examined in comparison with the African American production and the striking difference noted in the historic and discursive heritage of the slave narratives. This lack in the francophone critical field led us to prepare the ground for the analysis and the review of the contemporary Francophone Caribbean writing of slavery, and for a generic expression: francophone slave narratives.

For English-language audiences, twentieth-century French literature is often identified with a variety of literary movements tied to the political left. In spite of its lesser visibility, the French literary right enjoyed considerable prestige during the first half of the twentieth century. This thesis employs methodologies from translation studies in order to study how the French literary right has been translated, or not translated, into English. Case studies devoted to three seminal writers of the right, including Charles Maurras (1868-1952), Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893-1945), and Roger Nimier (1925-62), demonstrate that right-wing committed literature was a central mode of literary production from the 1910s to the 1950s and that this current of writing is underrepresented in English-language translation and scholarship. A number of literary and cultural asymmetries separating English-language literature from French literature have contributed to this situation, such as the phenomenon of literary engagement in French literature and France’s strong anti-liberal intellectual tradition. Using systems theory this thesis argues that these differences between the French and Anglophone literary systems have contributed to the lack of representation accorded to the French literary right, which is manifested in the selection, presentation, and translation of texts by right-wing authors such as Maurras, Drieu, and Nimier. When translations of texts by these authors do exist, a number of translation patterns emerge. These patterns and distortions have ramifications for the construction of literary canon and for our understanding of twentieth-century literary history and the role ideology plays in influencing high- and low-level translation decisions.

While we can easily acknowledge that many aspects the texts written by Chrétien de Troyes have been studied and discussed through the centuries, it is always possible to apply a new reading to the author's work. Like many authors of the same time period, the author of Le Conte du graal and LeChevalier de la charrette was not only writing for the audience of his time but was also openly targeting an audience set in a different century and social context. This timeless aspect of Chrétien's work is part of what makes his texts intricate and still relevant to this day. It also allows us to understand the impact they had by the time they were written as well as the long lasting interest that has been keeping them current throughout eight centuries. While the courteous aspect of these texts seems to be mostly relevant to the audience of a certain time period it is possible for us to conduct a psychoanalytical reading of Chrétien's work in order to appreciate the long- lasting qualities of these tales almost eight hundred years later. By using the drive theory established by Freud along with the work of Lacan based on search for the I, studies which were both established during the twentieth century, we will analyze the untold motivations of the quest and define the relationship between the knight and his physical and inner journey. In this study we will consistently question these motivations. In order to understand them we will first discuss the implications of the quest in a set medieval context which will then lead us to look at this behavior outside of this timeframe in order to focus on the psychological elements of these texts.

This study examines how the female circus artist is represented in twelve pieces of French literature ranging from the late nineteenth century to the modern day. The books are divided into three categories by author type: first, authors without a circus background; second, male authors involved in the circus world; and third, women involved in the circus world. Although predicted that the first section would reveal the largest use of stereotypes and misogyny, the second would show the sexist expectations of the circassienne onstage and off, and the third would call out these stereotypes and suggest improvements, there was less variety found than expected. Only two authors—one from each of the first two categories—used circassienne stereotypes in an extremely negative manner, authors who were unfamiliar with circus but did research as well as the majority of the male authors familiar with circus bluntly stated some of the bias but did not offer solutions, and the majority of the female circus artist authors also stated the bias they faced but were limited in their opportunities to challenge stereotypes. Eleven of the books focus on artists from traditional circus, and only Circassienne looks at contemporary circus. Whereas there is a variety of literature about the contemporary circus scene in Quebec, Circassienne was the only book found to be written by a French circassienne that deals with normalizing the life of a circus artist in who lives in a house, sends their children to school, and creates pieces designed to expose children to contemporary circus as well as pieces with calls for activism. Overall, it was found that the situation for the female circus artist in traditional circus in France has not greatly changed in the past century. She is still expected to be feminine, to wear revealing costumes, and to flirt with the audience, often serving as the “female element” in an otherwise male-dominated group of performers. Reducing sexism in circus and the fight for gender equality remain part of the agenda of circus going forward, and progress is being seen faster in contemporary circus than in its traditional counterpart.