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This thesis provides a comparative analysis of seven different variants of the fairy tale commonly known as “Donkeyskin,” classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale motif index as ATU 510B. By comparing so many different iterations of one fairy tale, it is easier to recognize the inherent attitudes concerning women and their place in society contained in this tale. Additionally, reading multiple variants from different centuries lends a perspective on the way that these attitudes changed over the centuries. Each of the thirteenth century texts considered end with their heroines trapped in loveless marriages, much like the seventeenth-century fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” their direct literary descendant. The nineteenth century texts then present death or marriage as the alternatives for women, while the twentieth century brings the first instance of a heroine choosing for herself. This comparison allows the reader to learn not only what was considered a “happy ending” at the time, but also to gain a better understanding of the means by which a woman could gain agency.

Dans le contexte algérien contemporain, la femme a activement participé aux guerres pour l'indépendance, eu accès à l'école de la République et a imposé sa présence dans un milieu dominé par les hommes. Sous la décennie noire, le tragique historique a fait de la femme- intellectuelle de surcroit- la première cible des extrémistes religieux. Les auteures algériennes avaient le choix de se taire, elles ont préféré écrire, parcourant comme c'est le cas pour Bey, l'histoire de l'Algérie contemporaine. Maïssa Bey fait partie de cette génération d'auteures qui ont dit l'horreur de l'Histoire, qui se sont senti dépositaires d’une Histoire collective à laquelle elles assistent en tant que femmes d'abord, intellectuelles ensuite.Mais si les romans beyens se posent comme support intellectuel pour la lutte contre les dérives de la violence historique, sociale, religieuse, etc., il n’en demeure pas moins que l’individualité de Bey cède la place à la parole de la collectivité, chaque lecteur pouvant reconnaître dans le portrait d’une victime la figure de toute personne acculée arbitrairement au silence.C'est justement à la charnière de toutes ces transformations qui ont touché l'Histoire de l'Algérie, la société algérienne et la création romanesque résultant d'un séisme identitaire que se situe l'œuvre de Maïssa Bey et que nous comptons explorer dans ce travail.Mots-clés : Maïssa Bey, littérature algérienne francophone, fictionnalisation de l'histoire, idéntité individuelle, identité collective. / In the contemporary Algerian context, the woman actively participated in wars for independence, had access to the school of the Republic and imposed her presence in a male-dominated environment. Under the Algerian Civil War, the tragic history has made the intellectual woman moreover the first target of religious extremists. The Algerian authors had the choice to be quiet, they preferred to write, browsing as is the case for Bey, the history of contemporary Algeria. Maïssa Bey is part of this generation of writers who have said the horror of history, who felt they were the depositary of a collective history that they attend as women first, then intellectual.But if Bey novels arise as intellectual support for the fight against the excesses of historical, social, religious violence, etc., the fact remains that Bey's individuality gives way to the word of the collectivity , each reader can recognize in the portrait of a victim the figure of any person arbitrarily driven to silence.It is precisely at the turning point of all these transformations that have touched the history of Algeria, the Algerian society and the romantic creation resulting from an identity crisis that the work of Maïssa Bey is located and that’s what we intend to explore in this work.Key-words : Maïssa Bey, algerian francophone literature, fictionnalisation of the history, individual identity, collective idendity.

Published in 1985, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur is a collection of six autobiographical and semi-autobiographical short stories written during and just after the German Occupation. Echoing the French national sentiment of the 1970s and 1980s, these stories examine Duras' own capacity for good and evil, for forgetting, repressing, and remembering. The first of these narratives, the eponymous "La douleur," is the only story in the collection to take the form of a diary, and it is this narrative, along with a posthumously published earlier draft of the same text, that will be the focus of this thesis. In both versions, Duras recounts her last tortuous months of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from a German concentration camp after he was arrested and deported for his participation in the French Resistance. Though Duras claims in her 1985 preface to "La douleur" that she has no memory of having written this diary and that it has "nothing to do with literature," when it is compared to the original version it becomes clear that substantial changes in style and tone were made to the 1985 version before publication. Though many of Duras' peers disregarded this rewritten version of "La douleur" as a shameful distortion of the truth, it is my contention that historical accuracy was never Duras' primary goal. Instead, what manifests in these two versions of the same story is Duras' path toward understanding and closure in the wake of a traumatic event. Using a combination of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, I will show that Truth and History are essentially incompatible when narrating trauma. Instead what is central to these two texts is their emotional accuracy: the manner in which the feelings and impressions associated with a traumatic event are accurately portrayed.

La chanson d'Yde et Olive, an early fourteenth-century epic poem from the Picard region, exemplifies the medieval custom of text renewal that seeks to adapt pagan materials to fit Christian doctrine. Largely based on the plot of the Ovidian fable Iphis and Ianthe from The Metamorphoses, its main character Yde undergoes a metaphorical transformation from a woman into a man. Moreover, much like the Ovide moralisé, a Christianized adaptation of the Latin original, Yde et Olive's message can be understood as a Christian parable for the purging of the sinful soul. To set up the poem's didactic message, the poet carefully infuses the story with contemporary social concerns, such as the theme of incest and gender disruption, both potentially offensive forces to the medieval social structure. In the backdrop of these threats to society, the heroine's overcoming of her struggles becomes all the more meaningful, leading to a clear moral message to the reader. While being a hybrid in genre and structure, the poem shows many borrowings from Christian hagiography, especially from the later, more romance-influenced versions of the Vitae of female transvestite saints. In these narratives, the heroine's spiritual development is typically portrayed in terms of "becoming male," which can also be understood as an erasure of sexual difference to approach God in a Neoplatonic sense. Moreover, the development of Yde's own hybrid state leading to the climax of revealing her new sex exemplifies medieval literary criticism, elaborating on the central theme of uncovering truth by exposing the hidden gem beneath the rough surface.

The subject of this thesis is the contemporary literature written by the sons and daughters of North African immigrant families in France. Its main area of investigation is the place of this literature in the French literary field, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, and the discursive features which motivate the ethnic based label of “Beur literature”. The study has a double approach in investigating both the argument for the socio-ethnic categorisation, and the reception of this literature in the French press. The literary corpus consists of twenty works from 2005 and 2006 by eighteen Beur writers. Thirteen of these works are subject to literary analysis. These are novels by Akli Tadjer, Zahia Rahmani, Faïza Guène, Mabrouck Rachedi, El Driss, Mohamed Razane, Houda Rouane, Nora Hamdi, Nor Eddine Boudjedia and Touhami Moualek, and three autobiographical narratives written by Razika Zitouni, Abel El Quandili and Aziz Senni. The press corpus from the corresponding period covers 14 titles of French national and regional daily papers, 8 titles of weekly general press and 6 titles of periodicals of literary and social debate. According to my hypothesis, the Beur fiction and the autobiographical narratives of my corpus are based on a common discourse that is expressed through certain literary means. A frequent strategy found in the novels is the subversion of French classics. Another feature is the constant referral to the French republican values. The novels share the latter of these two strategies with the autobiographical stories. This can be interpreted as resulting from a communication between a literary discourse and a social discourse which points toward a common ideological foundation. It also reveals the specific “Frenchness” of a literature that is often classified as “francophone” rather than “French” literature. The study of the journalistic reception confirms this aspect by the frequent referral of its authors to their ethnic and social origins.

Le récit Moi, l’interdite, se présente comme une exception parmi les œuvres d’Ananda Devi en ce qu’il n’aborde pas de front ni implicitement le thème de la dissidence féminine, comme nous pouvons l’observer dans la plus grande majorité des œuvres de l’auteure mauricienne. Au contraire, le récit s’évertue à mettre en place un processus singulier : celui d’une disparition, perpétré contre la narratrice et protagoniste principale, condamnée à être l’éternel Autre à cause de son physique monstrueux. La présente étude se donne pour objectif d’exposer les rouages à la fois narratifs, thématiques, corporels et relationnels de cet anéantissement de l’Autre à travers une approche essentiellement narratologique. Dans un premier temps, l’entreprise de disparition est observée à travers plusieurs procédés narratifs : complexité chronologique, enchâssement de plusieurs niveaux de récit, abondance de narrataires. Dans un second temps, le thème de la disparition est questionné dans les relations aliénantes nouées par la narratrice, dont le corps difforme est le principal enjeu. De cette volonté de destruction (re)nait et (re)meurt une narratrice, malade de folie, dont les séquelles incurables l’empêcheront de réaliser son désir d’appartenance à un Même fantasmé. / The novel Moi, l’interdite, stands as an exception in Ananda Devi’s works due to the fact that it does not, directly or inherently, address the topic of feminine dissidence usually displayed in the majority of the works from the Mauritian author. The story, on the contrary, tries to set up a singular process: a disappearance affecting the narrator and main protagonist, forever condemned to be the Other because of her monstrous physical appearance. This study aims at exposing the inner machinery of the narrative, thematic, corporal and relational aspects of the destruction of this Other mainly through a narratological approach. Firstly the initiative of the disappearance can be observed through several narrative methods: chronological complexity, interlocking of several levels of discourses, abundance of narratees. Secondly the theme of disappearance is questioned in the alienating relationships developed by the main narrator, for whom her deformed body is mainly what is at stake. This will of destruction leads to the crazily sick narrator’s (re)birth and death, as the incurable after-effects will prevent her from fulfilling her dream to belong to a fantasised Same.

The Basque people and their language have been politically oppressed for centuries. I examine the history of the Basque language and how its oppression and revitalization have been shaped by the language policies of France and Spain, the two countries spanned by the Basque country. I focus my research and predictions on the French Basque Country, which is currently subject to a more oppressive language policy than Spanish Basque Country. The number of Basque-speaking bilinguals in the French Basque Country is decreasing and attitudes regarding instruction of the language have become more apathetic. I explore governmental, community, and combined efforts to preserve and encourage use of the language and draw several conclusions about viable future revitalization efforts.

This thesis seeks to investigate the factors that cause the existing sexism within the educational system in the banlieue (suburban districts mostly comprised of North African immigrants), and the societal prejudice that exists between the society of the descendants of the immigrant population and the rest of French society. This thesis explores Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film, La Journée de la jupe, which highlights the major inequalities within the French educational system and stereotypes of the banlieue. The narrowed focus of this thesis is on the inequalities between women and men, which cause for the outbreak of sexism that runs rampant throughout the toxic institutions in the underprivileged areas of France, the banlieues, by analyzing the film.

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