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This study, written in French, examines both the parallel and conflicting events in the childhoods and adolescent periods of two significant francophone writers, Camara Laye and Joseph Zobel, through an in depth analysis of their respective novels L'enfant noir and la Rue Cases-Negres. The study was based on the assertion that children of African heritage growing up in French colonial society would have similar experiences bearing distinct cultural markers. The following sources were used in the development of this thesis: direct comparison of the two novels, study of twentieth century literary criticism, and research of other scholarly works in the field of modern francophone literature. In this analysis, the researcher explored similar elements between Franco-African and Franco-Caribbean culture in the themes of music, oral tradition, colonial education, language, religion and superstition, and social interaction as represented in the two novels. Furthermore, the study described the conflicting representations of the conditions of French colonialism in each of the settings of the novels and how those representations do or do not reflect the general thinking of the literary period in which they were published.

Most frequently enunciated as a questioning the notion of identity appears only when an interrogation such as "Who am I?" becomes even conceivable. Thus any reflection on the issue of identity involves an inquiry into the conditions of emergence of this questioning. Considered in the multi-faceted Palestinian context, this concept is particularly complex because of its political ramifications and its national and collective dimensions. Facing the Zionist project that claimed Palestine (supposedly a land without people) as the land of return for the Jews (a people without a land), the Palestinians had to face a denial of their existence that is rare in modern history. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (the Nakba for the Palestinians), expelled more than 700.000 Palestinians in the neighboring Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, transforming them into refugees who also had to face the societies of their host countries. This situation sharpened the Palestinians' conception of national identity and their awareness as a people even in the absence of an official state. The books by Elias Sanbar and Racha Salah that this dissertation examines share not only a historical background but a vision of a distinct Palestinian identity in which, I contend, collective memory and lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) play a crucial role. Yet in many ways these works are also strikingly different. The main objective of this dissertation is to study their respective representation of the Palestinian struggle to preserve and consolidate a particular identity as well as demonstrate how the particular literary forms they use are integral to the struggle they depict. Chapter I sets the historical and socio-political framework: Going back to the period when the fall of the Ottoman Empire was followed by the British mandate on Palestine, it analyzes the ways in which Palestinian nationalism developed in contending with both the British colonization and the Zionist ambition of establishing a Jewish national homeland. Chapter II considers several 20th-century theories on nationalism (by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith, among others) to assess the light that they help shed on the "Palestinian question" and its specificity. Chapter III first investigates the three historical periods whereby Elias Sanbar (a celebrated, second-generation Palestinian who lived mostly in exile in Europe) constructs the Palestinian identity in his socio-political essay entitled Figures du Palestinien. Identité des origines, identité de devenir; the second part of this chapter shows how Le bien des absents, in resorting to the different mode of biography (unusual in Sanbar's production) and a nonlinear narrative mode, builds upon various "sites of memory" and cultural artifacts to shape its representations of Palestinian identity. Chapter IV is devoted to Racha Salah's L'an prochain à Tibériade. Lettres d'une jeune palestinienne du Liban. It examines the situation of refugee camps and more specifically Salah’s representation of the camp within a host country in which she was brought up as a third-generation Palestinian refugee. This chapter shows how, paradoxically, this situation of near-detention enabled her persona to distance herself from the official discourse, not only to develop her own hopeful, yet sometimes disenchanted, vision of a reunified Palestinian nation but also to question, through the specific genre of epistolary fiction, the role and responsibility of the Western world in the "Palestinian question." Overall, this dissertation also seeks to draw attention to the important contribution made to the Palestinian cause by Francophone Palestinian writers (and Francophone studies scholars in general).

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Au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, le pouvoir et la censure exercés par l’État et l’Église étaient très bien connus par Denis Diderot. Incarcéré en 1749 pour la publication de son texte <em>La Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient</em>, et persécuté sans cesse pour son travail sur <em>L’Encyclopédie</em>, Diderot cherchait un moyen d’exprimer sa philosophie matérialiste et d’éviter la prison. Dans <em>Le Rêve de D’Alembert</em> et <em>Le Neveu de Rameau</em>, écrits entre 1762 et 1773, le philosophe a trouvé ce moyen dans les monstres, et il a utilisé la monstruosité physique ainsi que morale comme outils littéraires. Les monstres sont employés de manière didactique, afin d’instruire le lecteur et d’élucider ses idées sur la nature, la biologie, le matérialisme, et même certains aspects de la philosophie athée. L’hybridité associée avec la monstruosité a même influencé la forme de ces deux dialogues, qui sont des œuvres uniquement structurées pour véhiculer leurs messages. À partir d’une analyse du <em>Rêve de D’Alembert </em>et du <em>Neveu de Rameau</em>, ainsi qu’une étude des textes critiques, cette thèse démontre comment la monstruosité est devenue un élément-clé dans l’expression de la philosophie matérialiste de Diderot. / Master of Arts (MA)

In this thesis, I am interested in studying how African writers incorporate cinema in their works while focusing on the impact of Western and Asian films on the African public. My corpus includes writers such as Abdoulaye Sadji (Maïmouna), Ousmane Sembène (Les Bouts de bois de Dieu), Sylvain Bemba (Rêves portatifs), Tierno Monénembo (Cinéma), Henri Lopes (Le Pleurer-Rire) and Alain Mabanckou (African psycho and Verre Cassé). I use criticism by Freud, Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Bellemin-Noël, Christian Metz, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and others to analyze, through the mechanisms of alienation, of depersonalization and corruption of the imaginary, the transmutation that cinema lovers in the African novel undergo. By « transmutation », I mean the process which leads to the expulsion of the individuality of some characters. This transformation will be manifested by an overactive imagination, by the exaltation of the most extravagant fantasies and by the violence inherent to the characters that now, in a perverse way, strive to reproduce in their social world the fictional world of movies that they have watched and which are fully disconnected from their environment. As these characters do not manage to draw the line that separates cinematic facts from their illusions, the narrative will suggest the confusion between cinema and "reality". Therefore, the loss of direction and other dealings will lead to personality disorders and criminal behaviors. / Thesis (Ph.D, French) -- Queen's University, 2010-07-23 13:33:45.297

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

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