Th. : Lett. : Lausanne : 1980. / Bibliogr. p. 268-278. Notes bibliogr.

Translating and reading western modernist literature played a vital role in forging contemporary Chinese literature and China’s mode of subjectivity, but little has been written about them, and even less about the interconnections between them. My PhD thesis aims to offer a comprehensive interpretation of the phenomenon of translating and reading modernist literature in Mao’s China, focusing particularly on translators’ and readers’ agency, and their collective construction of a multifaceted discourse of subjectivity. The central questions I try to answer in my thesis are: For what “practical” purposes or needs did the Chinese Communist Party order the translation and publication of these modernist texts which are clearly against the ideology of Mao’s China? What mark did translators from state controlled institutions leave in the intellectual history of China? Why did western modernist literature of 1950s cause such a strong response from the intellectual youth in the 1970s? In Mao’s China, there were a number of modernist literature texts that were translated and published. They were only intended to be available for a very limited readership consisting of high ranking party officials, but ended up being leaked, and eventually became extremely popular in the underground reading movement. I decided to focus on the three most widely read texts, which are On the Road (first translated into Chinese in 1962), Catcher in the Rye (first translated into Chinese in 1963), and Waiting for Godot (first translated into Chinese in 1965). By mapping the translation process and the underground reading of these texts into the context of the politics of China from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, my study provides three arguments which attempt to answer the three questions raised above: 1) Mao’s China encountered similar modernity situations so that western modernist literature after World War II was translated for internal circulation and criticism; 2) Thanks to the subjectivity of translators from state controlled institutions, their translations paved the way for the rising of the self, the end of revolution, and the individualization of Chinese society; 3) As early as in the 1960s to 1970s, the conscious reading of modernist literature brought alternative understandings of self and ways of being, and the sent-down Chinese youth have new self-projection by reading these texts. Few researchers have studied translation beyond analysis of target language text (TLT), while my methodological innovation is to connect three traditionally isolated subjects into a single continuing process of meaning giving activity: the source text and their role in forging western subjectivity; translators and their translations in Mao’s context; and Chinese underground reading of western literature from late 1960s to 1970s. This is a comparative and theoretical study of the three chosen texts in their historical contexts in order to reconsider the cultural significance of translating and reading modernist literature in Mao’s China. I hope it will modify our view of translation and reading history in Mao’s China, contributing to theories of subjectivity and the plurality of Chinese modernity discourse. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This thesis presents Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (1788) as a synthesis of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the theology of François de la Mothe-Fénelon. While the novel’s prominent themes of the goodness of nature and the corruption of society are clearly associated with Rousseau, Bernardin rejects Rousseau’s ideals of independence and self-sufficiency as the basis for his moral theory and preference of nature. Instead, his novel appears to Christianize Rousseau’s philosophy by stressing dependence on a personal, beneficient God who is revealed through nature, thereby associating the natural life with a God-centered life where happiness can be found through dependence on God and selfless service to others. In seeking to pinpoint Bernardin’s Christian influence, this paper goes on to acknowledge Bernardin’s hyperbolic praise for François Fénelon, which leads to an investigation concerning, first, which of Fénelon’s teachings can be found in Paul et Virginie, and second, how Bernardin manages to preserve such enthusiastic admiration for a Christian thinker while also denying several important tenets of Christian orthodoxy. This investigation reveals that Fénelon appealed to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre not only on the basis of what he emphasized, but also what he failed to emphasize. On the one hand, a number of Fénelonian ideas find expression in Paul et Virginie, ideas such as a conception of worship that privileges inner realities over external performances; a glorification of pure, disinterested love toward God; an ideal lifestyle of simplicity and harmony with nature; and an acknowledgement of the role of sentiment in gaining knowledge of the divine. On the other hand, this paper also proposes that Bernardin’s unhindered admiration for Fénelon was made possible by his ability to misinterpret two of Fénelon’s most well-known works, Télémaque (1699) and the Traité de l’existence de Dieu (p. 1718), whose silence on particular doctrines like original sin and the authority of the Scriptures allowed Bernardin to preserve his beliefs about natural goodness and the sufficiency of natural revelation. / text

This study examines six texts o f the 12[sup th] and 13[sup th] centuries for the fantastic mode. It first refutes the critical assertion that the fantastic could not exist in medieval literature, but also establishes that most of the casually denominated "fantastic" is not. For the genuine fantastic, both in general and in its medieval appearances, questions of reality are at most peripheral. Rather the fantastic mode encodes itself in the narrative structure, creating ambiguity and openness. The structural approach frees the discussion o f the fantastic from theories predicated upon issues of thematics, reality-based analysis, and didactic categorizations o f supernatural objects. The first two chapters synthesize those elements from modern works of fantastic theory, (re)deflning the fantastic based upon a semiotic approach. The introduction concentrates on the need to reexamine the corpus of critical works addressing the fantastic. Chapter 1 summarizes the theoretical discussion in order to adjust the definition of "fantastic" as a critical term according to a more pre-Renaissance view of reality. Chapter 2 proposes the parallel worlds model as a structural model for the identification of the fantastic mode in texts where the supernatural is evident, with an emphasis on fantastic space as an intermediary locale between worlds. The last four chapters apply the parallel worlds model to a selected corpus of six narratives. While the structures of these texts vary in length, the fantastic is consistently manifested in a pattern that alternates between the real world, fantastic space and the otherworld. The open-ended structure of five narratives indicates that journeys to the otherworld are rarely accomplished with a high degree of completion, and therefore the narrative program remains incomplete. The conclusion is a defense of the fantastic within medieval French literature, concentrating on how the supernatural creates /otherness/, fantastic space and openness in the narrative program. The fantastic as a powerful but elusive force within Old French romance narratives often shifts to the merveilleioc in the end. The parallel worlds model, when used in conjunction with other theories for identifying the fantastic, is a structural method that emphasizes openness as a characteristic of the fantastic within medieval romance narratives.

Le silence est a peu pres total, dans la litterature franciase du dix-septieme siecle, sur tout ce qui touche a la pedagogie, mais ce silence merite d'etre scrute et explique. L'enseignement de l'epoque a des caracteres utopiques nettement marques, et c'est par les voyages imaginaires et les utopies que s'expriment les preoccupations pedagogiques, essentielles aux yeus des uptopistes. A la contestation pedagogique est liee la contestation religieuse : le dogme du peche originel doit etre ecarte pour ouvrir la voie au progres pedagogique. Le progres social et politique depend d'un progres pedagogique prealable. Plusieurs utopistes ont affirme la necessite de la creation d'une langue nouvelle parfaitement logique et destinee a remplacer le latin. Ainsi les utopies sont la manifestation d'un courant cache tendant a remettre en question la pedagogie de l'epoque.

<p>The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday shows how British, French and German writers have dramatized the dilemmas of the ethical life with others in the twentieth century, and taken up the challenge of imagining new forms of community. Framed by an encounter between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, the study traces an exemplary arc from 1933 to 1999, bringing together works of fiction, philosophy, critical theory, autobiography, social reportage and anthropology authored by deeply intriguing or controversial figures such as George Orwell, Paul Morand, Henry Miller, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and others. Negotiating the ethical and the political, the role that intellectuals can, or should assume in the conflicts and debates of their time, trying to find adequate forms to express their dilemmas, these writers share a sustained attention to the question of the ideal distance between oneself and others in an age deprived of a shared morality.</p> / Dissertation

Turks and Indians are the two major figures of the Other in French Renaissance literature. The purpose of this thesis is to explore otherness from a closer point of view by analysing the discursive allusions of the inhabitants of the South of the French Kingdom, particularly those of the "Province de Languedoc" throughout a collection of texts from the second half of the 16th century, whether they be strictly of a literary, historical or geographical source. Using the imagology method, the idea of the South being a key space in the emergence of the French identity is challenged. / First of all, the South legislates as a land of industrious administrators. However, even if it shows a claim for independence---a secularly evidenced fact---it nevertheless remains subject to the French Crown. Southerners, with identical customs as those of the French, are already part of this political entity. Schismatic area par excellence that tears the State apart, shown by numerous Huguenot patches in the Languedoc region, it is about to embrace the faith of the Same. This tendency occurs together with the linguistic phenomenon: the use of the French language develops at the same time as the practice of Law. The various parameters that distinguish the Other from the Same tend to converge to make the Southerner a subject per se of the Kingdom of the Valois. Far from questioning the foundation of the modern French identity, the people of Languedoc and other Southerners, with a rich distinct set of customs, contribute to it in several ways.

<p>In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from early-nineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory. Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early 1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de Paris, so central to panoramic literature.</p> / Dissertation

The reception of the works written by Roland Barthes in North America can be appreciated by examining editions, rééditions, collections of papers, commentaries and critical approaches. The thesis presents a bibliography of editions and translations in the United States and Canada. It provides an analysis of the portrait drawn by selection and interpretation of the foremost French critic, dead in 1980.