<p dir="ltr">This dissertation examines the expansion of refugee student services in postwar France during three subsequent refugee crises involving students from Eastern Europe. More than just a product of Franco-Soviet Cold War relations, I show how French support for the students developed in the context of decolonization and contemporary migration politics that favored white Europeans. The Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) in specific transformed the way the French thought about citizenship and strengthened the importance of race to national identity. The racial and ethnocultural compatibility of Eastern Europeans students with postwar France became a distinct advantage that manifested itself in the financial and social support that students received.</p><p dir="ltr">Beginning in 1945 with the rebirth of the refugee student organization the <i>Entraide Universitaire Francaise</i>, I analyze how the arrival of Eastern European refugee students over the next thirty years coincided with these changes to French self-image and citizenship. I further explore how key developments in international and national refugee law helped establish and maintain Eastern Europeans as the stereotypical refugee figure in postwar France, despite the increasingly globalized nature of refugee emergencies. This dissertation therefore reveals the influence of migration politics, decolonization, and race on France’s treatment of refugee students in the postwar period.</p>

This thesis, which is written in French, examines the problems of translating modem Scottish literature into French. To illustrate them, a case study on The Crow Road by lain Banks will be undertaken. A short introduction first establishes the content of the thesis, its different parts and the strategy that we have adopted to tackle our main problem. This is identified as the cultural "otherness" of Scottish writing, which has been to a greater or lesser degree occulted in French translations of Scottish Literature. Chapter I looks at theoretical aspects of translation from a thematic point of view ranging from a philosophical approach, through a linguistic one to various cultural approaches, with specific reference to Eugene Nida and Lawrence Venuti. Chapter II examines Scotland as a nation and as a country with important linguistic and cultural differences from its southern neighbour. We will see how important this separation is in literature and how some theorists have dealt in particular with the problem of translating the vernacular. Chapter III is devoted to the analysis of the French translations of four Scottish authors, James Kelman, William McIlvanney, Irvine Welsh and lain Banks. It examines passages from the texts but also emphasises the strategies adopted by the translators. Chapters IV and V focus on respectively on lain Banks and The Crow Road in order to provide thorough social and cultural contextualisation before considering ways of translating the novel. Chapter VI considers a number of potential strategies for translating sections of The Crow Road: a 'domesticated' one, a Nabokov style, the use of a French dialect and finally one using Venuti's concepts. The conclusion suggests that translators are free to choose between competing strategies, or even to mix them, but that what is crucial is to have a thorough knowledge of the source culture, and a conscious and apparent strategy, before approaching works as culturally laden as contemporary Scottish novels. The Translator may have to have the courage to offend against existing French translation norms if translation is to be truly trans cui tural.

As we all know, there are multiple stories of art. But even in the West, each country has its own story, especially when it comes to the visual arts in the second part of the twentieth century. The stories told by the French, the German, the Italian, and the American textbooks and museums differ greatly. Yet, the American story is usually regarded as the standard account: the common Western story against which we mentally contrast the Non-Western stories. Without aiming at writing the true story of contemporary Western art, this dissertation tries to uncover alternative stories, interpret the differences, and explain how one particular view came to prevail as the story. Concretely, it examines four contentious issues on which the standard account is particularly challenged by other stories, namely the fracture of the Second World War, the shift of the artworld’s center from Paris to New York, the domination of American art in the 1970s, and finally the European comeback of the 1980s. Analyzing the different national interpretations of these events and confronting them with empirical data (place, date, participant, etc.), the dissertation uncloaks enduring myths and reductive explanations. It highlights above all the role of dealers, collectors, curators, critics, and government officials in the way art is produced, received, and remembered. It also demonstrates how the shifting historical, economic, and institutional contexts continuously reshaped the story, the canon, and the viewers, so that what art historians have traditionally seen as stylistic shifts and artistic leadership appears rather as the result of forces that extend beyond the artistic creation. Stories with less international recognition should not be dismissed in favor of an official story that would erode all differences and present us with a single -- and thus deficient -- perspective. Only through the consideration and analysis of multiple cultural and national perspectives can we understand the complexity of the artworld’s dynamics. Ultimately, I propose a comprehensive yet critical art historical approach rooted in cultural history that would offer a solution to writing art history in an age of globalization that purports to eschew previous assumptions of nationalism and creative genius. / text

'"Transcolonial Circuits': Historical Fiction and National Identities in Ireland, Scotland, and Canada" explores the intersections between gender, canon-formation, and literary genre in order to argue that English- and French-Canadian historical fiction was influenced, both in form and content, by the precedent-setting fictions o f Scotland and Ireland in the early nineteenth century. Conceived in the spirit o f Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), this dissertation extends Trumpener's examination of nineteenth-century British and Canadian romantic fiction by exploring in greater detail the flow of ideas and literary techniques between Ireland, Scotland, and English and French Canada. It does so in order to revise critical understandings of the formal and thematic origins and development of Canadian historical fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter One functions as a series of literary snapshots that examine historically the critical and popular reception of novels by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in Ireland, Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, John Richardson, William Kirby, and Jean Mcllwraith in English Canada, and Philippe Aubert de Gaspe and Napoleon Bourassa in French Canada. I pay particular attention to the issues o f gender and political ideology as inseparable from the history of the novel itself. In Chapter Two, by focussing on the travel trope, I examine in detail how Irish, Scottish, and Canadian writers transformed the investigative journeys of Samuel Johnson and Arthur Young into journeys of resistance to the dictates of the metropolis. Chapter Three focuses on the complications of marriage as a metaphor o f intercultural union. It pays particular attention to the intersections between gender, sexuality, and colonial identity. The Conclusion extends the concerns raised in the thesis about the relationship between historical writing and national identity to the late-twentieth-century Canadian context, by examining the adaptation of literary and historiographical conventions to the medium of television in the CBC/SRC television series Canada: A People's History, which aired in 2001-02.

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.