This study of Abdelkebir Khatibis autobiography, La Mémoire tatouée, addresses two specific questions with respect to autobiography: What does this autobiography tell us about autobiography in general and about its own status as autobiography? What is the relationship between Khatibis autobiography and his other more well-known texts? Chapter One focuses on questions of autobiography and how this text challenges generic classification and definition. The analysis in this chapter focuses on a consideration of form and innovation, the multiplicity of the autobiographical subject, and questions of completeness, accuracy and memory in the creation of autobiography. Chapter Two begins with the idea that this autobiography is a story of becoming, of how the protagonist comes to be a writer. As such, it is also the protagonists history as a reader, from his days at the Quranic school, to his years in the French educational system, and to his first efforts at creative writing. The narrators mention of a previous publication and his suggested ideas for future publications lead the reader to understand that this autobiography, as a story of writing, addresses the past writing efforts, the present autobiographical project, and possible future texts. Chapter Three addresses the intertextual relationship between Khatibis autobiography and his other texts. Khatibis key concepts of pensée-autre and double critique, the bi-langue, and the intersémiotique are evaluated here with respect to decolonization, translation and bilingualism, and writing and its relationship to multiple signifying or semiotic systems such as geography and urban planning, tattooing, and calligraphy. I show in this chapter that these ideas, elaborated in Khatibis later texts, are all present in the autobiography. The analysis of the intertextuality of Khatibis autobiography and his other texts reveals that the autobiography serves as a kind of introduction to Khatibis body of work. The repeated references to music, especially in the autobiography, indicate a fugal relationship between the autobiography and the later texts: the former is the theme and the latter are the variations on that theme. Thus, the autobiography is a prelude to Khatibis lifes work, his Text.

This dissertation examines the different ways in which Edouard Glissant, Kateb Yacine and William Faulkner combine landscape, history and identity in their work. The depiction of landscape in literature is not new, but the French Romantics in the 19th century, for instance, tended to describe the beauty of landscape without conceiving any rapport between landscape and humankind, and thus created a gap between the two. For Kateb and Glissant, landscape is also a witness of History. The (hi)story of their respective communities has been confiscated and shattered by the respective colonizers, hence the necessity to recreate it through the poetics of land. However, because of the different contexts some differences in the conception and use of landscape arise between these three writers. In the case of Kateb Yacine, the Algerian landscape is the repository for the ancient history of North Africa. The North African people have to turn to their landscape in order to recreate their history and redefine their identity. For Edouard Glissant, the landscape was an accomplice of the Caribbean People. When the slaves escaped the plantation confinements the wilderness was their only refuge. It is then essential for the Caribbean community to take roots in this land in order to create its own history. In the case of William Faulkner, the land of his "Yoknapatawpha county" is presented as the podium where some injustices in the South took place, such as the dispossession of Indians, the spoliation of their lands, slavery, and above all the tragedy of the Civil War.

My thesis deals with : ««Engagement» in African Literature : the study of the Poetic Myth: Maïéto Pour Zékia by Joachim Bohui Dali or the Violence as the Symbol for Love». According to the myth of Maïé, at the beginning of the world, men and women lived in different areas and the two communities did not have any physical let alone sexual contact. After a significant war between these two groups, the women were defeated and therefore forced the men to marry. In short, the myth of Maïé explains how men and women met. Bohui Dali, in his book has inverted the myth of Maïé. The new war, according to him, is no longer between men and women. The war in the poem of Bohui Dali is the one that opposes Good to Evil. There are two main reasons for my choice of this topic: First of all, Maïéto Pour Zékia is the first literary work to have dealt with the mythic origin of marriage and polygamy in Ivorian society. In addition, Maïéto Pour Zékia allows us to understand the suffering of women in Africa and why they are always considered to be «inferior» to men. Then, Maïéto Pour Zékia presents issues for a possible approach to teaching of African oral literature in universities and other academic institutions. First, I will begin my study by situating the space of diffusion of the myth of Maïé in a comparative context and by defining the term of myth and explaining its importance in African culture. Finally, I will concentrate on the study of the poetic myth of Maïéto Pour Zékia. I will insist on some aspects such as the place of women in the rebirth of African culture, the question of violence, and the theory of «Engagement» in African literature.

This thesis traces the evolution of attitudes towards the body, desire, autobiography, and self-affirmation, in three novels of Assia Djebar: L'amour, la fantasia, Vaste est la prison, and Les nuits de Strasbourg. The three novels share a common trait: the narrators' will to express their body and their desires. This body, which is simultaneously anonymous and concealed, is at the very center of a contradiction; it is often relegated to representation as a ghost without any corporeal reality. It is been our objective to follow the narrators' introspective reflection on the multiple relationships between Algerian women and public space, designated as a masculin dominion controlled by the male gaze. The narrators move from a symbolic aphasia in L'amour, la fantasia, in which they are incapable of experiencing and expressing emotions to the definition of a private space of desire in Vaste est la prison, and ultimately, in Les nuits de Strasbourg, to the possibility of mastering space and time which they themselves define in their relationships to men. In order to subvert the patriarchal system, the narrators develop strategies of camouflage and disguise as means of manipulating the notion of the incorporeal feminine body. In this progression from passive to active invisibility, they render conscious the unconscious dimension of their attitude towards themselves and towards men. In the context of Algerian society, the presence of woman in the public space is unacceptable. The gesture of making public space accessible to women requires a collaboration between the newly conscious Algerian woman and a male partner who embraces both her and his evolved identity.

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these components ultimately induces otherwise unnamed meanings, meanings that exist as part of the symbolic network of a text, yet beyond the division and difference of signifiers. And while traces of this phenomenon may be found in literature from all historical periods and genres, the three medieval romances in which I have chosen to explore it - La Vie de Saint Alexis, Le Conte du Graal, and Le Roman de Silence - exhibit a particularly strong awareness of the communicative problems and possibilities engendered by silence. Each one demonstrates - albeit in a slightly different way - that silence is more than just omission: within their pages, it becomes an elusive yet create force that shapes thematic development and structures poetics. Ultimately, however, silence's structuralizing force is not just textual, but also ontological, affecting our existence and perceptions of who we are.

The aim of this dissertation is to question the concept of orality as the natural expression of ancestors in African novels and press for a reading of West African writers, which values their fictional creation as autonomous from their cultural origins. The main purpose of this study is to examine, through series of close textual readings, how francophone West African novels distance themselves from oral tradition by fully assuming literacy as a characteristic of the post-colonial Africa. The first chapter attempts a redefinition of orality, as only a critical discourse aimed at translating the complexity and the suspected hybridity of West African novels. Using examples of American southern folklore from Joel Chandler Harris, Alcée Fortier and Zora Neale Hurston, this study demonstrates how orality is built from hesitations between an intention of authenticity and its literary inventions as a response to oppressive and dominant cultural influences. In this regard, orality appears therefore like a comfortable concept, but an inaccurate reading for its failure to address the cultural and historical dynamism of the West African sub-continent. Therefore, through a reading of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's l'Aventure ambigue, the second chapter "witnesses" the making of authenticity as the simultaneous denial and the consciousness of universalism. Thereby, the recourse to oral tradition appears, as the third chapter emphasizes through examples from Bernard Dadié's Le Pagne noir and Léopold Sédar Senghor's La Belle Histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre, as a pretext for African writers to make contemporary cultural proposals to their respective communities. In spite of the claim that it derives from speech, orality operates more like the negation of literacy and also as a contemporary review of West Africans' relation to their ancient cultures as the fourth chapter demonstrate with Djibril Tamsir Niane's Soundjata ou l'épopée Mandingue. Finally, the fifth chapter analyzes orality as a strategic writing practice by reading the conflict between speech and writing, in Ahmadou Kourouma's En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, as a proposal of a creative language which serves as vehicle for the adjustment of Africans in their encounter with western cultures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, 1984. / Abstract (1 leaf) and Summary contents guide (18 loose leaves) in pocket of v. 1. Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, leaves 261-277).

Diss.--Freiburg im Breisgau. / Bibliography: p. 331-339.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-180).

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris, 1901. / Includes bibliographical references and index.