This study has attempted to show that, in her récit Le Soleil et la terre (Paris: Société Nouvelle des Editions J.-J. Pauvert, 1977), the contemporary French woman writer Chantal Chawaf has, through her use of language, created female-defined symbolic imagery. The sources of such imagery draw upon the depths of female experience expressed in a female collective unconscious silenced within both the female mind itself and the interpretive cultural body. At the very core of such imagery - and that upon which focuses the author is the primary presence of the sexual body as the very key defining mode of existence and weltanschauung. The introduction briefly discusses Chantal Chawaf's sensuous and sensual use of language to convey the bodily source of her imagery and words. The focus, however, remains - throughout the study - on how the author is bringing to the foreground the bodily presence and experiences of woman left essentially unacknowledged, in woman's own terms, in the general social fabric. The first chapter examines imagery arising in the female imagination when the self confronts the self as female revealing to woman the sisterhood of all females through ties of body and a primordial affinity with Mother Earth as giver and sustainer of life. The second chapter discusses the cathartic process of freeing woman from the shackles of self-denial arising from an implicit and blind acceptance of male-dominated visions and experiences. The search for female identity in a male-dominated world necessitates fleeing from established and universally accepted symbolic forms by distorting them through imaginative powers. The third chapter examines the gradual attempt to ground woman's identity through a (re)conquest of the female self. The process of (re)birth entails the recognition and acceptance of the self's primary motivating force: the female body and how it relates to its biological truth of giving life. Thus, bodily-defined, life ultimately derives meaning through the human interconnection of man, woman and child as expressed in the time-worn word - Love - to which Chantal Chawaf gives a new, life-pulsating and all-encompassing cosmic meaning. An integral, if not perhaps paramount, part of considerations of content in this study has also been that of form. The very form of this study attempts to duplicate, as a mimetic echo, Chantal Chawaf's image of the woman writer as a lacemaker (la dentelliére) searching to find and make meaning apparent through the transparent or barely visible medium of words. An attempt was made to show (by means of layout, blanks, spacing, oblique quotations...) how explanatory analysis need not follow the path of logical discursive thought, but can also arise from the interplay or associative capacity of abstract intelligence, memory and imagination; i.e., to arrive at intellectual meaning through the concept known in the visual arts as «negative space». / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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Cette etude propose une analyse de "Tel Quel" en tant que mouvement de neo-avant-garde situe a la frontiere de la modernite et de la postmodernite. Nous y considerons tous les textes de creation (roman et poesie) publies dans la collection "Tel Quel" entre 1960 et 1982, sans negliger l'etude de leur rapport avec la reflexion theorique exposee dans les essais et les articles de la revue. Cette these represente en meme temps un effort de synthese des principales typologies ou tentatives de definition proposees par la critique occidentale pour caracteriser les mouvements litteraires issus des societes post-industrielles: modernite, postmodernite, modernisme, postmodernisme, avant-garde, post avant-garde et neo-avant-garde.

This thesis intends to describe the contemporary self as drawn by literary theory and writing practice. This objective implies defining the human being considering its history as well as studying its representation in narratives. / In order to circumscribe today's self, we undoubtedly have to study its historical evolution. Exploring the diametrically opposed conceptions suggested by modernity and postmodernity will lead us to a better understanding of the hybrid composition of the contemporary self, which is characterized by a search for coherence and meaning to a multidimensional and constantly evolving individual. / This definition, so far theoretical, will have to be confronted with the representations of the self found in autobiographies. The study of such self-narratives will provide the opportunity to observe in concrete terms the conception of the human being today. / The essential role of narratives will be identified beforehand. Narrative form certainly allows the representation of the self, but moreover it enters in the constitution and definition of the being itself. Self-narrative permits to establish the coherence of the self, hence it clearly appears at the basis of the identity. Overall, the narrative constitutes the foundation of the contemporary self amidst modernity and postmodernity.