As women began to establish themselves in the United States workforce in the first half of the twentieth century, one especial group of career women, women writers, began to use the space of their self-authored life writing narratives to inscribe their own understanding of themselves. Roundly criticized for not adhering to conventional autobiographical standards, these women writers used purposeful political strategies of resistance to craft self-authored life writing works that varied widely from the genre of autobiography. Rather than employ the usual ways critiquing autobiographical texts, I explore a deeper understanding of what these prescient women sought to do. Through revision of the terminology of the field and in consideration of a wide variety of critics and approaches, I argue that these women intentionally employed resistance in their writings. In Dust Tracks on A Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston successfully established her own sense of herself as a black woman, who could also comment on political issues. Her fellow Southerner, Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), used orality to deliberately showcase her view of her own life. Another Southern writer, Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, employed an overtly social science approach to tell the life narrative of all white Christian Southerners, and described how she felt the problems of racism should be overcome. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian émigré to the United States, used an Old World European understanding of storytelling to refashion an understanding of herself as a writer and at the same time critiqued the United States in her work, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). Mary Austin, a Western woman writer, saw Earth Horizon as an opportunity to reclaim the fragmentation of a woman’s life as a positive, rather than a negative space.

Cette thèse porte sur l’analyse des ouvrages de Luigi Meneghello les plus fortement marqués par le plurilinguisme : Libera nos a malo, Pomo pèro, Maredè, maredè…, Dispatrio et Trapianti. Elle se pose comme objectif d’argumenter le travail stylistique qui sous-tend la réalisation de la prose plurilingue de l’auteur, dont la caractéristique dominante est une apparente spontanéité. La première partie de cette étude parcourt la réflexion de Meneghello afin de comprendre les raisons et les enjeux de l’utilisation littéraire des langues appartenant à son expérience biographique, à savoir le dialecte de son village natal (sa langue maternelle) et l’anglais, la langue de son pays d’adoption. La deuxième partie de cette étude se consacre en revanche au repérage et à l’analyse de procédés stylistiques récurrents, employés par l’auteur en vue de l’instauration d’une dimension polysémique du texte plurilingue. Cette enquête explore plus particulièrement le travail d’approfondissement métalinguistique que l’auteur voue à sa langue maternelle et la pratique de la traduction littéraire d’œuvres anglophones, conçue comme un véritable lieu d’échange et d’enrichissement mutuel entre langues et entre œuvres littéraires. / The main focus in this thesis is Luigi Meneghello’s litterary works, which are substantially influenced by plurilingualism: Libera nos a malo, Pomo pèro, Maredè, maredè…, Dispatrio and Trapianti. Its principal objective is to reveal the foregoing stylistic work on Meneghello’s plurilingual prose, which is characterised by an apparent spontaneity. The first part of this essay discusses the author’s thinking about using different languages in the literary text. These languages are related to his biographical experience: his birth village dialect (his native language) and English language, of his adopted country. The second part of this essay aims to identify and analyse stylistic processes used by the author to create a plurilingual text’s polysemic dimension. Moreover this investigation explores especially the field of metalinguistic observation of the native local language and the practice of literary translation from English, which is conceived as a real field of exchange and mutual enrichment between languages ant literary works.

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the main part of Latvian literature was produced by writers living outside Latvia. To this day Latvian literature continues to be written outside Latvia, albeit to a much smaller extent. This study examines those Latvian novels, written outside Latvia after the Second World War, which depict the realities of the early years of exile. The aim of the study is to describe the image of the world of exile as depicted in these novels. Borrowing from Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, images relating to time and space in these novels are examined in order to discern a mental topography of exile common to all these novels - a chronotope of exile. The novels are read as part of a collective narrative, produced by a particular social group in unordinary historical circumstances. The novels are regarded as this social group’s common perception of its own experience of this historical reality. The early years of exile fall into two distinct periods: first, the period of flight from Latvia and life in and around the Displaced Persons camps of postwar Germany; second, the early years of settling in a new country of residence after emigration from Germany. A model of the perceived world is constructed in order to compare these two periods, as well as their divergence from a standard perception of oneself in the world. This model consists of various time-spaces radiating concentrically out from the individual – ranging from the physically and psychologically near-lying time-spaces of one’s personal and intimate life, through everyday social time-spaces, as well as formal societal time-spaces, to the more distant abstract and conceptual perceptions of one’s place in the universe. Basic human concepts such as home, family, work, intimate relationships, social administration, and most notably the homeland – Latvia – are plotted at various points within these models. Divergences between the models describing the perception of time and space in the two early periods of exile thus become apparent.

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