The present study elaborates a poetics of cross-cultural writing. Its primary theoretical reference is the ‘cross-cultural poetics’ (poétique de la relation) of Edouard Glissant: a set of poetic tropes and narrative structural strategies that he identifies in the mixed cultural setting of the Caribbean, in Le Discours antillais. My thesis argues that if these poetic strategies are indeed a response to specific social, cultural and political situations, then if analogous situations were considered elsewhere, we might expect an analogous poetics to arise. Taking North Africa as an example context, and specifically the novels of the Algerians Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih, I argue that these writers’ complex poetic strategies engage with – indeed, help to articulate – analogous socio-political concerns arising in their homelands. The formal poetical analysis of these authors is based on several key thematic tropes and structural strategies that Glissant advocates in his cross-cultural poetics. My five chapters consider roots and origins, living landscapes, silence and screams, literary opacity, and structural polyphony. They also develop a new critical vocabulary to describe how Glissant’s poetical strategies might take form at a close textual level; my analysis reveals a complex, and reciprocal, relationship between poetic expression and socio-political context. Glissant’s work is therefore shown to be more broadly relevant, but the founding tenets of his theory are also interrogated and questioned; the comparison with a North African setting entails a (re)assessment of the underlying conceptions of Glissant’s poetics – of the implicit logic by which he connects poetic form to social, cultural and political factors. These factors, for Glissant, also display a clear overlap with the (post)colonial; in studying cross-culturality, the postcolonial, and the poetics engendered by their overlapping, my thesis presents a specific critical focus for the postcolonial literary field.

The object of this thesis is to study the attempts made by writers and filmmakers in two very different socio-cultural contexts to depict and elucidate the experience of political violence, particularly torture, in the periods 1954-1962 and 1976-1983. I seek to apply the hypotheses of Anglo-American and French theorists with an interest in historical representation, as well as trauma, to both 'realist' and experimental accounts of the widespread oppression that occurred during the Algerian war of independence and later during the so-called 'Dirty War' in Argentina. The texts analysed in detail include novels and short stories by Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela; the films I examine most closely are the Algerian-Italian 'docudrama' La Bataille d'Alger and the Argentine melodrama La historia oficial. However, the thesis also addresses other non-factual portrayals of brutality, such as the Nouvelle Vague's meditations on decolonization, and autobiographical writings, such as military memoirs and survivors' testimony, as a means of elaborating more fully on the issues at stake in the works cited above. It explores the difficulty - and the possibility - of giving voice to histories that simultaneously resist and demand articulation, and ultimately, of reconstituting the fragmented or 'disappeared' subject through narrative: of using fiction to summon the 'ghosts' of the past.

This thesis seeks to discuss the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945 - 1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The thesis, divided into five chapters, each focusing on the late-colonial oeuvre of one writer, initially makes use of Bourdieusian conceptions relating to a gendered "dissymétrie fondementale" and concomitant Spivakian notions of representation, to argue that a masculine domination of public fields of representation contributed to, if not ensured, a post-colonial marginalization of women and a reduction of their public role. However, it is the principal argument of this thesis that the canonical writers of the period, who were mostly male, both textually acknowledge their inability to articulate the experiences and subjectivity of the feminine Other, to represent women, and deploy a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual innovations in an attempt to tentatively produce evocations of Algerian femininity that seek to upset or highlight the structural imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony in literary and socio-political milieux. Though this thesis does not shy from investigating those aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations, it chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity and an omnipresent literary subversion of a masculine subject pole. It deploys formal narrative analysis, Lacanian psychoanalytical frameworks and a conceptualisation of "pessimistic" form to achieve these ends and to argue that the texts of its corpus discreetly militate for a communal feminine self-representation to be inaugurated, before outlining in its conclusion a post-colonial Algerian feminine literary tradition, in particular contemporary symbolic conduits such as la bande dessinée that might serve as effective motors for progression in gender relations.

L’esthétique de théâtre en Algérie est analysée à travers le prisme des deux paradigmes « action » et « parole », deux dimensions essentielles pour comprendre « le théâtre de parole » et le théâtre dramatique ; deux variantes dynamiques de la présente thèse qui, en rupture avec les études antérieures qui ont tendance à privilégier la perspective historique dans les études théâtrales, réaffirme la valeur esthétique du théâtre algérien, aussi bien au niveau de l’écriture scénique que de l’écriture théâtrale. Le théâtre de parole s’accorde avec le style oral de la société algérienne, une société portée sur l’oralité que l’écriture. La parole est déterminante dans les modalités d’échange, et de transmission des valeurs sociales. Il existe une proximité entre le théâtre de parole et le style oral. La dimension de discours théâtral prend le pas sur l’action théâtrale. La dramaturgie texto-centrée est remise en cause, donnant ainsi une perspective au spectacle joué, au jeu de l’acteur-performer, au conteur performer d’autrefois qui sillonnait les contrées d’Algérie. La dimension de jeu est analysée, à la lumière des théories des auteurs tels que Stanislavski, Brecht, Vassiliev ou Grotowski. L’acteur rhapsodique s’inscrit dans le jeu « médian » ; il n’est pas dans la dimension d’incarnation, mais dans la dimension de représentation du rôle. / The aesthetics of theater in Algeria is analyzed through the prism of two paradigms namely "action" and "speech". "Action" is related to the theater of drama and "speech" is related to what is called "the theater of speech". The notion of speech is predominant in an Algerian society that has developed an oral tradition more than writing. Speech is the determining factor in the modalities of exchange and the transmission of social values. Unlike previous studies in Algerian theater, having given major privileges to the historical perspective, this thesis focuses on the various theatrical expressions written by Algerian writers who have led the Algerian theater since the 1920s till today. The notion of action is investigated through the theories developed by Brecht and Stanislavsky among others. In addition, we study the reception of the Algerian public, an active and dynamic public who like to listen to theatrical discourse.