Thesis--Stockholm. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Comparative Literature Dept., 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Stockholm. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Title and description from printout of file. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-193).

This dissertation calls into question the critique that has depicted the Francophone literary movement known as Negritude as a sole vehicle of black essentialism. By looking at recently published anthologies, archival documents, and lesser-known texts from 1935 to 1966, I show that in addition to the discourse on a fixed ‘blackness’ engraved in the neologism ‘Negritude,’ there is another set of discourses that forces us to rethink the movement as a philosophy of becoming. In particular, this dissertation stages the year 1948, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave Negritude its fame with the publication of his influential essay “Black Orpheus,” as a pivot for the definition of the movement as well as its reception. Since 1948, most of the critical engagement with Negritude has happened either through a reading of Sartre’s essay or the limited corpus that was available at the time. I thus argue that, by reading a broader range of the poets of Negritude’s literary and cultural production, one gets a sense that their vindication of Blackness is not only an essentialized invocation of a romanticized past, it is also an imagined unity within an evolving postcoloniality. This dissertation covers three areas within which this constantly reimagined unity is staged, from the youthful local publications of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor from 1935 to 1948, to their mature global interactions as statesmen in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Paris and Rome from 1948 to 1966. First, it looks at language and analyzes the relation of the poets to French. While the choice to adopt the idiom of the former colonizer has been criticized by merely every reader of Negritude, I show that they used French as a tool enabling violation, negotiating their relation to the metropole as well as other colonies. Second, it interrogates the often overlooked concept of métissage as common element for colonized subjects. With particular attention to problems of translation, I analyze how the poets used métissage as a political and ethical concept in order to reach to the African diaspora without referring to Europe as the unavoidable mediator. Third, it focuses on the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966 as instrument for political practice. By investigating extensive documentation on the Festival’s organization, especially the influential role and presence of the United States, I show that art was used as a political tool to stage postcolonial unity in an otherwise global and competitive diversity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-241). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

In this thesis, we examine theories of reading as they apply to three examples of the French New Novel. We begin with a detailed theoretical expose in which we compare and attempt to reconcile the reading models of Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Bertrand Gervais and Richard Saint-Gelais. The hybrid theory thus obtained is then tested on three works in order to underscore the modalities of reading that are particular to the New Novel, while insisting on these modalities' inherent variability. We focus on the reader's reconstructing of the narrative in L'Emploi du temps , on the impossibility of structuring the plot in La Maison de rendez-vous, and on the paradigmatic mode of reading La Bataille de Pharsale. In so doing, we hope to demonstrate how an analysis of the reading process allows for a heightened appreciation of the essential indeterminacy of the New Novel, of its fundamental otherness. We conclude with tentative remarks on the heuristic function of these texts.

No description available.