Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed June 17, 2008). PDF text: v, 193 p. ; 652 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3293923. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Originally presented as author's Thesis (doctoral)--Université Paris VIII Vincennes à Saint-Denis, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 478-482).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-239). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Originally presented as author's Thesis (doctoral)--Université Paris VIII Vincennes à Saint-Denis, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 478-482).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

In a field such as literature, the sense of belonging to a time, a history, a culture, a society or a social class, among other things, inevitably influences the creation of a text---even if it's only done unconsciously. Thus, writing isn't done in a vacuum. By extension, in translation, the context in which the translator exists also tints the text with the reality that the transfer from a source language to a target language is done. Starting with the assumption that the different political, social and cultural contexts surrounding the translation of Albert Camus' L'Etranger influenced the translation and retranslation of the book in Spanish, I will demonstrate and interpret the differences between three Spanish versions of the novel. The first translation was completed in Argentina, in 1949, while Spain was under Franco's dictatorship. Deemed immoral by Franco's regime, its publication was censored in Spain for several years before finally being authorized in 1958---a year after Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize of Literature. A retranslation of the book was completed in 1999 as Spain was marking almost a quarter of a century of democratic rule. More precisely, I will first compare extracts from the first Spanish translation of L'Etranger---done in Argentina by Bonifacio del Carril---with the revised version of that same translation, which was authorized and published in Spain in 1958. My objective for this comparison will be to illustrate the nature of translation by attempting to verify the hypothesis according to which the revised translation of 1958 reflects corrections aimed at actualizing the translation of 1949 in order to more accurately comply with the vocabulary and syntax used in Spain. I will then see how these chosen extracts differ between the first Spanish translation (original version of 1949 and revised version of 1958) and the retranslation done by Jose Angel Valente in 1999, considering that one translation was done during the dictatorship and subject to censorship, while the other was done under a democratic Spain.

<p> My dissertation shows how two women writers, Marie NDiaye and Bessora articulate the <i>experience</i> of being black in France, while, at the same time affirming the French Republican tenet that racial identification does violence to individuals, communities, and the nation itself. Despite their similar backgrounds, despite the fact that they reside in the same country, and that they write about a similar cast of characters in a similar milieu, Bessora and NDiaye are not typically seen as belonging to a shared literary category or tradition. NDiaye is categorized as a "French" author and Bessora as "Francophone." Although their novels might not be found in the same section of a French bookstore, when considered together, their works create a dialogue on race in today's France that cannot be overlooked.</p><p> In chapter one I focus on NDiaye's 1999 novella <i>La Naufrag&eacute;e </i>. This work combines art and fiction, featuring paintings by English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, most notably The Slave Ship (1840). In this chapter, I show how the narrator, a meilnaid, functions as an allegory for racial mixing. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's ideas on allegory, I demonstrate how the novella links the author's own non-white body to the historical bodies of human chattel drowned in the Middle Passage. This novella challenges the notion that France can ever be blind to race, given its history of chattel slavery.</p><p> Paradoxically, it is through allegory that NDiaye demonstrates the real violence and pain inflicted on the black body by the ideology of race-blindness. I build on these ideas in chapter two, examining the effects that the particular allegorical significance of the black body has on black subjects. Here I uncover a powerful intertextual thread running through NDiaye's 2012 novel <i> Ladivine</i>. Though NDiaye's understanding of race is undeniably French, she looks to the United States, to the Harlem Rennaissance and the passing novel to articulate the experience of being both black and entirely culturally French. I explore the dissociative effect produced when an individual, who sees herself as "universal," i.e. French like "everyone else," inhabits a nonwhite body. I extended my analysis beyond <i>Ladivine</i> to touch on <i>Rosie Carpe</i> (2001) and <i>Trois Femmes Puissantes </i> (2009). My analysis of these works reveals the ways in which French universalism is, paradoxically, geographically conscripted. The historical realities of slavery and of colonialism continue to impact the ways in which black bodies are seen in the metropole and in Overseas Departments, and profoundly influence the ways in which black subjects conceive of themselves.</p><p> In Chapter three I turned to Bessora, analyzing her first two novels, <i> 53 cm</i> (1999) and <i>Les taches d'encre</i> (2000). Bessora wrote both of these while pursuing a doctorate in anthropology. However, current scholarship tends to interpret her literary output as standing in direct conflict with her academic pursuits;that her novels, so rich in satire and pastiche, serve to reject or simply "write back" against the fields she was studying at the time. These analyses assume a necessarily conflictual relationship between black writers and the social sciences. I argue that in the tradition of many French anthropologists and authors before her, Bessora should be seen as both a literary author and a social scientist. By handing the tools of anthropological analysis to characters of color in these novels, Bessora does not invalidate a social scientific way of viewing the world; rather, she universalizes the anthropological gaze. She combines postmodern and anthropological narrative techniques to critique the way that race is constructed in France; she exposes the ways in which Republican values work to reinforce nationalism and white supremacy, and fall short of their universalist ambitions.</p><p> Chapter four builds on the ideas established in chapter three by comparing Bessora's dissertation, "M&eacute;mories P&eacute;troli&egrave;res au Gabon," (2002) with her novel <i>Petroleum</i> (2004), on the same subject. As an author of Gabonese descent who was raised and educated primarily in Europe, Bessora offers a complex insider/outsider perspective on her father's country (a country that was also her home for ten years), its history, and its memories of colonization. Reading these two texts side by side reveals both the interdependency between literature and the social sciences in both Bessora's fiction and in the French literary scene more generally. She writes from a vexed position of privilege, for which she has not yet fully accounted. Bessora's own stance towards universalism, her post-national identity which ironically gathers up identitarian labels and categories, obfuscates a more fraught relationship to the national history of Gabon, and to French neo-colonialism there.</p><p>

Ethnic women in early twentieth-century America constituted a significant literary and political presence. Their gender politics were varied, according to the specifics of historical and cultural location. My dissertation demonstrates the heterogeneity of gender politics early in this century by detailing how ethnic women's fiction contests the political discourses of ethnic women. I use the multiplicity of issues in Native American, African American, and Jewish American women's texts to illustrate the importance of grounding gender in a particular historical moment. In addition, my study examines the ways in which ethnic women in the United States have used discourse to empower themselves. By reading fiction in relation to political history, I demonstrate how literary strategies of resistance are culturally constructed. An exploratory venture in method, this work develops a historically specific critical practice. Drawing on current feminist criticism as well as poststructuralist theory, I focus initially on the ways in which contemporary critical practices continue to obscure the political agendas in ethnic women's texts. The subsequent four chapters demonstrate how narrative contests rather than reflects history. History, like literature, is dynamic and conflicted; accordingly, I construct pluralistic histories in each chapter, detailing the debates over class, sexual, and ethnic politics within ethnic women's communities. I argue that novels appropriate and rewrite political discourses acting as interpreters, using history to legitimate particular politics. I argue, for instance, that Their Eyes Were Watching God employs the language of the black women's club movement and the "Classic Blues" to refute racist and classist sexual ideologies which position African American women as libidinous, while it simultaneously struggles to advocate sexual subjectivity for women. Drawing upon the writings of Jewish women labor organizers and social workers, as well as Orthodox teachings and the literature of the Haskalah movement, I suggest that Bread Givers challenges notions of femininity which were opposed to manual and wage labor. My final two chapters argue that Mourning Dove's Cogewea employs Native American women's writing from the turn-of-the-century Pan-Indian movement to counter assimilationist ideology and represent gender as a specific means of resisting cultural imperialism.

In an age compounded by diversity, this dissertation seeks a common ground among the multifarious experiences of America. It argues that the land, the physical and the metaphysical, the lived and the perceived space that is referential to all, constitutes a primeval experience--the imagination of America. If Anglo-Americans once envisioned a virgin land on which to build a New World Garden, ethnic groups have their founding myths of America: While the Navajo Indians perceive a "house made of dawn," Chicanos reclaim the mythic "heart of Aztlan" in the Southwest; and while Afro-Americans hail "home to Harlem," Chinese Americans "go-out-on-the-road" to the legendary Gold Mountain in California. Conceptually, the study employs Henry Nash Smith's (1950) critical notion of myth: "a poetic idea, a collective representation." While Smith historicizes the westward expansion of the "virgin land," Annette Kolodny (1984) provides a paradigm of middle-class white women taunting and questioning the male-centered "virgin land." Kolodny is important not only because she polarizes the male and female fantasies, but because, by exposing the woman as one category of "otherness," she relates womanhood to ethnicity. The study hence deconstructs the myth of virgin land by contesting the issues of ethnicity and gender in imagining America. It investigates the images of Aztlan, la Mestiza, Harlem, the "house made of dawn," and the Gold Mountain to surface the common ground of a mythic element in our imaginations of America. It emphasizes the ethnic woman's need to carve out the "land before her" in both racial and gender terms. This is done structurally by pairing a male and a female writer in each ethnic group: (1) N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko; (2) Rudolfo Anaya and Gloria Anzaldua; (3) Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston; (4) Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston. By comparing male and female writers and by juxtaposing multiethnic writers, this study transgresses sensibly and fluidly among Ethnic Studies, Women Studies, and American Studies. Mostly, it lands on a common ground to illuminate from various angles the lure of the land.

The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaking” and remaking of the English language in postcolonial literatures. Pidgins, oral vernaculars born in the colonial contact zone and developed outside institutional channels, compel our interest as linguistic realizations of a subaltern hybridity and as the most markedly “broken” varieties of English. Within Nigerian literature, representations of pidgin English play a variety of transgressive roles. In two specimens of Onitsha market literature, pidgin is spoken only by clownish chiefs, but in one of these, Ogali A. Ogali's 1956 Veronica My Daughter, pidgin also functions as an anti-language providing a critical perspective on the “big grammar” of standard English. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) pidgin is often associated with the seamy underside of life, while in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) it is the vehicle for a resistant counterknowledge. Finally, in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), “rotten English,” a mixed language strongly colored by pidgin, escapes the confines of quotation marks to become the language of narration. The second case study is of the work of Salman Rushdie, arguably the paradigmatic postcolonial author—a writer positioned between East and West, between the English language and the polylingualism of South Asia, and renowned for his inventive linguistic experimentation. Chapter 7 explores his short story “The Courter,” a story of linguistic and personal dislocation and transformation in which a mispronounced word brings about a new reality. Chapter 8 is an extended exploration of the languages in Midnight's Children and the translational magic of Saleem Sinai's “All-India Radio.” Chapter 9 examines ways in which Rushdie unsettles borders, redefining the boundaries of words and bringing languages into new relationships by means of such devices as the translingual pun. The concluding chapter briefly explores the implications of this postcolonial breaking of English for the novel and for the language of English literature.