Certain phenomena in contemporary fiction reveal the current stage of the epic novel's evolution. If a major impulse of the modern novel has been the attempt to deal with the wide-scale social and political dimensions of existence, a rival impulse has been the efforts of writers to conduct deeply personal investigation. In the second half of this century, a number of writers on both sides of the Atlantic--inviting, through large-scale theme and complex structure, epic consideration for their work--have sought, with resultant experimentation in form, to reconcile these impulses by combining accounts of personal experience with the examination of contemporary affairs Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Norman Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam? are particularly useful in the examination of radical shifts and fusions of narrative voice symptomatic of the interpenetrations of public and private worlds. The Golden Notebook's six distinct texts (comprising twenty-two sequences) plus additional editorial comment, reflect not only the fragmentation of Anna Wulf, principal character and narrator, but the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world. This condition is matched by continual undercutting of successive versions of 'the real' throughout the novel. This undercutting, a kind of Brechtian epic/dialectical technique for detachment, gives way to the penultimate section of the novel, where characters and voices fuse and admit the author into the condition of her characters and narrative. The narrative of Why Are We In Vietnam? simultaneously presents itself as the recollection by a Dallas youth of a hunting trip to Alaska two years before his current farewell dinner as he leaves for Vietnam, and as the improvisational cosmic broadcast to a waiting national audience. As these two narrative positions are themselves challenged by other possible narrative identities, first and third person postures interconnect as the author shares his narrators' condition. Thus Lessing, who sets out to render not merely a particular female sensibility but the political temper of the mid-twentieth century, and Mailer, who attempts to arrive at a trope for the vertiginous contemporary American experience, achieve ways to participate in the conditions and situations of their nominally separate representative twentieth-century heroes / acase@tulane.edu

Pierre Grenaud's apparent conclusion in his chapter 'Que penser de l'Ecole nord-africaine des lettres?' is that no significant literary community which could be classified as such existed in the French Algeria of the 1930s and 1940s. His analysis seems to indicate that during that era the contributions made to the literary world by French Algerian writers constituted only individual efforts intended to glorify France. It can be inferred from this that the immediate influences of the Algerian environment on the pied-noir writer counted for little in either the conception of his art or his identity as a writer The object of this thesis is to re-address the question of the literary significance of colonial French Algeria, as related to the literary group known as the Ecole d'Alger. In 1936 this group formed around the editor Edmond Charlot and the writer Albert Camus, and in 1945 was considered by the French writer and critic Gabriel Audisio to constitute a literary school. Associated with this school are the four writers of interest in this thesis: Emmanuel Robles, Jean Pelegri, Jules Roy, and Albert Camus This thesis demonstrates that the Ecole d'Alger holds a notable place in recent French literary history. An examination of the writers' nostalgic literature shows their identities as both French Algerians and French Algerian writers, and serves to affirm the existence of the Ecole d'Alger The introduction to the thesis addresses the broad issue of post-independence nostalgia for Algeria. Chapter one contains a brief history of colonial French Algeria and the Algerian War. Chapter two is an overview of French Algeria's non-indigenous literary history prior to the 1930s. Chapter three presents the social climate that produced the Ecole d'Alger, while chapter four presents the Ecole d'Alger in detail. Four subsequent chapters treating the writers' nostalgic literature on Algeria analyze autobiographical novels and memoirs. In conclusion it is seen that the role and image of Algeria in all of these works affirm the writers' love for, and identification with, Algeria, and affirm their status as members of a literary community distinctive in the history of French Algeria / acase@tulane.edu

A questionnaire survey of the 385 Indiana high schools was conducted to determine how many of a selected list of 150 titles of Black literature the schools owned and the factors that appeared to be related to the acquisition of that number of titles.The 72 per cent response was analyzed to determine whether the following were related to the size of the Afro-American collections concerning the library--the size of the total book collection, the money available for purchase of books and periodicals, the person making the final decision about buying books, and the existence of a written book selection policy; concerning the school-the total student enrollment, the percentage of Black students, the size of the community the school serves, and the existence of units or courses in Black studies; concerning the librarian-the age, sex, education, and experience of the librarian.

Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Michigan University, 2009. / Bibliography: leaves 43-45.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Bonnie Braendlin, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 2, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

"Displaced Memory: Oscar Micheaux, Carlos Bulosan, and the Process of U.S. Decolonization," uses new applications for existing colonial and postcolonial theories in order to explain common incongruities in ethnic minority autobiographies in early twentieth-century America. Using Carlos Bulosan (1914-1956) and Oscar Micheaux's (1894-1951) "fictional autobiographies" as case studies, I argue that the seemingly contradictory coexistence of assimilationist and subversive narratives can be explained when understood as textual representations of the process of decolonization. Reading these narrators as postcolonial subjects, however, would require both a radical rethinking of colonial and postcolonial theory and careful revaluation of early American mythology. While recognizing the United States as a former (or neo-) colonial power poses no insuperable problem for scholars in Philippine American studies, analyzing other disenfranchised ethnic communities in terms of a U.S. colonial context is more problematic. My project addresses precisely this problem: part one begins with the Philippine context and asks why even this overt example of colonization remains unacknowledged within U.S. cultural memory. The answer to this question is grounded in the literary, political and ideological national foundations emergent during nascent U.S. development. In the second part of my project, I stress the necessity of comparing multi-ethnic experiences within parallel historical trajectories, addressing questions about how a U.S. postcolonial theory would become complicated when applied to slavery and its aftermath. I argue that the unique position of displaced colonials occupied by African slaves and the colonial memory instilled in their offspring suggest the applicability of postcolonial theory to the African American community. Questions of U.S. postcoloniality are invariably tethered to multiple perspectives from early literature, from captivity to emancipation and reconstruction. Thus, understanding the ways in which African Americans have been colonized is important not only for re-reading African American literature like that of Micheaux, but for revising American ideological holdovers from the seventeenth century to the present. Read together within the postcolonial context, Bulosan's and Micheaux's views on nation, race, masculinity and women take on new significance.

This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.

This study proposes that Leila Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul, two widely-read contemporary novelists, intuitively understand Albert Camus' idea of revolt, using it to legitimate their non-essentialized, transcultural models of individual and collective identity. This dissertation views an Algerian teenager's rendezvous with Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul in Les Carnets de Sherazade as a magical portal through which Leila Sebbar allows us to see her fiction as a subversion and a reappropriation of the liberal philosophical principles underlying V. S. Naipaul's novels and travel journals. Although they interpret the increasing visibility of cultural, racial, and religious fundamentalisms in Western and non-Western societies as signs of a gathering nihilistic storm, neither Sebbar nor Naipaul believe that these epistemologically bounded ideologies of revolt are invincible. Instead, both depict rebellion, an epistemologically open-ended and altruistic form of revolt, as the exclusive means through which post-colonials across the globe can experience individual and communal wholeness---liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace---amidst the eponymous mixing of different peoples and truths in the late twentieth century. Chapter One explores the concepts of rebellion and nihilism in Albert Camus' The Rebel and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. It also investigates the uncanny philosophical and thematic parallels in Leila Sebbar's and V. S. Naipaul's works. Chapter Two analyzes the theme of the returned gaze in Sebbar's Sherazade and Le Fou de Sherazade. It shows how Sherazade, Sebbar's title character, resists Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy in a rebellious manner. The Algerian teenager challenges the "master's" desire for supremacy without denying his or her dignity. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between Sebbar's fiction and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, her correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston. It demonstrates that Sebbar's formulation of exile as a hybrid, contingent identitarian space in Lettres parisiennes is coterminous with Camus' notion of rebellion. Chapter Four is a detailed study of Sherazade's encounter with V. S. Naipaul in southwestern France in Les Carnets de Sherazade. Using Anne Donadey's model of mimicry, it claims that Sebbar subverts the British-Caribbean writer's representations of the ex-colonized's subjectivity and revalidates his underlying faith in rebellion.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University. / Bibliography: leaves 69-70. Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center