Simone Schwarz-Bart (1938-) and Albertine Sarrazin (1937-1967) offer an example of the cultural diversity that French Literature provides to the readers. Two of Albertine Sarrazin's novels, L'Astragale and La Cavale, were published in 1965; the third one La Traversiere in 1966. Simone Schwarz-Bart first published a novel, Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, in 1967, in collaboration with Andre Schwarz-Bart. In 1972, she published by herself Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle and in 1979 Ti Jean L'Horizon. / As a young teenager, life in a rigid family felt too hard and too stifling for Albertine Sarrazin and she fled away at the age of fifteen. For the young girls and Ti Jean, in Schwarz-Bart's novels, life in the West Indies presented difficult situations from which they too wanted to escape. The two women writers explore the technics that the creative imagination summons up to take the heros away from these stressful situations. Dreams, meditations, travels or changes of locations, temporary madness are common themes studied according to the theories of Carl Jung in the six novels cited above. / In order to become a better person and get away from their unhappy situations, the characters had to go deep inside themselves to get to know their innerself. Through this universal process of search for happiness and a better way of living, despite their differences, they reach a common ground that allows the reader to identify with their ordeals, their reactions. We recognize the characters as being of the universal human family. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3210. / Major Professor: Victor Carrabino. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Rosario Ferre's literary works follow Adrienne Rich's feminist theory of writing as re-vision. According to Rich, a literary re-vision requires the woman writer and/or critic to re-vise and challenge the nature of all patriarchal structures that have oppressed women throughout the centuries. This re-visionist task has been attempted by Ferre in her literary works, where she exposes the misogyny of the patriarchal ideology embedded in and supported by cultural and social myths. / Rosario Ferre achieves her re-vision of the patriarchal ideology and eternal feminine myth through both her role as a writer and her role as a feminist literary critic. As a feminist literary critic, Ferre carries out this task through different approaches. One approach is the execution of a historical and critical re-vision of the lives and works of several women in her collection of essays, entitled Sitio a Eros. A second approach is the writing of (auto)critical literary reviews, collected in El coloquio de las perras, in order to question the literary canon and image of women in masculine literary texts. As a fiction writer, Ferre achieves her feminist re-vision of the patriarchal ideology and the eternal feminine myth by exposing and challenging them in the short stories and narrative poems from Papeles de Pandora and in her novelette "Maldito amor" or by the re-writing of fairy-tales from a feminist-feminine perspective, offering new feminine and masculine paradigms in her collection of children's stories, "Cuentos maravillosos." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-02, Section: A, page: 0567. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

What has been termed as a post-Negritude era has seen many Caribbean writers trying to forge an autonomous identity that would adequately articulate the multifaceted nature of the Caribbean subject This study will attempt to show that Maryse Conde is interested in expanding and (re)-negotiating the parameters used to define Caribbean identity formation. Conde intentionally blurs the lines that have helped maintain traditional tropes and oppositions that limit acceptable definitions of Caribbean identity. Her work resists closure and draws on the amalgam of cultures that makes the Caribbean propitious to multiple identity formation In the first chapter, I will show how Conde's attempts to relocate the matrix of Caribbean identity from Africa to the Antilles highlight the cultural conflicts at work within Caribbean societies. The second chapter revolves around the specificity of gender in assessing identity and reflects the complex role of women in determining social structure. The third chapter will show that, even though Conde is concerned with the question of race as a polemic debate, she seldom problematizes it as an orthodox black/white dichotomy. Her criticism suggests that race is a cultural construct and underscores the need for dealing with individual personalities rather than physical traits. The fourth chapter looks at the dynamic process of creolization and the quest for authenticity through language and stylistic expression Paradoxically, even as Conde repositions the Caribbean identity as a product of multiple cultural intersections, her representation of cultural plurality leads inexorably back to the Antilles as the primary source of inspiration, drawing from it, claiming it, and above all, accepting it as one's own / acase@tulane.edu

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 31-09, Section: A, page: 4769. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1970.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

I theorize about cultural hybridity; specifically, I theorize about transcultural rhetorics to consider the positive capabilities those rhetorics encourage in students within composition classrooms. People in our society frequently ignore and devalue hybridity and multiplicity, which are facts in our culture. Therefore, minority students, who are more likely to display transcultural elements in their rhetorics, also face devaluation of their use of language. People associate minority members of society with poor language use because their rhetorics "differ" from the USAmerican standard. This contributes to dismissal of transcultural rhetorics in classroom settings. Teaching standard uses of language negates other possible language strategies. Yet transcultural rhetorics provide a means to encourage students to value their potential and contributions to the communities with which they engage. I argue that teaching language and writing skills should use multiple approaches and encourage students' abilities to negotiate multiple discourse communities. Allowing people to move and to fit into more than one or two cultures will enhance success and survival in both dominant and non-dominant cultural groups. I use discussions by and about women-of-color to illustrate some of the real and significant issues revolving hybridity and acculturation/assimilation practices. Doing so helps to illustrate the psychological, social, and other political issues surrounding hybrid-USAmericans as they engage with education. While an increasing number of writers and teachers value and use rhetorics that represent multiplicity, teachers and writers need to understand and address the political and psychological processes hybrid people experience. The fact that many teachers encourage the kinds of writing research that I advocate does not negate the need for broader use of transcultural rhetorics. I present various ways that teachers can teach and encourage transcultural rhetorics within the dissertation. Although transcultural rhetorics can work for all teachers and all students, I focus on Latina writers because they frequently need greater understanding of their literate foremothers and the value of their Latina skills in USAmerican education. The work that follows urges teachers of composition and their students to use the transcultural rhetorics as one of many possible ways of transforming the world of academia and beyond.

Esta tesis analiza la identidad y la estructura narrativa en las obras de dos escritores hispanos, Reinaldo Arenas y Esther Tusquets, quienes escriben al borde de la transicion entre una vision del mundo moderna a la postmoderna. Arguyo que las obras de estos dos autores cuestionan los procesos de la construccion de la identidad desde la perspectiva de los que son marginalizados por este proceso. Para hacer este analisis, estudio el debate entre el modernismo/postmodernismo dentro del mundo hispano y como este dialogo puede iluminar nuestra interpretacion de las complejidades y los constantes tematicos que presentan estos dos autores. De la misma manera, analizo como estos autores incluyen este debate dentro de su presentacion de la dinamica del desarrollo humano. Para tales propositos, analizare El amor es un juego solitario (1978), El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1979), Varada tras el ultimo naufragio (1980) de Esther Tusquets y El mundo alucinante (1968) de Reinaldo Arenas. En este analisis se consideraran las relaciones tanto socio-historicas como artisticas que existen entre Modernidad y Postmodernidad y la forma en que estas caracteristicas se presentan en los textos analizados. Se plantea que la verdadera relacion entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad no es una de superacion sino de dialogo, la postmodernidad es la problematizacion de la modernizacion. Los conceptos modernos de la Ilustracion son cuestionados por ser inadecuados para describir las situaciones actuales. Es este escepticismo profundo hacia todos los aspectos de la vida lo que define al postmodernismo. Se cree que la modernidad no ha alcanzado sus metas por ser imposibles. La narrativa de Esther Tusquets y la de Reinaldo Arenas presentan este escepticismo profundo con un estilo en que predominan las figuras repetitivas, el erotismo, el retorno, el tiempo circular, el mar y la muerte, tanto como los pre-textos literarios, los cuales se deconstruyen para despues reconstruirse dentro de la re-creacion de una identidad propia a traves de las relaciones sexuales y la muerte. Asi se cuestionan las fronteras entre el sexo y el genero en el establecimiento de la identidad, reinterpretando y reescribiendo el pasado.

The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904--1980) and painter Wifredo Lam (1902--1982) draw upon Surrealism in their representations of an Afro-Cuban religiosity in their early Negrista works. Through a comparison of Carpentier's ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933) and "Historia de lunas" (1933) with a selection of Lam's works of the 1940's---"The Jungle" (1942), "The Eternal Presence" (1945), "The Wedding" (1947), and "The Visitor" (1950)---this analysis uncovers how both writer and artist use collage and a surrealist mood in representing certain aspects of Afro-Cuban religiosity, specifically Abacua ceremonial incantations, Itutu, and trance or possession. This thesis also attempts to unmask the limitations of these techniques as a representational paradigm in limning the Afro-Cuban.

<p> Le fran&ccedil;ais repr&eacute;sente une langue dominante au Qu&eacute;bec et aux Antilles. Cependant, il n'arrive pas toujours &agrave; exprimer les r&eacute;alit&eacute;s de ces peuples. Alors, pour rendre compte des valeurs ch&egrave;res aux populations locales, les auteurs qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et antillais ont recours &agrave; l'int&eacute;gration du joual et du cr&eacute;ole dans leurs textes respectifs. Etant donn&eacute; que ces langues sont plus souvent utilis&eacute;es par les couches d&eacute;favoris&eacute;es, les milieux populaires offrent, du coup, un cadre id&eacute;al pour un tel proc&eacute;d&eacute;. Il s'agit, dans cette &eacute;tude, de proc&eacute;der par une analyse sociolinguistique, sociohistorique et socioculturelle du joual et du cr&eacute;ole, en partant des espaces choisis, en l'occurrence le Qu&eacute;bec et les Antilles. Lesdits espaces partagent des r&eacute;alit&eacute;s semblables quant &agrave; l'utilisation de la langue comme moyen de d&eacute;fense et de revendication culturelle et identitaire. En outre, &eacute;tant donn&eacute; que le joual et le cr&eacute;ole sont deux langues orales, il se pose la question de la transcription de l'oral &agrave; l'&eacute;crit, ses m&eacute;canismes et ses fondements. Entendu que les &eacute;crivains Qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et Antillais ont un rapport &eacute;troit avec la langue, comment l'utilisent-ils pour affirmer leur identit&eacute; ? Devant les nombreux d&eacute;fis &agrave; relever, notamment la pr&eacute;servation du fran&ccedil;ais au Qu&eacute;bec et l'affirmation d'une identit&eacute; communautaire, ainsi que la cr&eacute;olisation des Antilles, les &eacute;crivains ont recours &agrave; des techniques particuli&egrave;res qu'il convient de d&eacute;couvrir, dans un contexte de diversit&eacute; et d'affirmation identitaire. Aujourd'hui, l'&eacute;volution des pratiques langagi&egrave;res am&egrave;ne les auteurs et leurs lecteurs &agrave; parler l'anglais et le cr&eacute;ole car d&eacute;sormais, la mixit&eacute; des langues est un facteur &agrave; consid&eacute;rer dans l'affirmation de l'identit&eacute; des Qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et des Antillais.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1690. Adviser: Stanley O. Ikenberry. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-371) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.