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Depuis la fin des années 1990, la littérature québécoise pour la jeunesse aborde des thématiques délicates auparavant taboues, dont le suicide. Le traitement d’un tel sujet est grandement facilité par l’attention qu’accordent les auteurs à la forme de leur récit, ce que nous observons dans Une vie en éclats de Maryse Pelletier, Le long silence de Sylvie Desrosiers, Le parfum des filles de Camille Bouchard ainsi que Ma vie ne sait pas nager d’Élaine Turgeon. La quête des personnages, désormais plus englobante, est centrée sur le rapport à l’Autre, qui se transforme au cours du processus de deuil. Les protagonistes traversent en fait un long moment d’errance où ils n’ont plus de repères et tentent de fuir, jusqu’à ce que l’apparition d’un nouveau personnage qui comprend leur douleur les aide à établir ce nouveau rapport avec le défunt. La déconstruction formelle des oeuvres vient faire écho à la fragmentation vécue par les personnages, ce qui rend fort significatives l’attention portée à la temporalité ainsi que la multiplicité des narrateurs, voire l’hybridité générique au sein des récits. Les oeuvres semblent remettre en question certaines conventions de la littérature jeunesse afin de faire vivre au lecteur la confusion vécue par les protagonistes : le lecteur confronté à un texte d’apparence déconstruite doit ainsi effectuer un travail de reconstruction semblable à celui opéré par les personnages.

“Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora” examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, “Re-Writing the Canon,” I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys’s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre’s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a “writing back” to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, “Re-Storying the Past,” examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar’s recuperation of Algerian women’s resistance to French colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat’s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, “Re-Voicing Slavery,” I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, “Re-Membering Gender,” examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. / text

xi, 236 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Writers in the Caribbean, like writers throughout the postcolonial world, return to colonial texts to rewrite the myths that justified and maintained colonial control. Exemplary of a widespread, regional phenomenon that begins at mid-century, writers such as Aimé Césaire and George Lamming take up certain texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and recast them in their own image. Postcolonial literary theory reads this act of rewriting the canon as a political one that speaks back to power and often advocates for political and cultural independence. Towards the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Caribbean women writers begin a new wave of rewriting that continues in this tradition, but with certain differences, not least of which is a focused attention to gender and sexuality and to the literary legacies of romance. In the dissertation I consider a number of novels from throughout the region that rewrite the romance, including Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Maryse Condé's La migration des coeurs (1995), Mayra Santos-Febres's Nuestra señora de la noche (2006), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Romance, perhaps more than any other literary form, exerts an allegorical force that exceeds the story of individual characters. The symbolic weight of romance imagines the possibilities of a social order--a social order dependent on the sexual behavior of its citizens. By rewriting the romance, Caribbean women reconsider the sexual politics that have linked women with metaphorical constructions of the nation while at the same time detailing the extent to which transnational forces, including colonization, impact the representation of love and desire in literary texts. Although ultimately these novels refuse the generic requirements of the traditional resolution for romance (the so-called happy ending), they nonetheless gesture towards a reordering of community and a revised notion of kinship that recognizes the weight of both gendered and sexual identities in the Caribbean. / Committee in charge: Karen McPherson, Chairperson, Romance Languages; David Vazquez, Member, English; Tania Triana, Member, Romance Languages; Judith Raiskin, Outside Member, Womens and Gender Studies

El Caribe ha sido reconocido por considerarse una pluralidad de espacios que simultáneamente son solo uno. Contrario al contexto de su fragmentada geografía, su segregada historia colonial y su diversidad racial y lingüística, los intelectuales caribeños han establecido puentes de unidad cultural con la intención de configurar una identidad pan-caribeña. Por consiguiente, los ensayistas del siglo XX se enfrentan a la necesidad de examinar críticamente los factores que formulan sus respectivas identidades, en contraste con aquellas tradicionalmente impuestas bajo el discurso colonial y metropolitano. Desde el tercer cuarto del siglo, pensadores como Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), Fidel Castro (1926-), George Lamming (1927-), Kamau Brathwaite (1930-), Juan I. Jiménes-Grullón (1903-1983), Hubert Devonish (1953-), Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1931-2005), Arcadio Díaz Quiñones y Maryse Condé (1937-), entre otros, cuestionan el sistema colonial, los procesos étnicos y las propuestas lingüísticas, relacionándolos con conceptos tales como la hibridez, el sincretismo, la transculturación y la heterogeneidad. Estas teorías culturales, de alguna manera, reescriben ideas antecedentes en reacción a discursos hegemónicos previos como consecuencia de los cambios políticos que trajeron las guerras de independencia en América Latina durante el siglo XIX. En mi tesis demuestro que estos planteamientos delinean un mapa de modelos epistemológicos de la cultura del Caribe. Para indicar que estas propuestas constituyen metáforas que muestran una consciencia cultural, las proposiciones acerca de la cultura de Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) y Hayden White (1928-) sirven como marco teórico apropiado. Así, a través de las representaciones literarias ensayísticas de los modelos metafóricos de la cultura caribeña, este trabajo redefine algunos aspectos importantes de la identidad cultural vis a vis la mirada parcial que usualmente se utiliza para estudiar el archipiélago antillano. Igualmente, incluso aunque estos modelos proponen una representación metafórica de la cultura pan-caribeña, la construcción de un modelo del Caribe puede ser utilizado en otras regiones y espacios culturales en el contexto de la globalización, ya que elucida una gnoseología cultural que sirve para describir distintas realidades globales.

This study analyzes the experience of alienation from family and culture as portrayed in the personal narratives of francophone women. The authors appearing in this study are Assia Djebar and Marie Cardinal, from Algeria, Mariama Bâ and Ken Bugul, from Senegal, Marguerite Duras and Kim Lefèvre, from Vietnam, Calixthe Beyala, from Cameroon, Gabrielle Roy, from Canada, and Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe. Alienation is deconstructed into the domains of blood, money, land, religion, education and history. The authors’ experiences of alienation in each domain are classified according to severity and cultural normativity. The study seeks to determine the manner in which alienation manifests in each domain, and to identify factors which aid or hinder recovery. Alienation in the domain of blood occurs as a result of warfare, illness, racism, ancestral trauma, and the rites of passage of menarche, loss of virginity, and menopause. Money-related alienation is linked to endemic classism, often caused by colonial influence. The authors experienced varying degrees of economic vulnerability to men, depending upon cultural and familial norms. Colonialism, warfare and environmental depending upon cultural and familial norms. Colonialism, warfare and environmental degradation all contribute to alienation in the domain of land. Women were found to be more susceptible to alienation in the domain of religion due to patriarchal religious constructs. In the domain of education, it was found that some alienation is inevitable for all students. Despite its inherent drawbacks, education provides tools for empowerment which are crucial for overcoming alienation. Alienation in the domain of history was found to hinder recovery due to infiltration of past trauma into the present, while empowerment in this domain fosters optimism and future-oriented thinking. Each domain offers opportunities for empowerment, and it is necessary to work within the domains to create a safe haven for recovery. Eight of the nine authors experienced at least a partial recovery from alienation. This was accomplished via cathartic release of negative emotions. Catharsis is achieved by shedding tears, talking, or writing about the negative experiences. The personal narrative was found to be especially helpful in promoting healing both for the author and the reading audience. / Classics and World Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (French)