Notre travail propose un double état de lieu tout en cherchant à placer le roman algérien dans le champ critique théorique. Il s’agit de démontrer comment la qualification du roman algérien comme [francophone] et/ou [postcolonial] impose des lectures-analyses qui échappent à la littérarité du texte, qui lui imposent des codes d’interprétation biaisés et ne permettent pas démontrer la poétique et l’esthétique des textes. Pour cela, il s’agira de dé-lire la critique théorique du roman algérien contemporain, afin de sortir des apories, des lieux communs et des réflexions enjointes à ce dernier qui souvent sont passéistes et datés. Il s’agira de faire l’état des lieux du roman algérien dans un double mouvement, l’état des lieux de ses œuvres et de ses lectures. Le dernier mouvement se veut réflexion clairement libre et subjective qui sera conclusion de notre proposition assumée d’une nouvelle conceptualisation de la production littéraire. L’algérianité littéraire comme nouvelle approche du roman algérien contemporain propose un roman qui ne s’attache plus à faire plaisir à son lecteur en lui racontant ce qu’il connait déjà ou à flatter son égo en lui laissant une béquille pour suivre un récit…L’algérianité littéraire serait une réflexion idéale de l’auteur avec son livre, avec son texte et ses personnages. Le roman algérien contemporain se meut entre une fabula et une utopie, entre mémoire et silence. Et surtout, il est ce qu’il reste à écrire / Our work offers a double state of place while seeking to place the Algerian novel in the field of critical theory. This is to demonstrate how the qualification of the Algerian as novel [francophone] and/or [postcolonial] imposes readings-analyses that are beyond the literacy of the text, which impose biased interpretations codes and do not demonstrate the poetics and aesthetics of the texts. To do this, it will “dé-lire” theory of the contemporary Algerian novel criticism, in order to get out of the aporias, commonplaces and required latter reflections which are often outdated and dated. The second movement will be reading. It’s to the state of affairs of the Algerian novel in a double movement, the state of affairs of his works and his readings. The last movement is clearly free and subjective reflection that will be conclusion of our proposal assumed of a new conceptualization of literary production. The contemporary literary algerianity as a new approach to the Algerian novel offers a novel which attaches no more to please the reader by telling him what he already knows or to flatter his ego leaving it a crutch to follow a story… The literary algerianite would be a perfect reflection of the author with his book, with its text and its characters. The contemporary Algerian novel moves between fabula and utopia, between memory and silence. And above all, it is what’s left to write

Erika Duncan has commented that ‘because of the intangible sentimental quality of Mary Webb’s special genius, there has been a general reluctance to acknowledge her as a major writer.’ This thesis argues against such dismissive approaches to Webb and makes a case for a re-evaluation of Webb as an unusual writer of pantheist spirituality and nature mysticism and one who can now be appreciated for the ecopoetics of her work. Within this framework the study charts the stylistic qualities of her writing and its mutative shifts through a chronological examination of her work which also includes a biographical account of her life and the major influences which shaped her ideas and writing. Aspects of inter-textuality with other writers will be considered throughout and will underscore the value of Webb’s work whilst emphasising the unique and beautiful quality of her voice. The first chapter, ‘Early Responses’, considers her formative experiences and her earliest essays and poems. ‘Mythological Motifs’ then reviews the mythopoeic nature of Webb’s first two novels and her use of myth in furthering her themes. The ensuing chapter, ‘Preceptive Perception’, evaluates both the didacticism in authorial style and the pertinence of Webb’s vision which are features of her third book. Chapter Four discusses her final two completed volumes as ‘A Dyad’ for they represent, respectively, her weakest and her finest writing. The final chapter, ‘A Medieval Message’, focuses on Webb’s last, incomplete, work, analysing its experimental qualities and its potential to reveal Webb’s last efforts to leave a parting missive for her readers before her death. Central critical concepts are that: in the development of Webb’s religious views from conventional Christianity to pantheism she anticipated modern feminist spirituality; and, in her insistence upon the supreme value of nature and its continual risk from human exploitation in connection with the oppression of women and their need for spiritual freedom, Webb is an unrecognised ecofeminist who was reflecting early twentieth-century issues. In addition, I attempt to discover reasons for Webb’s neglect and positively propose a place for her in literary studies. A Conclusion will summarise the main arguments and indicate possible further avenues of research.

La musique est art du temps, puisque celui-ci lui donne sa matière. Elle le stylise et recrée les effets de son déroulement circonscrits dans une durée close. Pourtant, les représentations associent fréquemment l’art des sons à une tentative d’oubli voire de négation de l’écoulement temporel. Elles s’inscrivent alors dans une perspective idéaliste qui fait de la musique une utopie consolante, un baume apaisant sur un sujet en proie aux déchirements intérieurs et à la rupture avec le monde – ainsi que l’on peut le lire chez Schopenhauer et Proust à sa suite ou, plus tard, chez Lévi-Strauss. Cette étude a pour but d’examiner le devenir de cette conception du temps musical à l’aune de trois romans contemporains qui semblent l’illustrer mais aussi la mettre en procès : Melodien, de l’allemand Helmut Krausser (1993), Prajs, du russe Léonid Guirchovitch (1998), et The Time of Our Singing, de l’américain Richard Powers (2003). Certains éléments du langage musical, reposant essentiellement sur les principes de polyphonie et d’organicité, dessinent ainsi les contours d’un modèle esthétique (nommé ici « idéal éternitaire ») que ces trois auteurs, marqués par la tentation « compositionnelle », mettent à l’épreuve des transpositions intersémiotiques. L’analyse se porte ensuite sur ce que Paul Ricœur définit comme l’« expérience temporelle fictive », afin de voir comment le rêve d’abolition du temps associé à un sujet musical affecte à la fois le temps intime des personnages et les vastes chronosophies du temps collectif. L’idéal éternitaire, enfin, est à son tour plongé dans le temps : discrédité par les faillites historiques du XXe siècle, il se pense désormais à l’heure postmoderne, sommé de désigner ironiquement sa part anachronique et de confronter la Kultur germanique dont il est issu à la diversité des modèles musicaux. / Music is an art of time, since it gives it its matter. It gives it style and recreates the effects of its process confined in a closed period. However, representations commonly associate the art of sound with an attempt to neglect or even to deny the temporal flow. Accordingly, they fit into an idealistic perspective that makes music a consoling utopia, a soothing balm on a subject beset by internal rifts and rupture with the world – as can be seen in Schopenhauer and Proust after him or, later, in Levi-Strauss. This study aims to examine the future of this conception of musical time in the light of three contemporary novels that seem to illustrate it but also challenge it: Melodien (1993), by the German writer Helmut Krausser, Prajs (1998), the work of Leonid Guirchovitch, a Russian writer, and The Time of Our Singing (2003), by the American novelist Richard Powers (2003). Some elements of the musical language, based primarily on the principles of polyphony and organicity, delineate an aesthetic model (here called “ideal éternitaire”) that these three authors, marked by “compositional” temptation, challenge through intersemiotic transpositions. The analysis then turns into what Paul Ricœur defines as the “fictive temporal experience” to see how the dream of abolishing time associated with a musical subject affects both the intimate time of characters and vast chronosophies of the collective time. Finally the “ideal éternitaire” is in turn immersed in time: discredited by the historical bankruptcies of the twentieth century, it now looks upon itself in the light of postmodern times, ironically bound to refer to its anachronistic share and to confront the German Kultur it comes from with the diversity of musical styles.

Recent years have seen a surge of scholarship that foregrounds the relationship between the novel and the nation. The postcolonial condition of much of the Arab world has made the Arabic novel a compelling case. For historical reasons the focus has tended to be on the literary production of North Africa, the Levant and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. This thesis aims to redress the balance while interrogating certain assumptions about this relationship. Its main contention is that the early Saudi novel, as a unique case study, complicates traditional categorisations of the novel in Arabic, either in terms of a set of discrete, national traditions or as a monolithic, regional tradition, i.e. ‘the Arabic novel’. I argue that the ‘Saudi’ novel and its canonisation reflect, and were shaped by, the inherent ambivalence of the nation space and Arab discourses of national identity. This ambivalence gives rise to a third or liminal space of literary production. The thesis revolves around two axes. Firstly, it traces the emergence of the novel in Hijaz, from the 1930s through to the late 1950s. Although the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932, for a long time Hijaz retained a sense of its own distinct identity, countering the dominant Najdi-Wahhabi narrative. The close reading of selected texts explores how they express both a strong sense of Hijazi identity and a deep ambivalence towards ‘the Saudi nation’. The salience of ‘the woman question’ in Arab nationalist discourses makes gender a key consideration. The territorialising impulse present in much men’s fiction is shown to be absent from the Saudi women’s novel that emerged between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. Aside from exemplifying the genderedness of nation, this contributes to an explanation of the marginalisation of Saudi women’s novels from the canon. Secondly, the issue of novel and nation is linked to the critical discourse on the Saudi novel and its canonisation. Through an analysis of the literary articles that appeared in the pages of Hijaz’s early press, I trace the origins of a nationalist, ideological concept of the novel and its function that privileges the canonical realist novel for its mimetic representation of the writer’s national social reality. The result of this is that histories of the Saudi novel often present a teleology that is unable to adequately explain its construction or account for its liminality. The thesis offers a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic relationship between the novel and identity, as well as the novel’s construction in the Arabic context.

This practice-led thesis situates the experimental novella <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> within the context of interdisciplinary approaches to experimentation which cross the arts, humanities, literature and sciences. The novella and thesis develop a queer avant-garde poetics and writing methodology that I have called transliteracy. Transliteracy builds on my situated and embodied writing practice as a queer identified novelist and nonnative English speaker. I have mobilised the perceived 'otherness' of English to produce narratively and linguistically experimental prose fictions (Waidner, 2010, 2011). Transliteracy develops this practice by sharing agency (the capacity to influence the narrative) across assemblages of human and nonhuman, fictional and real, material and semiotic 'actors', to use the philosopher of science Bruno Latour's (1987, 1999) term for participants in action and process. Transliteracy has allowed me to subvert normative versions of authorship, intentionality, causality, and process in <i>Gaudy Bauble</i>, and to produce a radically subverted version of a plot that is intelligible and captivating to the reader. <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> inaugurates a genre I have called agential realist fiction, which is original in its genre-bending, gender-bending, interdisciplinary and queer avant-garde orientation. The practice was further shaped according to a generative constraint, which dictated that the most marginal actors on and beyond the page were made relevant for the plot. This conceptual apparatus is also reflected in the novella's narrative as a 'not quite' detective story: <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages what happens if previously inconsequential actors are allowed to become effectual, rather than actions located within a conventional protagonist. Enacting an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" (Foucault, 1980, p. 81) in fiction, <i>Gaudy Bauble</i> stages a landscape of reversed power relations, a locally subverted surface of emergence in fiction, where radically nonnormative phenomena and imaginaries can come into being. The thesis connects transliteracy to a wider political LGBTQI+ project and agenda.

This thesis deals with an italian writer Luigi Pirandello and with one of his most famous novel: Il fu Mattia Pascal. The main aim is to find the examples of Pirandellos humour in this novel and to prove, that the novel is rightly called one of his first humour compositions. At the beginning of the thesis I introduce the writer and his works generally. Than I focus on his essay LUmorismo, which is important for analysis of the novel. In this essay Pirandello summarized the concept of his conception of humour. On the basis of the essay I analyse the novel.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo investigar as características que o romance adquire em Portugal e em Angola ao assumir um discurso pós-colonial. Em virtude das diferentes posições ocupadas pelos dois países durante a colonização, as representações romanescas desse processo acabam sendo também distintas, enfatizando relações de identidade e de diferença no diálogo entre as obras. No método de análise abordado, unem-se então os pressupostos da teoria da literatura aos da análise cultural. Dessa forma, os textos literários são lidos a partir dos mecanismos estético-ideológicos que utilizam para construir as suas representações das relações coloniais. Para isso, os estudos de teóricos e críticos pós-coloniais como Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ana Mafalda Leite, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro e Jane Tutikian, além das contribuições de Jacques Derrida acerca da filosofia da linguagem, são de fundamental importância. De uma maneira mais específica, os romances são analisados em pares (sempre um português e um angolano) que buscam representar três momentos distintos da história da colonização portuguesa em territórios africanos: o período colonial; o período das guerras de libertação, nas décadas de 1960 e início de 1970; e, por fim, o momento imediatamente posterior à independência, chamado de período de descolonização. Para o primeiro momento, o estudo é composto a partir das obras Partes de África, de Helder Macedo, e Nosso musseque, de Luandino Vieira. Para o segundo, A costa dos murmúrios, de Lídia Jorge, e Mayombe, de Pepetela. Por fim, para o terceiro momento, As naus, de Lobo Antunes, e Estação das chuvas, de José Eduardo Agualusa. Como resultado, o entrecruzamento de mecanismos estético-ideológicos semelhantes e diferentes nos romances analisados evidencia o fato de que esse gênero alimenta-se da alteridade para constituir um discurso pós-colonial. Assim, percebe-se a existência de um sistema pós-colonial em língua portuguesa que vai além do nacional. Essa rede de textos constitui uma narrativa polifônica da colonização, visto que preserva as devidas tensões não só na forma de representação romanesca, mas também nas variações do discurso assumido, inviabilizando tomar seu conjunto de maneira homogeneizante. / This work intends to investigate the characteristics the novel acquires in Portugal and in Angola by adopting a postcolonial discourse. In view of the different positions of both countries during colonization, novelistic representations of this process become eventually distinct, with emphasis on the relations of identity and difference in the dialogues among works. Literary theory’s presuppositions are then associated with cultural analysis’ postulations in the present methodological approach. Literary texts are thus and so read from the aesthetic and ideological mechanisms which they employ in order to construct their representations of colonial relations. In order to accomplish that, the studies of postcolonial theoreticians and critics such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ana Mafalda Leite, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Jane Tutikian, as well as the contributions of Jacques Derrida on language philosophy, are of utmost importance. Specifically, novels will be analyzed in pairs (invariably a Portuguese work and an Angolan one) which pursue the representation of three different moments of the history of Portuguese colonization in African territories: the colonial period; the liberation wars period, set in the 1960’s and the beginning of the 1970’s; and, at last, the moment immediately after the independence, known as the decolonization period. Throughout the first moment, the study comprehends the works of Partes de África, by Helder Macedo, and Nosso musseque, by Luandino Vieira. During the second part, A costa dos murmúrios, by Lídia Jorge, and Mayombe, by Pepetela. Finally, in the third moment, As naus, by Lobo Antunes, and Estação das chuvas, by José Eduardo Agualusa. As a result, the intertwining of similar and different aesthetic and ideological mechanisms in these novels highlight the fact that this genre feeds on otherness to form a postcolonial discourse. Therefore, the existence of a postcolonial system in Portuguese language that goes beyond the national is perceivable. This web of texts constitutes a polyphonic narrative of colonization, seeing it preserves the due tensions not only in its novelistic representation, but also in the variations of the discourse at play, turning unviable to take its ensemble in a homogenizing way.

This diploma thesis deals with the problem of identity in the novel by contemporary Czech writer Pavel Brycz The Long Lost Glory of the Patriarchy. It emerges from the concept of identity as a process of understanding one's self, the meaning of one's life, one's awareness of his place in an individual image of the world. Based on analysis of characters we try to show how Pavel Brycz portrays various aspects of identity (national, personal, social, professional, gender). Structurally, the thesis is divided into two parts: the first one is devoted to the basic characteristics of identity and represents the generalization of various concepts of identity from the point of view of philosophy, psychology, sociology and literary theory; the second part deals with the analysis of the characters of Brycz's novel The Long Lost Glory of the Patriarchy, which shows that each character carries a certain distinctive identity.

This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism's narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals' lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers' reconfigurations of forms--including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography--furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms--including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction--to reveal that non-canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller's conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors' various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd's assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics' engagements with conventional genres' narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood.

My intellectual interests span the Atlantic and are anchored in early modern narrative. Balancing original research, literary analysis and humanist literary criticism, my dissertation, “The Conundrums of Narrative: Cervantes in the Context of the Crónicas de Indias” attempts to bring a fresh understanding on the reciprocal relationship between emerging discourses of the New World and Spain –in particular, the kinds of narrative that coalesce into the (early) modern novel and the equally complex and imaginative forms of narrative on display in the Crónicas de Indias. My inquiry takes up two key sixteenth-century historiographical accounts of the Americas which include Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la nueva España. I deploy these texts, which problematize the relationship of history to ‘poetry’ (a category which for early moderns included imaginative prose), to shed new light on the narrative strategies employed in Don Quixote and the Persiles. Along the way, I argue that the significant role that memory and mnemonics play in Cervantes’s imitation of literary models contributes to the epistemological and narratological concerns produced by the New World encounter, and I examine the use of memory in the construction of textual authority. For example: the first portion of my dissertation analyzes the writings of Juan Luis Vives (1492- 1540) as a means to explore the humanist thinking on the writing of history. Vives’ contribution to the practice and rhetoric of history allows me to examine difficulties and paradoxes posed by the interplay of history and poetry in Cervantes.