Comment comprendre l’abjection qui travaille les textes littéraires de femmes auteures contemporaines ? Quelle abjection habite les récits Putain (2001), Folle (2004) et À ciel ouvert (2007) de la Québécoise Nelly Arcan? D’abord, sont esquissées une synthèse des multiples acceptions théoriques de l’abjection et une liste d’« objets » à l’abjection archétypale, avant de montrer comment l’abject est susceptible d’être dialectiquement relevé en son contraire, notamment dans l’œuvre littéraire. Une carte de l’imaginaire de l’abjection arcanienne est ensuite dressée : les représentations abjectes du féminin donnent naissance à plusieurs topos spécifiques, et des mécanismes abjects dé-forment le corps du texte, entraîné dans la logique tragique de l’éternel retour. Puis les effets performatifs du texte arcanien sont examinés : sur le plan affectif, il permettent une purification de l’abjection et, sur le plan discursif et énonciatif, une critique de celle-ci. Enfin, le corpus arcanien, à la fois poétiquement, esthétiquement et performativement, s’inscrit dans le sillage des grands écrivains de l’abjection du XXe siècle. C’est, en tout cas, ce que les résultats de cette étude permettent de conclure. / How the abjection inhabiting women’s writing can be understood? What abjection lies in Quebec writer Nelly Arcan’s narratives Putain (2001), Folle (2004) and À ciel ouvert (2007)? First of all, a synthesis of the theoretical perspectives among abjection and a list of archetypal abject « objects » are drawn, before presenting how the abject can be solved dialectically into its opposite, notably through a work of art. The imaginary of the Arcanian abjection is then mapped. Feminine abject representations draw specific topoï and abject mecanisms un-shape the text’s body, led by the eternal return’s tragic logic. Further on, performative effects of Arcan’s text are explored : on an affective level, they allow the purification of abjection, and on a discursive and uttering level, a critique of the later. Finally, as shown by this study’s results, the Arcanian corpus should be considered in the wake of the great XXth century writers of abjection.

This thesis explores representation of the Iraq War in selected Anglo-American and Iraqi novels, examining how several authors have employed this theme in their narratives. The featured novelists are chosen from many writers who focus their efforts and their writing on this conflict. Criterion for selection included offering a critique of the diverse perspectives from which the conflict was perceived, the texts‘ engagement with the political conundrums underpinning war and its approach, how such fiction engages with a contemporary audience and what perspective are deployed to do so. Their public visibility provides the basis of one interpretative strand of the thesis. This study also explores and conceptualises how this conflict has entered the cultural consciousness and to what degree the novels fictionalise the conflict as their main subject, and assesses through which thematic emphases. The texts chosen and to be analysed are pivotal to our understanding of contemporary Iraq and its recent history. It will be argued that the thematic content of these texts contextualise modern war‘s multiple effects within not only the fictional textual world, but as well as their imaginative characters these representations become part of the experience at least vicariously of the audiences who read them. The texts discussed in subsequent chapters are either originally written in, or translated into English (for publication), and therefore all available in English, one major criterion of textual selection. It is interesting to examine the theme of the Iraq War and the historical and pragmatic vein and cultural point of reference from which authors write and has come to dominate the discourse of some contemporary novelists. The goal is to critically explore how the war has become a focal point and the framework of their narratives. The thesis will attempt to analyse how such novels depict the effects of political violence and why they are drawn to powerfully articulate the gruelling reality and experience of those fictionally engaged by and/or affected by it. It will be proposed that novels of and about this conflict are essential to study, understand, and engage with because of the content and the message they attempt to convey which is so crucial to understanding contemporary faultiness in socio-cultural histories, and the critical themes they utilize in writing and the dynamics through which they fictionalize their stories. Such fictional representations of this war serve an important societal, cultural, aesthetic and symbolic function. Thus the study encapsulates how novels of and about the Iraq War reveal and recapture the physical, psychological, and interpersonal losses that are felt by the civilians and military alike.

Submitted by Fernando Souza (fernandoafsou@gmail.com) on 2017-08-22T11:17:11Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 2890866 bytes, checksum: c40e622da303f81aba08418f58c0884b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-08-22T11:17:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 2890866 bytes, checksum: c40e622da303f81aba08418f58c0884b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-04-06 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This research analyzed, based on the semiotic theory of French line, ideological relations that establish in parts produced by Cícera Martiniano,-artist of Paraiba with 89 years old, unknown by the Academy and resident of peripheral zone of Bayeux-PB. The choice of the corpus was given by the fact that the cultural expressions of the work of that author represent far more than artistic manifestations. Are, in fact, an exercise of collective memory of social practice. We chose those texts that discuss historical themes or everyday related to social roles assigned to women, in the context of Brazil and Brazil, which are: prejudice and violence against women; the marriage; as well as the death and suffering, arising from the sexist oppression on the genre. The strings chosen were: story of Margarida Maria Alves, story of a life suffered, dismantle the world's story, When I was excluded from the St. Lawrence community, story of Bayeux and bird story. The theoretical basis was the semiotics of French line, in particular, the proposals of Greimas and Rastier that were considered the analysis of three structures that make up the generational path of meaning and analysis of human areas of the human environment: the ID, the proximity and the cultural distance. To this end, it was necessary to establish a systematic path that understood the following actions: a) theoretical study about the Semiotics of culture, based mainly on the work developed by the same authors mentioned above, of which we highlight, the popular culture and your transmission; (b) the purpose of writing) study, considering the socio-historical and cultural context of your production c) analysis of the immanent ideologies to narratives examined, deciphering and reconstituting the socio-cultural processes and the values of the subject that they establish, d) rescue of intersubjective relations and human projections of person, space and time, describing the effects of direction caused by such mechanisms. / Esta pesquisa analisou, com base na teoria semiótica de linha francesa, os sistemas de valores presentes que se instauram nas peças produzidas por Dona Cícera Martiniano, – cordelista paraibana com oitenta e nove anos de idade, desconhecida pela academia e moradora da zona periférica de Bayeux-PB. A escolha do corpus se deu pelo fato de que as expressões culturais da obra daquela autora representam bem mais do que manifestações artísticas. São, na realidade, um exercício da memória coletiva de uma prática social. Escolhemos aqueles textos que abordam temáticas históricas ou cotidianas, relacionadas aos papéis sociais atribuídos às mulheres, no contexto brasileiro e paraibano, quais sejam: o preconceito e a violência contra a mulher; o casamento; bem como a morte e o padecimento, decorrentes da opressão machista sobre o gênero.Os cordéis escolhidos foram:Estória de Margarida Maria Alves, Estória de uma vida sofrida, Estória do desmantelo do mundo, Quando fui excluída da comunidade São Lourenço, Estória de Bayeux e Estória de passarinho. O fundamento teórico foi a semiótica de linha francesa, destacando as propostas de Greimas e Rastier, as quais foram consideradas a análise das três estruturas que compõem o percurso gerativo da significação e análise das zonas antrópicas do entorno humano: a de identidade, a de proximidade e a de distanciamento cultural. Para tanto, fez-se necessário estabelecer um percurso sistemático que compreendeu as seguintes ações: a) realização de um estudo teórico acerca da Semiótica das Culturas, com base, sobretudo, nos trabalhos desenvolvidos pelos mesmos autores citados, de que destacamos, a cultura popular e sua transmissão; b) estudo a propósito da escrita feminina, considerando o contexto sócio-histórico e cultural de sua produção; c) análise das ideologias imanentes às narrativas examinadas, decifrando e reconstituindo os processos socioculturais e os valores dos sujeitos que nelas se instauram; d) resgate das relações intersubjetivas e das projeções antrópicas de pessoa, espaço e tempo, descrevendo os efeitos de sentido provocados por tais mecanismos.

La narrativa de Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) no goza del lugar que merece en la ficción argentina y latinoamericana como obra de la principal cuentista del siglo XX. Hace relativamente poco que su obra comenzó a despertar el interés de la crítica, atención que se evidencia en la cantidad de artículos y disertaciones recientes. Mediante una disección de la narrativa ocampeana a partir de las grandes coordenadas que la intersectan se pueden caracterizar los aspectos peculiares y distintivos de su estilo. Desarrollada tras la consolidación del psicoanálisis y su influencia en la estética surrealista, la narrativa de Ocampo incorpora algunos de esos elementos. El género fantástico también se articula aunque mediante una selección de rasgos configurados a su modo. Si bien Ocampo rechaza la etiqueta de feminista, ciertos aspectos de su estilo sólo pueden explicarse a partir de la visión particular de una mujer escritora y su representación de la identidad y las relaciones. La lectura pormenorizada de varios cuentos recogidos en “Cuentos completos” I y II (1999), once volúmenes publicados durante su vida, pertenecientes a distintos períodos de su producción permiten realizar un análisis diacrónico que ofrece una caracterización redonda de su estilo y evolución. El análisis sincrónico de estos textos incorpora datos históricos acerca del contexto de producción; a la vez que otras obras literarias del período ofrecen un punto de comparación para identificar influencias y contribuciones. Este análisis, realizado desde el marco teórico de la crítica literaria, da cuenta de la presencia de constituyentes narrativos (narrador, ironía, ambigüedad) que configuran espacios de indeterminación, noción postulada por las teorías de la recepción. Éstos explican las peculiares características de la obra ocampeana: su habilidad para inquietar, intrigar, sorprender y, en suma, desestabilizar al lector y sus expectativas. Es más, sirven para explicar la idiosincrática representación de la realidad que emana de su obra, su interés en lo fantástico y la articulación de lo anti-convencional, como mecanismo subversivo para escapar del orden social dominante, lo cual revela sensibilidades protofeministas. La narrativa de Silvina Ocampo se resiste al reduccionismo y construye una visión peculiar y multifacética de la artista y su obra.

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) emerged in 2009 as a platform through which Afghan women could express their lived experiences and perspectives on a range of culturally relevant issues while retaining their anonymity. The purpose of this research was to understand poetry as a conflict resolution tool that Afghan women are using to be active participants in the social, political and cultural dialogue that is determining their rights. This research focused on three questions: 1) How do Afghan women describe the state of womanhood in Afghanistan? 2) How do Afghan women describe the conflict they experience in their everyday lives? 3) How might poetry and narrative be used to manage the conflict that Afghan women are facing? This research presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of one hundred published poems from the AWWP poetry database. Data analysis included open coding, thematic analysis, and the use of van Dijk’s six-step CDA model to evaluate the semantic macrostructures, local meanings, linguistic markers, global and local discourse forms, linguistic realizations, analysis of context, and the researcher’s own interpretive analysis. The findings identify and explain the major themes derived from the study as well as describe how Afghan women feel about womanhood and conflict. The major themes included: child brides/forced marriage, hijab/burqa/niqab, women’s resistance, parents as protectors and/or perpetrators, the power of writing and stress as a result of conflict. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of implications for sustainable norm change using poetry, directions for future research, and recommendations for policy and programming.

This thesis seeks to argue for the problematising role of tradition and generational influence in the work of three Northern Irish poets publishing since the late 1990s. The subjects, Colette Bryce (b. 1970), Leontia Flynn (b. 1974) and Sinéad Morrissey (b. 1972), emerged coterminously, each publishing with major UK publishers. Together they represent a generation of assured female poetic voices. This study presents one of the first critical considerations of the work of these poets, and it remains conscious of the dominance of conceptions of tradition and lineage which are notable in poetry from Northern Ireland from the twentieth-century onwards. In suggesting that this tradition is problematised for emerging women poets by precursor-peer dominance and the primacy of male perspectives in the tradition, this thesis combines a study of poetics, themes relating to gender, detachment and paratexts. From consideration of these elements, it proposes that contemporary poets are not necessarily subject to the powers of tradition and influence, but rather, are capable of a selective approach that in turn demonstrates the malleability of contemporary traditions. The approaches are laid out in four chapters which move from a consideration of “threshold” paratexts (following from the work of Gérard Genette), including book reviews and dedications, through studies of thematic divergence and detachment, the changing status of women’s poetry traditions within Northern Ireland and beyond, the significance of gendered subjects in poetry, and influence found not in thematic or paratextual aspects, but in the individual aspects of poetic form. These aspects combine to form poems and the tradition(s) in which they continue. The thesis provides extensive coverage of the work of Bryce, Flynn, and Morrissey, combining close readings with the application of theoretical frameworks interrogating the implications of literary traditions on later writers (especially when the writers are temporally and culturally close), giving particular consideration to gender and feminist politics. It explores a variety of different critical truisms applied to the poetic generations that precede the younger poets and identifies both compliance and divergences from the contemporary Northern Irish canon. In doing so, this study simultaneously illuminates the frailties of the popular, overwhelmingly male, tradition, particularly as regards to representations of women, and provides direction for studies of post-millennial Northern Irish poetry.

This thesis explores women’s writing and its place in the formation of female film culture in the British silent cinema era. The project focuses upon women’s literary engagement with silent cinema as generative of a female film culture, looking at materials such as fan letters, fan magazines, popular novels, short story papers, novelizations, critical journals and newspaper criticism. Exploring this diverse range of women’s cinema writing, the thesis seeks to make an original contribution to feminist film historiography. Focusing upon the mediations between different kinds of women’s cinema writing, the thesis poses key questions about how the feminist film historian weights original sources in the reclamation of silent female film culture, relative to the varying degrees of cultural authority with which different women commentated upon, reflected upon, and creatively responded to film culture. The thesis moves away from conceptualization of cinema audiences and reception practices based upon textual readings. Instead, the thesis focuses upon evidence of women’s original accounts of their cinemagoing practices (fan letters) and their critical (newspaper and journal criticism) and creative (fiction writers) responses to cinema’s place in women’s everyday lives. Balancing original archival research with multiple overarching methodological frameworks—drawing upon fan theory, feminist reception theory, audience studies, social history and cultural studies—the thesis is attentive to the diversity of women’s experiences of cinema culture, and the literary conduits through which they channeled these experiences. Shifting the recent focus in feminist silent film historiography away from the reclamation of lost filmmaking female pioneers and towards lost female audiences, the thesis thus constructs a nationally specific account of British women’s silent era cinema culture.

À partir de fragments décousus, de morceaux du passé, du présent et même de rêves d’avenir, la narratrice du récit Les rubans bleus réfléchit sur la signification de femmes qu’elle a côtoyées durant sa vie. Elle tente ainsi de recoudre la lignée dont elle est issue et de tisser une histoire qui restera effilochée. Les diverses femmes rencontrées structurent ce récit rapiécé qui, comme une courtepointe, va rassembler de façon hétéroclite les souvenirs d’un « je ». Dans le récit Ma mère et Gainsbourg de Diane-Monique Daviau, le motif omniprésent de la robe constitue une enveloppe psychique qui permet une continuité imaginaire entre la mère et la fille, la narratrice. Cette robe, nous dit cette dernière, est trouée, et la reprise tout au long du récit de ce motif préfigure l’absence ressentie par la fille devant le deuil à faire de sa mère. Les nombreux trous à la robe, que la narratrice met en évidence, se lisent comme des manques et des silences entre la mère et la fille. Ces accrocs à la robe marquent l’identité de cette dernière et fondent cet « héritage-fardeau » qu’elle porte et dont elle témoigne dans le livre. Par l’écriture, la narratrice nous convie à un patient travail de deuil (Anzieu, Delvaux, Green, Harel). Celui-ci s’offre comme un assemblage de fils servant à recoudre les diffé-rents morceaux de sa vie qui lui permettront de mieux reconstituer la figure de cette mère-absente, et, par là même, sa propre identité. C’est donc à la manière d’un patchwork qu’elle lie entre eux des souvenirs d’enfance, des rêves et des réflexions portant sur la perte et le manque. Ceux-ci donneront forme à son texte, cette robe d’endeuillée. / Using unwoven fragments, pieces of the past, of the present and even dreams for the future, Les rubans bleus’s narrator reflects on the meaning of the different women in her life. Thus, she attemps to sew the lineage from which she came and to weed a story that will stay frayed. The different women encountered structure the reattached narrative, bringing together like a quilt, in a heterogenous manner, the memories of an “I”. In the narrative Ma mère et Gainsbourg by Diane-Monique Daviau, the omnipresent pattern of the dress constitutes an envelop for the psyche that allows an imaginary continuum between a mother and a daughter, the narrator. She describes this dress as having holes in it. The reoccurence of this dress in the text prefigures the absence that is felt by the daughter as she mourns her mother. The narrator puts forth the many holes in the dress through gaps which read like silences and emptiness between the mother and daughter. These snags in the dress imprinted on the narrator’s identity and founded a “burdon-heritage” that the narrator wears, and shares in her book. With her writing, she invites the reader to a slow passage through the mourning process (Anzieu, Delvaux, Green, Harel). The latter presents itself as the thread with which the narrator will sew the pieces of her life together, which in turn will allow for a better fit pertaining to the figure of the absent-mother, and from there, to her own identity. Hence, the narrator ties together childhood memories, dreams and reflections about loss and emptiness, like a patchwork, giving form to her text, that of a mourning dress.

This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.

This thesis investigates a neglected sub-genre of women’s writing, which I have termed the literature of the boarding house. Focusing on unmarried women, this is a study of the alternative rooms ‘of one’s own’ that existed in the nineteen thirties: from the boarding house and hotel, to the bed-sitting room or single room as a paying guest in another family’s house. The 1930s is defined by the conflict between women’s emerging social and economic independence and a dominant ideology that placed increased importance on domesticity, the idea of ‘home’ and women’s place within the familial structure. My research highlights the incompatibility between the idealised images of domestic life that dominated the period and the reality for the single woman living in temporary accommodation. The boarding house existed outside conventional notions of female domestic space with its connotations of stability and family life. Women within the boarding house were not only living outside traditional domestic structures; they were placing themselves outside socially and culturally defined domestic roles. The boarding house was both a new space of modernity, symbolising women’s independence, and a continued imitation of the bourgeois home modelled on rituals of middle-class behaviour. Through an examination of novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Lettice Cooper, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and E. H. Young, this study privileges the literary as a way in which to understand the space of the boarding house. Not only does the boarding house blur the boundaries between public and private space, it also challenges the traditional conceptions of the family home as the sole location of private domestic space. I argue that by placing their characters in the in-between space of the boarding house, the authors can reflect on the liminal spaces that existed for women both socially and sexually. In the literature of the boarding house, the novel becomes a site for representing women’s experiences that were usually on the periphery of traditional narratives, as well as a literary medium for articulating the wider social and economic issues affecting the lives of unmarried women.