Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis focuses on how identity in contemporary British and French women’s writing has developed since the times of second wave feminism, when identity in women’s literature was virtually narrowed down to gender identity and women’s identities more often than not were portrayed as discriminated against, alien and other in world dominated by patriarchy. The thesis addresses different aspects of identity explored in the work of four contemporary female authors: British Trezza Azzopardi and A.L. Kennedy, French Marie NDiaye and Marie Darrieussecq. It also articulates the structure of identity as it appears in the work of each author. The study suggests that Azzopardi, NDiaye, Kennedy and Darrieussecq address a wide range of aspects of identity in their work. Nevertheless, gender identity remains a significant preoccupation in their writing and is often explored together with other discriminated identities and their combinations (i.e. gender/race/social/class or gender/age/national identities. It is argued that self identity in the work of all four authors takes the form of the other in different guises. It is argued that a prominent concern with the exploration of self as other is the distinguishing mark of the latest generation of women writers compared to previous ones. It is the contention of this thesis that the change in the female speaking position has inevitably transformed the way the female speaking subject perceives herself and functions in discourse and culture. / Disertacijoje siekiama atskleisti, kaip moterų tapatumo problema naujausioje prancūzų ir britų moterų literatūroje pakito nuo antrosios feminizmo bangos laikų, kai moterų literatūroje ji buvo tapati lyties tapatumui, o moters tapatumas vaizduojamas kaip diskriminuojamas, svetimas, kitas vyrų pasaulyje. Lyties tapatumas šiuolaikinėje moterų kūryboje išsirutuliojo į sudėtingą ir platų tapatumų tinklą. Disertacijoje nagrinėjami įvairūs tapatumo aspektai ir jų raiška keturių šiuolaikinių rašytojų – prancūzių Marie NDiaye ir Marie Darrieussecq bei bričių velsietės Trezzos Azzopardi ir škotės Alison Louise Kennedy (pasirašinėjančios A. L. Kennedy) – kūryboje. Per minėtų autorių kūrybą aptariami XX–XXI amžių sandūros britų ir prancūzų moterų literatūroje aktualizuojami tapatumo aspektai ir jų konstravimo principai. Daromos išvados, kad šiuolaikinių rašytojų nebeslegia lyties identifikacijos, joms rūpi aktualizuoti ne vieną, bet daugelį tapatumo aspektų, kurie vis dėlto dažniausiai yra diskriminuojami. Vyraujantis mąstymo apie tapatumą būdas Azzopardi, NDiaye, Kennedy ir Darrieussecq kūryboje yra kito neišvengiamumo deklaravimas. Tai simbolizuoja visavertį moterų rašytojų dalyvavimą diskursyvinėje erdvėje, tai, kad kūrybą jos suvokia ne kaip kito dominuojamą erdvę, bet kaip areną, kurioje jų talentas, jų kūrybinė savastis gali skleistis ir skleidžiasi per santykį su kitu, kitais, jų tekstais, kūrybiniais ir meniniais ieškojimais.

Disertacijoje siekiama atskleisti, kaip moterų tapatumo problema naujausioje prancūzų ir britų moterų literatūroje pakito nuo antrosios feminizmo bangos laikų, kai moterų literatūroje ji buvo tapati lyties tapatumui, o moters tapatumas vaizduojamas kaip diskriminuojamas, svetimas, kitas vyrų pasaulyje. Lyties tapatumas šiuolaikinėje moterų kūryboje išsirutuliojo į sudėtingą ir platų tapatumų tinklą. Disertacijoje nagrinėjami įvairūs tapatumo aspektai ir jų raiška keturių šiuolaikinių rašytojų – prancūzių Marie NDiaye ir Marie Darrieussecq bei bričių velsietės Trezzos Azzopardi ir škotės Alison Louise Kennedy (pasirašinėjančios A. L. Kennedy) – kūryboje. Per minėtų autorių kūrybą aptariami XX–XXI amžių sandūros britų ir prancūzų moterų literatūroje aktualizuojami tapatumo aspektai ir jų konstravimo principai. Daromos išvados, kad šiuolaikinių rašytojų nebeslegia lyties identifikacijos, joms rūpi aktualizuoti ne vieną, bet daugelį tapatumo aspektų, kurie vis dėlto dažniausiai yra diskriminuojami. Vyraujantis mąstymo apie tapatumą būdas Azzopardi, NDiaye, Kennedy ir Darrieussecq kūryboje yra kito neišvengiamumo deklaravimas. Tai simbolizuoja visavertį moterų rašytojų dalyvavimą diskursyvinėje erdvėje, tai, kad kūrybą jos suvokia ne kaip kito dominuojamą erdvę, bet kaip areną, kurioje jų talentas, jų kūrybinė savastis gali skleistis ir skleidžiasi per santykį su kitu, kitais, jų tekstais, kūrybiniais ir meniniais ieškojimais. / This thesis focuses on how identity in contemporary British and French women’s writing has developed since the times of second wave feminism, when identity in women’s literature was virtually narrowed down to gender identity and women’s identities more often than not were portrayed as discriminated against, alien and other in world dominated by patriarchy. The thesis addresses different aspects of identity explored in the work of four contemporary female authors: British Trezza Azzopardi and A.L. Kennedy, French Marie NDiaye and Marie Darrieussecq. It also articulates the structure of identity as it appears in the work of each author. The study suggests that Azzopardi, NDiaye, Kennedy and Darrieussecq address a wide range of aspects of identity in their work. Nevertheless, gender identity remains a significant preoccupation in their writing and is often explored together with other discriminated identities and their combinations (i.e. gender/race/social/class or gender/age/national identities. It is argued that self identity in the work of all four authors takes the form of the other in different guises. It is argued that a prominent concern with the exploration of self as other is the distinguishing mark of the latest generation of women writers compared to previous ones. It is the contention of this thesis that the change in the female speaking position has inevitably transformed the way the female speaking subject perceives herself and functions in discourse and culture.

This investigation presents two literary case studies that demonstrate the heterogeneity of Wilhelmine popular fiction, both in terms of thematic orientation and aesthetic quality. The chosen authors are women from bourgeois backgrounds who were prolific and well-known during their life-time, but who have since been relegated. They target the ‘new middle class’ of that era as their readership and, respectively, represent two important but contested genres of late nineteenth-century popular fiction: Heimatkunst and the Sozialroman. Heimatkunst has been dismissed as a homogeneous propagator of right-wing ideology. Yet the texts of Charlotte Niese evidence ‘resistant practice’ within and against prevailing discourse parameters. Her autobiographical writing demonstrates a type of nationalism orientated in dignity and independence, rather than competition and militarism, while also showing how political indoctrination and imposition poisoned the vernacular social status quo which otherwise managed to integrate antagonistic values and attitudes. Her fictional narratives highlight how writing dubbed Heimatkunst was subject to hybridisation, at times to amount to an approximation of a modernist aesthetic. The Sozialroman has been dismissed as a trivial ‘variety of social recipes’. Luise Westkirch’s narratives, however, incorporate thorough-going social reform. Her shorter narratives include astute, psychologically-based social critique which facilitates insights into contemporaneous preoccupations and slow perceptual changes. Incorporating tenets derived from the German romantic legacy, her narratives challenge dominant discourse parameters directly. In the process, the internationally ubiquitous interpretation of competition and power as basic instinctual drives is deconstructed as an erroneous and self-destructive assumption. Westkirch’s complex narratives establish sub-textual agendas through ‘thematic compounding’ that directs the reader’s attention overtly at one set of issues while covertly commenting on another. In this way, she constructs gender inequality as an indictment of normative socio-political systems. This study therefore argues that popular fiction located in a time of cultural crisis has the potential to make explicit the parameters of the prevailing dominant discourse, against which specific values are articulated. Since a conscious formulation of these parameters is essential to the loosening of any conceptual hegemony, which depends on implicitness, fiction thus situated can yield new perspectives, not only in terms of historical insight, but in terms of conceptual alternatives that also have contemporary relevance.

By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.

No description available.

This thesis analyses the themes of history, memory, and authorship in the works of four women playwrights from the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In doing so, it aims to reveal the three levels of marginalization to which Caribbean women theatre practitioners are subjected: being a woman, being a French Caribbean woman, and being a French Caribbean woman who writes theatre. The thesis seeks to contribute to the expansion of the field of French Caribbean literary and drama studies, endeavours to redress the gender balance in studies on French Caribbean literature, and aspires to add to the existing body of work on French Caribbean women's writing. Therefore, the thesis aims to reveal and to analyse the world of French Caribbean women's theatre and to study how the playwrights address socio-political issues that affect their communities and influence their own writings and careers. The corpus consists of plays by Gerty Dambury, Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Suzanne Dracius from the 1980s to the early 2000s. While focussing on a different theme, each chapter rests its analysis on theatrical works of a similar genre. The analysis of the plays deploys theories of the theatre pertaining to postcolonial drama and gender. The first chapter serves as an introduction to a group of female French Caribbean writers and their predecessors. The second chapter is a study of two historical plays, focussing on the collective experience of historical events and the role played by women in those events. The third chapter analyses plays that problematize the relationship between the collective and the individual. The fourth chapter looks at the image of the French Caribbean female artist and the multiple barriers she encounters in achieving creative independence.

Recent scholarship has examined the lived experience of unmarried women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, both in cities and in the countryside. Typically, scholarship in this field has focussed on women's social identity whether spinster, widow or lesbian and addressed how these types of women were variously used in fiction and the press to contest or uphold the gendered status quo. This thesis problematises the distinct characterisation of these social identities by examining works which seek to unify female social identity at the fin de siècle through a common modern experience: the conflict between individual and collective life. All of the female subjects examined in this thesis whether author, artist, or fictional character, and whether married, separated, unmarried, widowed, homosexual, or not easily identifiable either way are solitary figures. Their movement within and interaction with their environments reveal the uneasy combination of separation and exposure experienced by working women of all classes at the fin de siècle. This thesis examines the solitary female figure in works of British fiction produced between 1880 and 1922. It considers the pressures and implications of separation and exposure in relation to female celebrity and creative practices at the fin de siècle. My methodology involves examining the biography and auto/biographical works of Amy Levy (1861-1889), George Egerton (pseud. of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright; 1859-1945), Sarah Grand (pseud. of Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall; 1854-1943) and Charlotte Mew (1869-1923), and drawing out aspects that speak to the desires for privacy and, conversely, publicity and/or companionship. I identify how their lived experience of this conflict broadly, between society and solitude affected the depiction of modern female consciousness in their literary works by examining their female characters subjective interaction with three environments: the foreign landscape, the home, and the city. My aim is to identify how Levy, Egerton, Grand and Mew used their literary works to acknowledge and retaliate against the restrictions which continued to limit urban women's physical, social and psychological autonomy.

Mireille Havet, née en 1898, rencontre très tôt le succès grâce à ses poèmes. Proche d’Apollinaire et de Cocteau, elle se fait une place dans le milieu littéraire de l’époque. Parallèlement à ses poèmes, et à son roman publié en 1923, elle écrit un journal intime, qu’elle commence alors qu’elle est encore adolescente. Forte de ses succès de jeunesse, la jeune femme se laisse alors peu à peu rattraper par la vie : les femmes et les drogues, ses deux grandes passions, l’entraînent dans un tourbillon dont elle peine à s’extraire pour produire la grande œuvre dont elle rêve. Résignée, au fil des années, elle se concentrera sur la rédaction de son journal, devenu le seul support s’accordant avec son mode de vie, sa mélancolie et son addiction de plus en plus extrême aux drogues. Elle tente alors de transcrire son âme dans ses carnets intimes, de « dire et révéler [son] monde » intérieur. Ce projet, s’il n’est pas celui, idéal, de l’œuvre fantasmée, contient cependant toute la poésie de Mireille Havet et s’avère, après relecture, former un « tout complet », presque à l’insu de son auteur. Ce journal peut-il alors remplacer la grande œuvre avortée dont la diariste a toujours rêvé ? / Mireille Havet, born in 1898, meets early success through her poems. Being close to Apollinaire and Cocteau, she makes a name for herself in the literary sphere of the time. Simultaneously with her poems and her novel published in 1923, she writes a diary, started when she was still a teenager. Driven by this success, the young woman is gradually caught up by her two great passions: women and drugs. It results in a turbulence against which she will struggle to attempt to produce the great work she dreamed of. Over the years, she finally resigned and will focus on her diary. It became the only reconcilable medium with her lifestyle, her melancholy and extremely increasing drug addiction. She then tries to transcribe her soul into her diary, "to say and reveal [her] world" inside. This project, even if it is not the ideal fantasized work, yet contains all the poetry of Mireille Havet, and forms, after rereading, a "complete whole" almost unknown to the author herself. Can this journal then replace the failed masterpiece the diarist always dreamed of?

Submitted by Geandra Rodrigues (geandrar@gmail.com) on 2018-05-17T10:57:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 carolineresendeneves.pdf: 6479902 bytes, checksum: 2d348b4138ee37480f38c0148da7522f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-05-22T14:25:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 carolineresendeneves.pdf: 6479902 bytes, checksum: 2d348b4138ee37480f38c0148da7522f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-22T14:25:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 carolineresendeneves.pdf: 6479902 bytes, checksum: 2d348b4138ee37480f38c0148da7522f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-07 / O objetivo da presente dissertação é discutir os pontos de intersecção entre a vida da autora inglesa Virginia Woolf e sua obra ficcional Os anos, assinalando quais experiências foram utilizadas como fonte criativa no espaço autobiográfico ocupado pela obra citada. O livro que se configura como objeto de estudo narra a saga de uma família vitoriana que claramente se assemelha à própria família de Woolf, abrangendo o espaço de tempo de 1880 até os anos 1930, e dessa forma também abarcando as mudanças não só familiares, como também da sociedade inglesa. Com esse propósito, buscou-se inicialmente apresentar a biografia da escritora, seguido de um breve panorama da literatura de autoria feminina e da análise da produção crítica de Woolf, criando um paralelo em relação ao uso das experiências pessoais entre sua teoria e sua prática. Em um segundo momento, discute-se as teorias relacionadas à escrita de si, almejando encontrar uma que possa melhor definir a prática de escrita utilizada em Os anos. Não encontrando um conceito adequado ao objeto de estudo, apresentou-se uma expansão da noção de romance autobiográfico, levando em consideração todas as informações obtidas durante a pesquisa. Por fim, é feita uma análise do livro Os anos, discutindo seu enredo, simbolismos e apresentação das personagens femininas, culminando no cruzamento dos dados biográficos obtidos através de biografias e autobiografias com a história narrada. / The aim of this study is to discuss the connection between the private life of the British writer Virginia Woolf and her fictional work The years, pointing out which of her private experiences were used as a creative source in the autobiographical space present at the aforementioned title. The book, which is the object of this study, tells the story of a Victorian family that clearly resembles Woolf's own family. It is set from 1880 to 1930, thus depicting not only the changes in the families, but also in the British society as a whole. Having this study's purpose as basis, a biography of the writer was firstly presented, followed by a brief women's writing overview and by an analysis of Woolf's literary criticism, establishing a connection between her theory and the practice concerning the usage of private experiences. Secondly, theories on self-writing are discussed, aiming to find one which can define the writing practice used in The years. As a consequence for not finding a suitable concept for the object of this study, an expansion of the idea of autobiographical romance was introduced, taking all the information obtained during the research process into account. Finally, an examination of the book The years was carried out, analyzing its plot, symbolism and female characters, resulting in a cross-check of biographical data - which was obtained from biographies and autobiographies - and the story told.