published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation offers the first full-length study of five feminist writing practices developed between May 1968 and the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar in 1990: ecriture feminine (Helene Cixous), ecriture au feminin/writing in the feminine (Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire Tostevin), lesbian/political writing (Monique Wittig), innecriture (Trinh T. Minh-ha), and writing as feminist practice (DuPlessis). These share what I call a feminist poetics; I develop the concept of "sympathy" (the transmission of symptoms from one body to the next) to explain how they nourish one another. I recount their poststructuralist context, and outline key historical influences, such as the student protests of 1968, the nascent women's movements in France and North America, and feminist cultural production in the 1970s. I then describe their poetics---the textual, grammatical, and semantic strategies used to undermine the patriarchal symbolic. I focus on the status and function of the female body in this feminist poetics, and suggest the body provides it with a non-essentialist theoretical foundation. I conclude by evaluating two models that best describe these writing practices: the palimpsest and the matrix. While the palimpsest, with its textual allusions, is an attractive model, I suggest that the matrix offers two advantages: its corporeal connotations and its emphasis on writing as process.

The purpose of our thesis is to show the important role of the woman in the novelistic autobiography of Leon l'Africain. Inspired by the Description de l'Afrique, written by the famous arab geographer Mohamed al-Wazzan ez-Zayyati, Maalouf converted this autobiography to a quest of a man in search of an identity exceeding the geographic, ethnic and religious boundaries. If he succeeded in arriving to the end of his journey, it's mainly due to the contribution of the woman who is present under different names and faces throughout the novel and who leads him to the dialogue of cultures.

The existence of specific lexical features marking the speech of female characters in Roman Comedy is signalled in scholiastic literature, and has been confirmed by modern quantitative research. This thesis, focusing on the comedies of Plautus, investigates the question of why the playwrights made specific linguistic choices for female personae. / Greek and Roman literary theory stipulated that the speech of women in drama had to be constructed so as to reveal the speakers' feminine nature. Philosophical doctrines that construed gender as a polar opposition evince a fundamental distinction, defining male as 'bond' and female as 'boundless'. The association of female with boundlessness, it is argued, also determines woman's position with respect to speech. A study of Greek New Comedy reveals that the reflections on female nature and expression found there depict woman as adverse to limits, a concept which Plautus seems to have subsequently adapted from his sources. / Donatus's scholia to Terence characterize female speech as disorderly and disrespectful of the norms of verbal interaction. Concrete linguistic patterns are rationalized as symptoms of 'softness' and querulousness, both representing the female propensity to violate interpersonal limits. The text of Plautus, examined for meta-textual asides on female speech, confirms the scholiast's observations. An inquiry into the Plautine perception of blanditia reveals that female mannerisms are interpreted as tokens of a contagious moral disorder, and that they earmark the feebleness of female (and effeminate) personae. The otherness of female complaints, emphasized during the performance of palliata by both verbal and para-verbal means, is intimately associated in the text of the comedies with the chaos within women's minds. Female speech patterns in Plautus thus illustrate the concept of infirmitas sexus.