Early twentieth-century Chinese literary critics create a model of literary development that highlights leading genres for each dynasty. For the Ming and the Qing dynasties, these are drama and fiction. This model relegates other genres of the period, especially poetry and lyric, to a second-class status, and accounts for their less visibility in scholarly research until today. The aim of my dissertation is not to reverse the hierarchy of genres, but to break the boundaries of genres, examining the ways in which the aesthetic sensibility connected to drama and fiction is transposed to other genres and renews their conventions. The cross-genre approach used in my dissertation is supported by an overview of the literary scene of the period, when literati took up diverse roles from scholar-officials to professional dramatists, novelists, and painters, when the boundaries between "high" and "low" genres became more fluid and literati wrote across elite and popular genres, and when illustrations of printed plays and fiction, thanks to the rise of print culture, circulated widely and inspired the literati's cross-media imagination. Social practices of Ming and Qing literati, such as going to the theater, reading and writing commentary on drama and fiction, appreciating illustrations of printed plays and fiction, or listening to story-telling, translated into an awareness of the commensurability of life and theater (theatrum mundi), bringing role play, playfulness, staging, and fictional time and space to the reading and writing of other genres, creating textual and aesthetic hybridity in these latter genres. I use the term theatrical/fictional lyricism to refer to the ways in which drama and fiction, commentary on drama and fiction, and illustrations to drama and fiction change the conventions of reading and writing poetry and prose in terms of rhetoric and theme. The term also draws attention to the textual and aesthetic hybridity in these genres. Theatrical/fictional lyricism is a new form of lyricism, in which role play gives a twist to the genuine poetic voice, the records of real events gives way to self-conscious fictionality, and normal time and space merges with staged, illusory time and space. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation argues that Du Fu’s (712-770) ascent to the pinnacle of the Chinese literary pantheon was bound up with a revolution in the ways poetry was understood to be a serious endeavor. In Du Fu’s time, poetry had been valued for sustaining a time-transcending ritual institution descended from the ancient sages. Those later critics who placed Du Fu at the center of the poetic canon, by contrast, have generally located the his verse’s “serious” value in its embodiment of admirably accurate and appropriately felt perceptions of the precise historical circumstances that occasioned its composition. Although these latter critics have often claimed great antiquity for this latter vision of poetry’s moral significance, I argue that it was not an intellectual possibility in the Tang, and that it only came to be broadly persuasive when Du Fu’s collection was extensively remade through the addition of commentarial and contextualizing paratexts that were previously unprecedented within the Chinese critical tradition. Placed back into its original intellectual and material context, then, Du Fu’s poetry reads very differently than it has to post-medieval critics. It was, however, no coincidence that Du Fu was chosen as the center of this radical reinvention of the Chinese poetic tradition. It is possible to trace in the poet’s early collection a process of divergence from the norms of his time, leading ultimately to the creation of a new poetic language that does in fact raise many of the questions that Du Fu’s most influential critics have sought to answer. Yet this new poetic language never fully delivers the reassuring claim that these later critics have seen in his collection: that the good man will always be able to understand and movingly convey the moral truth of his experience. Instead of demonstrating the poet’s apprehension of such natural and given truth, Du Fu’s mature verse dramatizes itself as within the process of seeking for sense, a process that it leaves always open and unfinished. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation consists of two parts: a cultural study of divorce in early medieval China and a literary study of the divorced woman as represented in various early medieval Chinese writings, including literary and historical writings, legal, ritual and medical texts, and tomb epitaphs. A comparison between the rites, norms and regulations prescribed for women in ritual classics, and women’s lived experiences as recounted in historical writings, shows a greater discrepancy between norm and practice in the early medieval period than in later periods. Normative prescriptions were generally not followed by women of this period, and women enjoyed a more relaxed social and familial environment than their late imperial counterparts. The gap between norm and practice was extended into many areas of familial and social life, including marriage and divorce. An examination of actual divorce cases reveals that neither the Seven Conditions (qichu 七出) nor the Three Prohibitions (sanbuqu 三不去) were strictly adhered to when divorce took place. Divorce happened to people from all levels of society, and could be initiated by both men and women for reasons outside of the Seven Conditions and the Three Prohibitions. Divorce was not regarded as a social taboo in early medieval China. The unstable social and political environment that characterizes the early medieval period gave rise to some ritual deviations and anomalies, among which was the two-principal-wives (liangdi 兩嫡) phenomenon. Debates and discussions on this marital predicament anchored on the issue of divorce, that is, how should the martial status of the two wives be defined? A thorny case of a sixth-century liangdi dilemma reveals that during the long divide between north and south, the contestation between wives for the principal wife status mirrored the contention for cultural supremacy and political legitimacy between northern and southern elite. Generally speaking, divorced women were not stigmatized in early medieval China, and remarriage was an acceptable recourse for them. Historians appeared to be indifferent to her plight, and tended to write of the divorced woman only to help tell the story of the man who divorced her. In contrast, in poetic writings, the divorced woman was not viewed only in relation to her ex-husband. She was instead a disconnected, isolated figure, and her emotions took center stage. This comparison reveals that the image of the divorced woman in early medieval China reflects both the mindset of the men who formulate her in writing, as well as the constraints imposed by each writing genre. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

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L'Affaire Salman Rushdie possède des caractéristiques spécifiques---le contexte politico-historique, la particularité de la fatwa promulguée par Khomeyni, la critique de l'altérité par la fiction---qui participent d'un débat riche en idées à partir duquel il est intéressant de dégager une réflexion particulière sur la compréhension du social aujourd'hui en Occident. Dans le présent travail, nous étudierons trois réflexions utilisant chacune un cadre d'analyse spécifique pour aborder l'Affaire: Milan Kundera et le roman européen; Claude Lefort et l'idéal démocratique; Fethi Benslama et le pouvoir de la fiction de l'origine. Il sera intéressant, au final, de constater que bien que l'angle d'analyse différé, les conclusions tirées par ces auteurs pointent dans une direction similaire, que nous résumerons en quatre temps: (1) le roman est un outil de questionnement de la réalité; (2) le questionnement de la réalité s'articule autour d'une remise en cause des fondements de la société, plus précisément autour d'une réflexion sur l'origine; (3) la remise en question de ces fondements repose sur la valorisation du doute, lequel est indissociable de la division et du conflit; (4) la réflexion sur l'Affaire Rushdie amené à constater que les sociétés occidentales traversent une période de transition qui se caractérise par une difficulté à défendre les valeurs qui leurs sont propres quand elles sont confrontées à l'altérité.

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