Dans ce mémoire nous analysons deux oeuvres littéraires : Mes mauvaises pensées de Nina Bouraoui et Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit de Leïla Slimani. Le but de l’analyse est de savoir comment une double culture franco-maghrébine peut être vécue par des femmes nées dans des familles de mariages mixtes. Ce mémoire analyse ces oeuvres à partir des théories sur les genres littéraires, roman beur et autobiographie, et les lit à travers une perspective genrée pour voir comment nos écrivaines se situent dans les sociétés. Nous avons jugé intéressant de faire la comparaison avec le roman beur, qui évoque les problèmes d’intégration des beurs en France, alors que ces écrivaines ne sont pas des Beurettes puisqu’elles ont vécu au Maghreb et en France et elles traitent des problèmes rencontrés dans les deux endroits. En plus elles ont pu maitriser parfaitement les codes dans les sociétés grâce à leurs parents et il ne devrait pas y avoir de difficultés d’intégration alors qu’elles décrivent leurs rapports avec les deux cultures comme problématiques puisqu’elles se sentent toujours comme des étrangères partout. Le but principal n’est donc pas d’inscrire les récits étudiés ici dans un genre littéraire mais de montrer que beaucoup de problèmes d’intégration sont valables dans les deux cultures et les femmes ont encore plus de problèmes pour se faire respecter si elles ne respectent pas les traditions. Nous pouvons dire que ces écrivaines mettent au défi le roman beur comme elles ne montrent pas uniquement les problèmes d’intégration des Maghrébins en France mais aussi les problèmes pour se faire accepter parmi les Maghrébins pour ceux qui ne vivent pas conformément aux coutumes. Les problèmes liés à la binarité de sexes ont un rôle central. Bouraoui et Slimani donnent dans ces oeuvres la parole aux plus opprimés dans la culture maghrébine, les femmes, les homosexuels et les personnes qui ne suivent pas les traditions en même temps qu’elles traitent les problèmes d’intégration en France. Notre conclusion est que le bagage historique et la culture mixte ont influencé leur choix de métier. Le fait de prendre la parole et d’écrire des oeuvres introspectives les a aidées dans leurs propres analyses de soi. Ces analyses avec les descriptions des milieux aident aussi le lecteur à comprendre la situation dans les sociétés et les messages des écrivaines. / In this paper two literary works are analysed: Mes mauvaises pensées by Nina Bouraoui and Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit by Leïla Slimani. The aim of the analysis is to understand how a dual French and North African culture could be experienced by women in families characterized by mixed marriages. The literary works are analysed from theories based on literary genres, “roman beur” and the notion of biography. The study is based on a gender perspective and I try to understand how the authors are experiencing the societies. Comparing with the “roman beur” is interesting, since they raise the integration issues for second generation North African immigrants in France, but the authors are not likely to be seen as second generation migrants from North Africa since they have been living in the Maghreb region and in France, they are telling stories from both places. In addition, they have perfectly mastered the codes of both societies thanks to their parents and should not experience integration issues but nevertheless they feel like strangers. The main objective is not to classify the literary genres but to create an understanding and raise the issues that both cultures are facing regarding the integration into society, focusing on how women have a hard time trying to be respected when not following traditions. The authors challenge the “roman beur” since they not only reproduce the integration problems of North African immigrants in France but also the problems of being accepted among the North African community for those who do not live according to traditions. Issues related to the binary gender roles in society play a central role. Bouraoui and Slimani give in these works voices to the most oppressed individuals in the North African culture: women, homosexuals and people who do not follow traditions at the same time as they are dealing with the integration problems in France. The conclusion is that the historical background and the mixed culture influence the choice of the authors’ profession. Speaking up and writing in an introspective way helped them in their own self-analysis. These analyses also help the reader to understand the situation in the societies and the messages of the writers.

Garçon manqué (2000), premier récit autobiographique de Nina Bouraoui, raconte l'enfance d'une narratrice partagée entre quatre identités conflictuelles -française et algérienne, féminine et masculine -qu'elle cherche à concilier. Bouraoui y expose un cheminement identitaire complexe: alors que le texte s'ouvre sur le désir, très fort, de la jeune Nina de quitter ce qu'elle nomme « le camp » des femmes, il se ferme sur sa réconciliation totale et heureuse avec une féminité apparemment stéréotypée, mais en réalité renouvelée. Cette confusion identitaire est attribuée à la force de pressions sociales et familiales contradictoires à laquelle la narratrice sent devoir se soumettre. Garçon manqué montre comment, de sa prise de conscience du caractère construit de ces diktats, la narratrice en vient à une prise de parole littéraire salvatrice. Notre mémoire s'intéresse à l'évolution de la perception de son genre par la narratrice. D'abord éprouvé comme une structure aliénante et figée, il est finalement considéré comme malléable et potentiellement libérateur. Nous croyons que ce cheminement identitaire se déploie selon trois mouvements principaux, soit la construction, la déconstruction et enfin la reconstruction identitaires. Alors qu'on lit généralement Bouraoui sous l'angle post-colonialiste, l'originalité de notre projet se trouve dans le parti pris que nous adoptons, soit celui de considérer Garçon manqué comme un texte fondateur de son oeuvre en raison avant tout du questionnement sur l'identité sexuelle et sur le désir qu'il renferme. Notre approche intègre les théories féministes matérialistes, les gender studies, les queer studies, et les théories de l'agentivité (« agency »). En premier lieu, nous convoquons principalement des féministes travaillant à étudier les mécanismes d'oppression des femmes selon un point de vue constructiviste et matérialiste. Puis, nous faisons appel à une discipline émergente, les queer studies, qui permettent de lire le rapport de la narratrice à son genre et à ses désirs à l'intérieur d'un espace de réflexion qui fait éclater les frontières de la pensée binaire. Ensuite, nous nous inspirons des théories de l'agentivité (« agency ») et du pouvoir des mots afin de montrer comment le texte littéraire permet à Nina Bouraoui de reprendre possession de sa propre histoire. Enfin, la « théorie du placard » développée par Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick guide notre lecture de l'affirmation du lesbianisme par l'auteure de Garçon manqué, pensée comme un acte de langage risqué, mais stimulant et nécessaire. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Agentivité (Agency), Féminisme, Garçon manqué, Genre, Gender Studies, Nina Bouraoui, Queer Studies, Théorie du placard.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-213). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

In this essay called I withdraw into the gap, which is also a crevice. A nomadic subject comes into being in Nina Bouraoui’s Sauvage, I investigate which aspects in the novel play an important part in relation to the protoganist Alya’s process of becoming a subject in the passage from childhood to adulthood. Through Rosi Braidotti’s theories on the nomadic becoming of a subject I investigate a becoming that is nonunitary, non-linear and constantly changing. This becoming happens in the novel between affects like fear, violence, desire and different experiences of time, and also through a non-chronological narrative and a language which can both deceive, and create the world.       My results show that becoming in Sauvage is about being aware of the outside boundaries and one’s own position in relation to those. For Alya, fear and desire work as transformative and transgressional aspects. In between her affective body and the world which tries to force its boundaries on her, she finds that in between those outside images and her inner affective response, there is a space, a gap, and in the movement between is where she becomes who she is in a process that is a constant negotiation. The subject that emerges in the end of the novel is not a unitary subject, but a nomadic one, that is constantly changing and becoming.

30 years after the coining of autofiction (Doubrovsky, 1977), there is still no general consensus about its exact meaning. This research set out to discover autofiction, whether there is a need for this term, why the public has taken such an interest in autofiction. Research questions were divided into two major categories: 1. What is autofiction? What is its origin? How has it evolved? Which differences are there, if any, between autobiography and autofiction? Is there a need for the separate genre of autofiction? Why/why not? What are its general characteristics? 2. Do the three analysed women authors – Nothomb, Beyala and Bouraoui – incorporate these elements in their writing? If so, how and why? Is autofictional writing a stage/posture in the personal writing development of an author? Is there any link between the writing of the own persona and the obsession with the public persona? Concentrating on terminological and theoretical issues, extensive literature review was done in the first part of the research. Starting from main literary criticism regarding fiction and autobiography/autofiction, the theoretical side of my research dealt with narrative identity and the true/false dichotomy of fact/fiction. Together with qualitative research about intertextuality as applied by autofictional writers (difference plagiarism and intertextual borrowing) led to a functional definition of autofiction, the basis for the comparative study of the three authors. For the research into their public persona, extensive internet research and analysis of newspaper articles were undertaken to show: 1. how the authors portray themselves; 2. how they are perceived by the media; 3. how this possibly influences their writing style. Autofiction requires analysis of: 1. why authors write 2. about what they write 3. how they incorporate the Self and the world in their writing. Bouraoui compares writing to an almost sexual act of love, the most intimate possible. Writing was the only way she could deal with childhood memories and repressed homosexuality. Beyala writes to communicate with others, while Nothomb considers writing as a means to live more intensely, after anorexia. The specificities and distinctive characteristics of the texts and authors were discovered through narrative analysis (factual research into the authors’ public persona + textual analysis of literary oeuvres). In Chapter 3 (Calixthe Beyala), feminine literary criticism as well as postcolonial theories guided my reading. Chapter 4 (Nina Bouraoui) allowed reflexion on the links between memory, identity, truth and autofictional writing. All chapters included research on Doubrovsky’s link between psychoanalysis and autofiction. In conclusion, there is a strong indication that one should speak of autofictions in the plural. This research explains some of the differences between autobiography and autofiction while underlining the importance of the existence of this new, separate sub-genre. The researcher had an opportunity to reflect on human memory and re-interpretation of facts. Where does the dividing line between truth and falsehood fall when the author puts the reader deliberately on a false track by introducing his/her work as « a novel »? Recent, post-modern writing has deliberately transgressed the fine dividing line between fact/fiction. The present research corroborates this view. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

ix, 213 p. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT PQ673 .C53 2007 / This dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which the remembered past of childhood is inscribed in four francophone novels written at the turn of the twenty-first century: Nina Bouraoui's L'âge blessé and Garçon manqué, Ying Chen's Le champ dans la mer, and Gisèle Pineau's L'espérance-macadam. These texts belong to a substantial corpus of contemporary narratives in which the remembering of childhood experiences plays a central role. Within that corpus we find a new approach to childhood emerging, one in which an unfamiliar past returns through the remembered voice of a wounded child. This voice overwhelms the text, fracturing the narrative through the irruption of images that it cannot contain. This dissertation is a study of the characteristics of this new "aesthetics of rupture." Memories of childhood in these texts are overshadowed by shattering past events that went unrecognized and unacknowledged. As a result of the wounds inflicted upon the child, the adult narrator remembers the past through physical symptoms of pain. Far from suturing the wounds of the past, remembering childhood becomes an incessant confrontational engagement with past traumas. The reader is then able to hear the scream of the wide-eyed child through a process of empathetic identification with the narrator's visceral memories. My introductory chapters provide a historical context to the development of representations of childhood in French and Francophone literature. Chapter III studies the ways in which childhood memories can actualize the past as a set of interruptive and destabilizing images. Theories of the non-representational revelation of the past serve as a starting point to my reading of Bouraoui's L'âge blessé. Chapter IV concentrates on the affective quality of memories so as to understand the narrator's ambivalent affective relationship to the past of childhood in Chen's Le champ dans la mer. Chapter V attempts to capture the ways in which the memory of a child's voice can be heard as a literary scream in Bouraoui's Garçon manqué. Chapter VI is a reading of Pineau's L'espérance-macadam in which I take into account the unseen gaze of the child to consider the role of hope in this text. / Adviser: Karen McPherson

<p>This is a study of the novel <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em> (2005) by the French writer Nina Bouraoui. I use an intertextual comparative method, where I read the novel against three intertexts: Marie Cardinal <em>Les mots pour le dire</em> (1975), the David Lynch movie <em>Mulholland Drive </em>(2001) and novels and photographies by Hervé Guibert. Main focus is on the relation between body and language. Using the psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva I examine the melancholy of the narrator in <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em>. The melancholic subject mourns a Thing which is the unrepresentable archaic mother. Melancholy is connected to the notion of exile; the subject belongs to a lost place in the past which it is still holding on to. The narrator of <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em> is still living in her childhood, even though she is a grown up woman. I show how the place from where she speaks is the child. The female body and the female sexuality are not represented in the text, there is a missing link between the female body and it’s representation in language – in the symbolic order. According to Kristeva the melancholic denies the loss of the Thing – in the end the mother – and clings to the unrepresentable void. By realizing and acknowledging the loss one can reconstruct the bond to the archaic mother in language. Bouraoui’s failure in writing <em>the feminine</em> into the text is interesting because it puts lights on the conditions of writing the body for women. The theory of l’écriture féminine is an inspiration for the analyses and I contrast it to Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. There is a conflict in what constitutes gender and sex between psychoanalysis and queer theory, which is also found in the narrator in Bouraoui’s novel – trying to create herself through pure performativity she never succeeds to act independently of the mother and the female body.</p>

This is a study of the novel Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) by the French writer Nina Bouraoui. I use an intertextual comparative method, where I read the novel against three intertexts: Marie Cardinal Les mots pour le dire (1975), the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive (2001) and novels and photographies by Hervé Guibert. Main focus is on the relation between body and language. Using the psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva I examine the melancholy of the narrator in Mes mauvaises pensées. The melancholic subject mourns a Thing which is the unrepresentable archaic mother. Melancholy is connected to the notion of exile; the subject belongs to a lost place in the past which it is still holding on to. The narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées is still living in her childhood, even though she is a grown up woman. I show how the place from where she speaks is the child. The female body and the female sexuality are not represented in the text, there is a missing link between the female body and it’s representation in language – in the symbolic order. According to Kristeva the melancholic denies the loss of the Thing – in the end the mother – and clings to the unrepresentable void. By realizing and acknowledging the loss one can reconstruct the bond to the archaic mother in language. Bouraoui’s failure in writing the feminine into the text is interesting because it puts lights on the conditions of writing the body for women. The theory of l’écriture féminine is an inspiration for the analyses and I contrast it to Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. There is a conflict in what constitutes gender and sex between psychoanalysis and queer theory, which is also found in the narrator in Bouraoui’s novel – trying to create herself through pure performativity she never succeeds to act independently of the mother and the female body.

No description available.

This thesis, situated in the context of francophone and maghrebian postcolonial studies, examines the impact of identity discourses on the protagonists’ subjectivity in Assia Djebar’s La Femme sans sépulture (2002) and La Disparition de la langue française (2003) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000) and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005). These novels draw a parallel between two historically connected spaces, France and Algeria, and periods,  the years of the Algerian war of independence and the rise of Islamists in 1990s  Algeria. The movement between the two spaces and periods constitutes in a literal and figurative sense a third space that contributes to the protagonist’s hybridisation. Hybridity is analysed as a narrative and discursive strategy that subverts and recodifies different identity dis­courses that transmit normative ideas about cultural, ethnic and gendered belonging. Hybridity is also shown in the literary genre. By connecting the past and the present through individual and collective reminiscence, the four novels reinterpret history while transgressing the frontiers of classical genres: the fictional, the testimonial and the autobiographical intertwine with the historiographical. Through the character of the narrator-cineaste and the story of Zoulikha, Assia Djebar reconstitutes in La Femme sans sépulture her own heritage and that of the interviewed women which is associated with Luce Irigaray’s theory of feminine genealogy as a model of identification. The languages’ different transcultural influences are shown in La Disparition de la langue française in the light of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural translation. Bouraoui’s fiction shows more radically than Djebar’s the body as a surface of cultural inscription, determined by ethnic and gendered norms. To emphasize the sociocultural dimension of the Bouraouian protagonist’s problems of identity the analysis uses Judith Butler’s theories about the performativity, the recognition and the melancholy of gender. In the four novels the return to one’s origins remains an illusion. The only place where the protagonists can negotiate and express their hybrid subjectivity is constituted in and through their writing. / Cette thèse, située dans le contexte des études francophones maghrébines et postcoloniales, analyse l’impact des discours identitaires sur la subjectivité des protagonistes dans La Femme sans sépulture (2002) et La Disparition de la langue française (2003) d’Assia Djebar, et dans Garçon manqué (2000) et Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) de Nina Bouraoui. Ces romans  mettent en parallèle deux espaces historiquement liés, la France et l’Algérie, et deux périodes, le temps de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne et les années 1990 avec la montée des islamistes en Algérie. Le mouvement entre les deux espaces et temps constitue au sens littéral et au sens figuré un tiers espace, qui contribue à l’hybridation des protagonistes. L’hybridité est analysée comme une stratégie narrative et discursive qui subvertit et récodifie différents discours identitaires véhiculant des idées normatives concernant l’appartenance culturelle, ethnique et genrée des protagonistes. L’hybridation se reflète également dans le genre littéraire. À travers la remémoration individuelle et collective des événements passés mis en rapport avec le présent, les quatre romans donnent une nouvelle signification à l’Histoire en transgressant les frontières entre les genres classiques : le fictionnel, le témoignage et l’autobiographique s’inscrivent dans l’historiographique. Moyennant le personnage de la narratrice-cinéaste et l’histoire de Zoulikha, Djebar reconstitue dans La Femme sans sépulture, son propre héritage et celle des femmes interviewées, ce qui est associé à la théorie de Luce Irigaray sur la généalogie féminine au sens d’un modèle d’identification. Les différentes influences transculturelles des langues sont éclairées dans La Disparition de la langue française à la lumière de la théorie de la traduction culturelle de Homi Bhabha. Bouraoui montre plus radicalement que Djebar le corps comme surface d’inscription culturelle gérée par des normes ethnicisantes et genrées. Pour souligner la dimension socioculturelle des problèmes identitaires de la protagoniste bouraouienne, les théories de Judith Butler concernant la performativité du genre, la reconnaissance et la mélancolie genrée sont utilisées. Le retour à l’origine reste dans les quatre romans illu­soire. Le seul lieu où les protagonistes puissent négocier et exprimer leur subjectivité hybride est constitué dans et à travers l’écriture.