This study is about three French plays in which Jocasta, the mother and wife of Oedipus, is shared as a main character: La Thébaïde (The Theban Brothers) by Jean Racine, La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine) by Jean Cocteau, and Le Nom d’Oedipe (The Name of Oedipus) by Hélène Cixous. Jocasta has always been overshadowed by the tragic destiny of Oedipus since the onset of Sophocles’ works. Although these three plays commonly focus on describing the character of Jocasta, there are some remarkable differences among them in terms of theme, style, and stage directions. In The Theban Brothers, Racine’s 17th century play, Jocasta is described as a deathlike mother, while Cocteau’s Jocasta, in The Infernal Machine, is portrayed as an “extravagant, liberal, and hilarious” lady. In The Name of Oedipus, Cixous portrays Jocasta as a woman possessing hermaphroditic characteristics, ushering in a new era of resistance to the age-old paternal hierarchy. As for style, Racine’s neoclassical play shows a strict respect for the three unities of time, space, and action. Cocteau’s avant-garde play neglects all these rules, while Cixous goes even further by destroying the order of languages, as illustrated by her “feminine writing.” Freed from Western orthodoxy, Cixous wants to contribute to the creation of cosmic unity. Her deconstructionist play intends to regenerate the world by establishing a new order and new point of view towards universality. The stage directions of these plays are also an important key to better understanding theatrical evolution. It is through the stage directions, indicated both implicitly and explicitly in these three plays, iv that enables us to appreciate the theatrical transformation in terms of visualization as well as metaphysics. In sum, the transformation of theme, style, and stage devices in portraying their own Jocastas demonstrates that while these three plays are deconstructional to one another, each denying the existing value and orders of their respective time periods, they are also constructional in that they all attempt to open a new horizon of theatre

I trace Jacques Derrida's notions of self and truth in Circumfession. This text paints a gruesome self-portrait depicting the inescapable violence of subjectivity. The self is born in blood. Derrida courageously confesses to being a casualty of this lovelessness. Similarly, exploring the depth of patriarchy's inscriptions requires facing the painful truth of my bleeding self. Investigating these wounds seems to reopen them, making me complicit in my own oppression. Drawing from the rich narrative of Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina, I allow feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Drucilla Cornell and bell hooks to engage Derrida's notions of the wounded and wounding self. Beginning in this bloody place, they attempt to write a way-out of the disempowering systems of subjectivity to which the female self seems confined. They write in order that love will bleed some light on the struggle for empowered female subjectivity, re-writing the self as a space of love rather than violence.

This essay examines the inherent instability present in Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 novel Howl’s Moving Castle. I suggest that in relying on the ambiguity of the story and the setting, Jones creates not only a more complex universe, but allows the characters to be multidimensional -- both literally and figuratively -- without having any stable selves. Using deconstruction as a (non-existent) foundation for my analysis, I contend that the strength of the story is in the looseness of it. Thus, by using a Derridean approach with added Cixousian feminist elements and a heap of Kristevian intertextuality, I further argue that Jones invites the reader to embrace the ambiguity of identity by closely analyzing the conflicting behaviours of the two main characters in the novel, Sophie Hatter and Wizard Howl. In conclusion, I argue that Diana Wynne Jones through subverting classic fairy tale tropes in an ingenious way, suggests that there is no such thing as a final finished growing person and that there is comfort to be found in embracing this incompleteness.

Cette thèse porte sur trois textes autobiographiques qui questionnent, à travers l’élaboration d’une pensée de l’événement, les oppositions convenues entre fiction et témoignage. L’Événement (2000) d’Annie Ernaux, Le jour où je n’étais pas là (2000) d’Hélène Cixous et L’Instant de ma mort (1994) de Maurice Blanchot présentent le récit autoréférentiel d’un événement traumatique, soit un avortement clandestin pour Ernaux, la mort en bas âge d’un enfant trisomique pour Cixous et la mise en joue par un soldat nazi lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour Blanchot. Ce corpus, quoique hétérogène à plusieurs égards, loge à l’enseigne d’une littérature placée sous le signe de l’aveu, de la confession et de la révélation ; cette littérature porterait au jour ce qui était jusque-là demeuré impossible à dire. Partant de la figure de la honte inscrite dans ces trois œuvres, mais aussi dans d’autres textes de ces écrivains qui permettent de déployer ce qui se trame de secret et d’événement dans le corpus principal, cette thèse a pour objectif d’analyser les déplacements et les retours d’un trauma gardé secret pendant une quarantaine d’années et qui remonte, par la voie de l’événement, à la surface de l’écriture. Sous la double impulsion de la pensée de Jacques Derrida et de l’approche psychanalytique, cette thèse s’intéresse à la question de l’événement à l’œuvre chez Ernaux, Cixous et Blanchot. Dans chacune de ces œuvres, un événement traumatique intervient comme révélateur de l’écriture et d’un rapport singulier à la pensée de l’événement, marqué soit historiquement et politiquement (Blanchot), soit intimement (Cixous et Ernaux). Par l’écriture, ces auteurs tentent en effet de rendre compte de l’authenticité de l’événement ressenti, problématisant du même coup la nature et la fonction de l’événement tant réel que psychique dans le récit de soi. L’événement est ainsi abordé dans son caractère historique, psychanalytique mais également philosophique, ontologique ; la pensée de l’événement mise à l’épreuve des textes d’Ernaux, de Cixous et de Blanchot permet d’explorer les figures de la date, de l’archive, de la mort et du deuil qui lui sont liées, en plus de donner lieu à une poétique singulière chez chacun. Enfin, la thèse traite du rapport entre l’aveu de l’événement et la langue qui, défiant l’opposition traditionnelle du constatif et du performatif, entraîne l’événement du récit, cet autre événement qui arrive en même temps que le récit de l’événement traumatique. / This thesis focuses on three autobiographical texts: Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement (2000) [Happening], Hélène Cixous’s Le jour où je n’étais pas là (2000) [The Day I Wasn’t There] and Maurice Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort (1994) [The Instant of My Death]. Each presents a self-referential narrative of a traumatic event: respectively, Ernaux’s illegal abortion, the death in infancy of a child with Down’s syndrome for Cixous and Blanchot’s experience of having been aimed at by a Nazi soldier during World War II. These three texts work out a conception of the event and therefore question the conventional opposition between fiction and testimony. This corpus, although heterogeneous in many respects, is brought together under the sign of literary confessions, avowals and disclosures. Such literary writing is intent on unraveling or bringing to light what had hitherto remained impossible to say. This thesis analyzes the movements and returns of a trauma kept secret for over forty years which ultimately, by way of the event, resurfaces in writing. The thesis’s point of departure is the figure of shame found in the three works. Yet other texts of the same writers are summoned in an attempt to untangle the secrets and events woven in the main corpus. Under the impulse of both Jacques Derrida’s thought and that of psychoanalysis, this thesis focuses on the events in the making in Ernaux, Cixous and Blanchot’s writings. In each of these works, a traumatic event occurs and reveals the links between writing and a philosophy of the event, be it inscribed historically and politically (Blanchot) or intimately (Cixous and Ernaux). In their writings, these authors attempt to give an authentic account of the event as they experienced it, while at the same time problematizing the nature and function of both the real and the psychic event in self-writing. The event is addressed in its historical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical, ontological dimensions. Close attention to the texts of Ernaux, Cixous and Blanchot allows one to explore the figures of the date, the archive, as well as that of death and work of mourning. Moreover, a singular poetics emerge for each writer. Finally, the thesis deals with the relationship between the acknowledgement of the event and language. Notwithstanding the traditional opposition between constative and performative speech acts, another event—the event of narration—arises at the same time as the traumatic event is narrated.

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This thesis aims to analyze Dorothy Cross’s sculptural, installation, and video works in relation to Ireland’s Post-Conflict struggle with its cultural and global identity. Throughout the course of history, Ireland’s identity has always been in question, sparking new interest over the last thirty years in producing an Irish identity discerned by “hybridity, multiplicity, and mobility.”[1] Declan McGonagle states that the traditional Irish constructs of gender and sexuality were primarily challenged by Dorothy Cross during this period of rapid sociopolitical change.[2] Cross consistently deconstructs pre-Christian Mother Ireland and patriarchal Catholic Ireland in her early sculptural works, and ultimately transitions towards communicating a collective identity rooted in loss and desire. [3] The constructions of gendered, cultural, and collective identity are dismantled across multiple media throughout Cross’s oeuvre, which can be analyzed through a synthesis of poststructuralist, postmodern, and French feminist theory. In evaluating Dorothy Cross’s destabilization of identity, I will expand the literature on contemporary Irish art during the nation’s turbulent time of globalization, which has been underemphasized in the study of contemporary European art. [1] Robin Lydenberg, “Contemporary Irish Art on the Move: At Home and Abroad with Dorothy Cross,” Éire-Ireland: a Journal of Irish Studies 39, no. 3/4 (2004): 145. [2] Declan McGonagle, Fintan O’Toole, and Kim Levin, Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (London: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 1999): 19. [3] Enrique Juncosa and Sean Kissane, eds, Dorothy Cross (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2005), 16.

The thesis deals with four plays written by French dramatist and theorist of feminism Hélène Cixous for the Parisian Théâtre du Soleil under the directorial guidance of Ariane Mnouchkine. The analysis focuses on three different perspectives - firstly on écriture feminine, defined in the 1970s by Cixous herself, secondly on exile studies, a field of literary criticism concerned with the writings of exiled authors and exile as a fundamental category of human existence, and lastly on the concept of orientalism developed in the 1970s by American literary historian of Palestinian origin Edward Said.

My visual art practice explores the point at which a sense of bodily humour and revulsion may intersect in the world of the monstrous-feminine: the female grotesque, presented as my own obese (and post-obese) body. This exegesis is a written elucidation of my visual art practice as research. As an artist I create performative photographic images featuring taboo or otherwise 'inappropriate' subject matter, situations, materials and behaviours including bodily fluids, offal, internal organs and my own post-obese body. Through these modes of working, I establish and investigate the subjectivity of flesh: Why are we repulsed by the female grotesque? How can this flesh be used to subvert readings of the female body? My research is informed by those understandings of the female body, sexuality and difference described in the work of feminist theorists including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Ruth Salvaggio and Elizabeth Grosz. I explore the work of influential artists such as Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. In this context, I present my own visual art practice as a point from which the monstrous-feminine can be given voice as sentient, intelligent flesh.

Le Mouvement de libération des femmes en France ne fut pas seulement un mouvement politique et social, ce fut également l’une des dernières, si ce n’est la dernière, avant-garde littéraire que la France a connue. Du point de vue international, l’activité des littératrices au sein du Mouvement constitue un des principes distinctifs de la lutte des femmes en France. Les manifestantes qui déposent publiquement une gerbe de fleurs à la femme plus inconnue encore que le soldat inconnu sous l’Arc de Triomphe le 26 août 1970, sont déjà pour certaines – appelées à le devenir pour d’autres – des écrivaines. Dix ans plus tard, le MLF, depuis peu marque déposée à l’Institut national de la propriété industrielle, appartient à une éditrice, Antoinette Fouque, promotrice d’une écriture dite féminine. Dans l’espace circonscrit par ces deux points fixes, paraît un ensemble de textes qui s’inscrivent au sein de deux tendances majoritaires – mais antagonistes – du Mouvement, le féminisme d’une part et la néo-féminité, ou éloge de la différence, d’autre part. En miroir, un double rhizome éditorial se développe, partageant maisons d’édition et revues en deux factions militantes et littéraires bien distinctes. Pendant dix ans, la littérature se met tout autant au service du Mouvement des femmes que le Mouvement irradie la littérature, chacun-e influençant et informant la pratique et la pensée de l’autre. C’est de cette coïncidence entre littérature et Mouvement de libération des femmes que le présent écrit se propose de rendre compte, afin de retracer un mouvement politique qui fut et se fit littéraire, et, dans le même élan, une littérature qui fut et se fit politique. Par là même, la thèse redouble la question posée par tout un mouvement de femmes à la littérature elle-même, contestant ses définitions premières et repoussant les limites qui lui ont été assignées. / The Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) was not only a political and social movement, but one of the last, if not the very last, literary avant-garde that France has experienced. From an international perspective, the activity of the literary women within the movement represents one of the fundamental principles of the fight for women’s rights in France. The demonstrators, who publicly placed a bouquet of flowers for the unknown wife of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on August 26th 1970, are for some, and are soon to become for others, women writers. Ten years later, the MLF, a recently registered trademark with the National Institute for Intellectual Property Rights, belongs to the editor, Antoinette Fouque, promotor of female writing. Within the space determined by these two fixed points, there exists a collection of texts that adhere to two major trends – although antagonistic – of the movement, Feminism on one hand and Neofeminity, or the praise for “difference”, on the other hand. Mirroring each other, a dual editorial form develops, sharing publishers and scholarly journals, into two distinct literary and militant factions. For ten years, literature served the purpose of the Women’s Liberation Movement as much as the latter promoted literature, each influencing and informing the other by practice and thought. It is precisely this coexistence between literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement that the present dissertation proposes to examine, in order to trace the political movement that was and made itself literary, and, by the same token, a literature that was and made itself political. At the same time, the dissertation continues the question asked of literature by an entire women’s movement, challenging its assigned definitions and pushing back its boundaries.

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