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In this dissertation I will be analyzing the verbal representations of architectural descriptions in order to highlight their visual capacity and impact on the reader. My goal is to examine how nineteenth century French authors attempt to re-create the visual, spatial and temporal effect of architectural space through verbal representation. I will do this by examining selected narratives, spanning the century, and concentrating mostly on Greece, North Africa and the Middle East. I have selected these countries and not the Western European ones as most of the abovementioned countries offered an "alien" culture, thus deepening the effect of "otherness". The obvious difference between the cultures of the lands visited and European cultures made it necessary for the authors to describe those places in a manner that facilitates the French reader's understanding and visualization of them. I will study the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem of François-René de Chateaubriand, the Voyage en Orient of Alphonse de Lamartine, the Voyage en Orient of Gérard de Nerval, the Voyage en Orient of Gustave Flaubert, the Voyage en Egypte and Constantinople of Théophile Gautier and finally Voyages of Pierre Loti. I have selected these authors in particular as they span the nineteenth century, thus giving me the opportunity to offer a historical perspective to this dissertation. I have chosen to lay emphasis on architectural space, because of the interest shown for architecture in travel narratives, particularly the ones I am examining. In the nineteenth century, the urbanization of Paris may have influenced the interest generated in artists and writers for architecture. Through the medium of language and its rhetorical tools, the author tries to convey his perception to the reader. The traveling authors may have been influenced by major literary movements, prior knowledge while perceiving landscape, monuments and people, but what they held before them was reality for them at that given moment. It is thus the moment of perception and all the anterior factors that influence it that become the defining one for the description that follows. The traveling authors gave their input to the rhetoric of description. They had a visible influence on this rhetoric. In this dissertation, I hope to have illustrated the many modalities of descriptive techniques that they used. The visual aesthetics of the travel narrative however, are defined by that one moment when the author lives and feels his immediate environment. The narrative that emerges from it is then, in modern terms, a virtual image gallery.

For nearly two hundred years, France has been home to more immigrants than any other European country. The literatures that come out of twentieth-century immigrations represent a living and fluid genre, one that is constantly being transformed and transforming itself by the lived experience of immigrants. My dissertation analyzes the representations of first generation North African immigrants from the nineteen-fifties and sixties by their children in Arabo-French immigration cultural productions. The structure of this study is that of a comparative analysis, examining the representations of immigrants in film and literature and specifically analyzing the points of convergence and divergence in the development and perpetuation of stereotypical discourse. The "Beur generation" paved the way for dialogue about and representation of post-World War II North African migrant labor through the opening of a polyphonic discourse concerning colonial and post-colonial history. Beur authors and cinematographers have broken the long-standing collective pact of silence surrounding the first generation of North African immigrants, a silence which has led to an incomplete and therefore partly imagined history of a generation that is spoken of, but who does not speak. In filling the void concerning North African parents, these works often result in filtered representation and history as they reproduce the very stereotypes about first generation immigrants that are so rampant in dominant French culture; the "reconstruction" of history and the representation of its actors that takes place through Beur cultural productions are thereby strongly influenced by dominant French institutions. The Beur generation in France, inheritors of their Algerian immigrant parents' past, reconstruct and reinterpret their history with the filters of their own experiences and the subversive presence of French institutions. It is in these margins that history is constructed but also filtered through the gaze of others.

Women novelists in Algeria emerged in the 1980's and have reached a pinnacle of acclaim over the last twenty years among individuals of diverse backgrounds. Rooted in the past of the national liberation war and characterized by its rebellious nature, their literature combats practices of patriarchy, the obsolete content of the national family code, and the barbarity of ongoing religious fundamentalism. Confined to the patriarchal system, marginalized by the laws of the family code; outraged by the Islamists' threats, revolted and tired of the archaic laws of their society, Algerian female novelists are still struggling with the constraints of their gender. My dissertation studies fictional narratives by women who struggle against the violence and patriarchy inherent in traditional Algerian society. I analyze the thematic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies in three novels: N'zid, Surtout ne te retourne pas and La Jeune fille et la mère. Through close readings of the texts, I focus on how these writers combat the collective and ancestral silencing of women by transforming through textual violence an identity inherited from colonial and patriarchal discourses in order to construct a new subjectivity that escapes traditional structures. I also show how these novelists express their opposition to the fundamentalists' views to escape from the reactionary attitudes of fanatics and those who advocate an uncompromising stance towards women.

I analyze how fiction and non-fiction by women challenge the legal status and social roles imposed on French and Francophone female citizens by juridical institutions and practices from the eighteenth through the late twentieth century. Through close readings, I focus on women's determination to seek equality of civil rights by denouncing the effects of the Napoleonic code which had reduced them legally to the status of minors. I argue how women novelists, in particular, have denounced social and familial inequalities in order to provide all women with access to higher education and fulfilling careers. In so doing, these writers have defied models of education that had long privileged patriarchal orders. These women also struggled against outmoded laws that made contraception and abortion illegal. I show how these writers have tried to undo the bourgeois myth of the nuclear couple by calling for consensual alliances that rehabilitate women to full equality. I conclude by noting how these texts calling for an end to patriarchal prejudice fashion alternative models of womanhood to existing laws and statutes.

This research addressed teaching the French language as a foreign language in Yemen. The research investigated the historical development of teaching French in Yemen and analyzed the methodologies used in teaching the French language. Several research methods were used in collecting data for the analysis of this research. Methods included a survey, interviews with faculty members and students, lectures, attendance at the French department the University of Sana’a, Yemen. All the methods helped tremendously in conducting this research. They helped specifically to answer the following research problem statement: - How were foreign languages introduced to the Yemeni society?- How and why is the French language being taught in Yemen? - Who is studying the French language in Yemen? - What are the methods being used in teaching the French language in Yemen? - What is the status of teaching the French language at the college level? - What are the main obstacles in teaching the French language in Yemen? This research is considered the first academic study in Yemen about teaching French as a foreign language at the college level. It is hoped that this research will be a reference to government officials to aid them in improving the college curriculum as well as a resource for future scholars.

Michel Tremblay, the most important contemporary playwright (and novelist) in Quebec, has written for the theatre for over forty years. The study of his plays, beginning with the very first ones, reveals the capital importance that he attributes to the problem of the past and of memory. This dissertation examines how memory plays the role of protagonist in Tremblay’s drama: the study of Les Belles-Soeurs, (the writer’s first famous play, where memory is a tool for building gender identity), of Le Vrai Monde? (one of his most complex plays, where memory is concretely represented on the stage) and of Encore une fois, si vous permettez and Bonbons assortis au theatre (two autobiographical plays) demonstrates the accuracy of this proposition. Tremblay’s work is evidently integrated into the historical and social context of Quebec, where a preoccupation with memory, registered in their slogan Je me souviens (I remember), is a fundamental component of the imaginary of this people in constant quest for and affirmation of their identity, as well as a testimony to their resistance to the threat of assimilation by the Anglophone world that surrounds them.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Droit--Bordeaux 4, 2005. / Bibliogr p. 697-748. Webliogr. p. 749-750.

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