Julien Gracq' s quest for the "au-delà" is similar in many ways to the Surrealists' attempts to get in touch with the Beyond and to find that mythical and ideal point where binary oppositions are no longer contradictory but complementary. However, he differs greatly from the Surrealists in that his writing is anything but "automatic". Whereas he acknowledges being influenced by the Surrealists' ideas and by the works of certain authors, notably Goethe, Wagner, and Edgar Allen Poe, his works are a unique and carefully constructed web of style techniques, double-entendres, intertextual references, poetic devices, and a deliberate blurring of the dividing line between clear and obscure.

Spiritual, mystic and natural boundaries haunt the writings of Henri Bosco. Critics such as Bachelard have studied Bosco's interpretation of the natural elements and noted his sensitive portrayal of the protagonists with a focus on their unconscious desires by the use of this device. In Le Mas Theotime Bosco has unleashed his artistic and poetic creativity in addition to his passion for nature. Indeed, of all of Bosco's novels, perhaps this one exemplifies the quintessential harmony of man with nature. As suggested by Jean-Claude Godin: " ... il n'y a que dans Le Mas Theotime oil elles soient veritablement au coeur du recit ... La reverie de la terre debouche alors sur toutes les images de l'intimite heureuse." (Godin 176) It is also the essence of Provence, its legends and its natural beauty that plays an integral role in this novel. Not only does Bosco explore the natural elements, but he also explores the religious myths that so influence our society. This thesis will explore, through a symbolic and religious interpretation, the boundaries which prevail throughout. Le Mas Theotime incorporates Bosco's true genius as a writer who brings to his reader the possibility of a personal rendition and view of the story. His is not a straightforward and evident recollection of events, but rather a voyage through and involvement in the lives and minds of the characters.

Albert Camus' posthumously published novel, Le Premier Homme, shows a new facet of this great twentieth-century writer's art. Intensely personal, the novel speaks of the coming of age of a "pied-noir" (French Algerian) boy and his search for roots as an adult. Simultaneously, Camus endeavors to tell the story of his ancestors, the French Algerians. The purpose of this thesis is to examine protagonist Jacques Cormery's search for roots by: 1) discussing the formative elements of his identity uncovered in the nostalgic voyage in time through an anecdotal construction of his childhood and the history of his ancestors, 2) linking recurring themes to selected works which will include: L'Envers et l'endroit, L'Etranger, La Peste, and L'Exil et le Royaume, emphasizing the prevalent intertextual allusions, and 3) drawing parallels between the text and Camus' biography, and his artistic and philosophical vision. First, I demonstrate how themes common to Le Premier Homme and Camus' previous work are interwoven. Throughout the body of his work one finds images of poverty as well as the themes of silence, "strangers/outsiders", the mother/son relationship and communion with nature. I identify and analyze the primary influences in the formation of Camus' "first" (or original) man. These include: the father (as forgotten and enigmatic), the surrogate fathers whom Jacques finds in the uncle and the teacher, and the grandmother. Additonally, I establish the autobiographical underpinnings of Camus' thinly veiled protagonist, Jacques Cormery, by comparing the story in the novel with Camus' biography. A discussion of style deals with influences and the writer's narrative technique. Examples of his use of ambiguity, paradox, and irony are cited in addition to some of the unique imagery. Finally, I demonstrate that this vivid resuscitation of Jacques Cormery's childhood world as autobiography reflects some of the sources of Albert Camus' vision. The novel underscores the lessons of poverty, Camus' admiration for the poor working class "pied-noirs" who live in the present, Sisyphean models, and the notion of ambiguity.

Gabrielle Roy's novels are filled with images of childhood and aging, of family, of rural and urban French-Canadian settings, and of Roy's experiences as a young, impressionable teacher. The generation gaps present themselves in many human relationships and thread themselves throughout Roy's works. For this thesis, the generation gaps will be studied in three important relationships. Part One presents largely the relationships within the microcosm of the family. It explores the gap between mothers and daughters. La Rue Deschambault, La Route d'Altamont, and Bonheur d'Occasion are included. The relationship between the father and child in La Rue Deschambault, Bonheur d'Occasion, and Alexandre Chenevert will then be explored. Important elements of these relationships are: the circle of life, the inevitable resemblances between parent and child, and their reversal of roles as the parent ages. Part Two focuses on bridging the gap between teacher and student in Gabrielle Roy's works. This relationship is studied extensively in both La Petite Poule d'Eau and Ces Enfants de Ma Vie. The teachers in Roy's works represent the link from the family to the outside world, as education empowers students to progress. Part Two also presents the elderly as teachers of the children in their lives. This special relationship is seen in La Route d'Altamont. Part Three studies the relationship between life and nature. Roy's urban novels, Bonheur d'Occasion and Alexandre Chenevert, in which the author draws contrasts between rural and urban life, are explored. The gap between the urban dweller and nature is focused on in Alexandre Chenevert. The bond that links humankind and animals is studied in La Montagne Secrete. There is an important contrast between the inherent need for solitude and humankind's communion. The artist's place within the universe is shown to be unique. In this macro setting of humankind and the universe, all human relation ships take their places within these interwoven, circular patterns.

"Paradoxes of Particularity: Caribbean Literary Imaginaries," explores Caribbean literary responses to nationalism by focusing on Anglophone and Francophone post-war Caribbean novels as well as a selection of short fiction published in the 1930s and `40s. Because many Caribbean nations gained their independence relatively recently (Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1960s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the `70s, Antigua and St. Kitts in the `80s) and because some remain colonial possessions (Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.), nationalism and its alternatives are of major literary concern to Caribbean authors. This project considers how and to what extent the writings of such authors as Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Robert Antoni counter nationalist tendencies with Pan-Caribbean alternatives, arguing that the Caribbean texts under examination propose that we view the Caribbean as a unified region despite substantial differences (racial, linguistic, colonial, etc.) that otherwise tend to encourage separate, nationalist sentiments. Moreover, these Caribbean texts paradoxically emphasize discrete identities based on racial pasts and language communities, even as they forward a Pan-Caribbean ideology: uniqueness is, for many Caribbean writers, the fundamental basis for a unified sense of "Caribbeanness." This project dubs the phenomenon the "paradox of particularity," and identifies it as a postcolonial rhetorical strategy in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. After an historical introduction, Chapter One examines the increasingly Pan-Caribbean content of Barbadian literary journal Bim, Martinican ex-patriate journal La Revue du Monde Noir, and BBC radio program Caribbean Voices. Each of these media sources encouraged contributors to focus on topics that were of central and unique concern to his/her island community. However, these concerns often overlapped: authors from multiple islands submitted fiction and essays touching on labor struggles, the plight of the poor, wartime anxieties, and racial inequalities. Thus, in printing that which was nominally unique and particular to individual islands, these widely digested media sources in fact highlighted similarities throughout the archipelago, setting the stage for bolder expressions of a particularity-based regionalism. Chapter Two focuses on the Pan-Caribbean antillanité of Edouard Glissant. In Glissant's fiction, the only character capable of both recovering this past and of uniting the Caribbean is the defiantly isolated maroon (and, occasionally, his male descendants). Set against the backdrop of Martinique's fight to become a semi-autonomous département of France and the emergence of Jamaica and Trinidad as independent national entities, Glissant's novel La Lézarde (1958) at once celebrates postcolonial zeal for independence, and emphasizes that national autonomy is the first step in a process of regional unification. Chapter Three looks at gendered and cultural counterpoints to Glissant's notion of "marooning," through novels that reimagine the history of New World slavery and the Caribbean Black Power Movement. The chapter focuses on Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent Sur Telumée Miracle (1972), in which an ostracized sorceress attempts to unite her fragmented community, Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, Sorcèriere Noire de Salem (1988), which imagines a Glissantian link between Barbados, other Caribbean islands, and North America through the benevolent workings of a black female maroon, André and Schwarz-Bart's La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), which both recuperates an historical maroon figure (as, indeed does Condé) and imaginatively reconstructs the African past which informs her New World rebellion, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984), which features a psychologically marooned heroine who imagines not only a unified Caribbean, but also a Caribbean that serves as the racially inclusive bridge between diasporic communities in North and South America. Ultimately, in identifying female maroons as the unifying agents of cultural transmission, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, and Cliff's experimental fiction not only proposes a feminist, regional alternative to patriarchal nationalism, but imaginatively links colonized Caribbean citizens to broader, nation-less communities of suffering. Chapter Four focuses even more explicitly on formal and linguistic experimentation by examining Trinidadian Robert Antoni's Divina Trace (1991), and Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992) in relation to literary postmodernism. Rather than casting a wise maroon as the oracular voice of wisdom, both novels deluge us with a heteroglossic babble of voices, paradoxically suggesting that the potential for Caribbean interconnectedness lies in the collision of multiple, idiosyncratic uses of language. Moreover, by testing the boundaries of the novel form, these texts gesture toward the possibility of formally innovative alternatives to the nation-state. Thus, this project both identifies the "paradox of particularity" (in which difference is the defining component of group identity) as a postcolonial tactic in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction and demonstrates the intense political engagement of experimental modernist and postmodern Caribbean fiction. By strategically keeping individuality and collectivity in tension with one another, these writers offer a model for postcolonial independence that both preserves autonomy and avoids mimicking the colonial Western nation-state.

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This Master's Thesis examines what happens when African and Caribbean characters in France or in their own country meet the Other in Francophone literature. How do interracial relationships construct/deconstruct the concept of an intertwined identity? This comparative project explores three 20th century Francophone women writers from Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the West Indies in order to show how their novels construct or deconstruct the identities of migrated female characters through their interracial erotic and amorous relationships. Starting with Plato's Banquet which describes the origin of love as a splitting of identity and the quest of love as a quest to make that identity whole again, I problematize that notion through the intercultural encounters between the female main character and the white male in a postcolonial context. The study focuses on how the Other influences the female character and intervenes in the construction of the self, and looks at otherness as both an exterior force (the lover, the physical other) and an interior force (recognizing part of the self as other). It also explores how love and desire act as filters and motivators that influence the perception of the other and the self. My hypothesis is the following: the "ethnic woman" turns her foreigner status from a fragile one into one of strength and uses the Other for her integration into the Western society. Through otherness, she grasps a better understanding of the Other but also of herself. That encounter in all three novels pushes the ethnic female to return to her roots. Identities are not just hybrid but rather in a constant process of construction, a shift in self-construction in the globalized contemporary world. The female characters reflect the tendency to rethink not only what this new identity is but also the process of identity construction itself. By studying how women authors write on race and interracial relationships, this thesis offers a new understanding of the relation between love and identity and the female in Postcolonial Studies. Through her romantic relationships with the white male, the female has ultimately the power to decide for herself, which includes deciding to leave the relationship and leave for the sake of her newly found identity.

Following their independence in the 1960s the new governments of such French-speaking, African nations as Togo, Ivory Coast, Congo and Chad (to name only few), for the most part embraced policies that were authoritarian. A direct upshot socially of the lack of free speech imposed by certain African regimes was the migration of a large number of intellectuals from the black continent, yearning to rediscover their voices in more developed, democratic countries. Many, while living in exile, turned to writing or continued to write in such a way that the painful stories of the Africa they left behind could unfold before the eyes of the larger world and somehow bring a positive change to the leadership in Africa. One of these committed Francophone African writers of the Diaspora was Mongo Béti. In my dissertation, I explore the effects of an exile’s life on this writer's journalistic work by a careful analysis of the articles he published from 1978 to 1991 in the bimonthly review, "Peuples noirs, peuples africains", which he co-founded with his wife, Odile Tobner. My approach is to focus on the dual causality in Béti’s literary efforts through a better acquaintance with his review: the migratory factor that conveys, on the one hand, the notion of cultural integration and the creative spirit in perpetual exile and, on the other hand, the neocolonial factor that constantly connects the protagonist to his origins as he radically refutes poor governance and dictatorship in his home country and in the so-called independent francophone Africa, or to the ex-colonizer reluctant to give up its ill-fated 'mission civilisatrice'. Through later research, I hope to develop my work by thematically analyzing three formative periods of the author's life: the period before his exile, the time during his thirty two years of exile, and the period after his exile, in order to better contextualize factors of influence and their varying degree over time in his writing, both journalistic and novelistic.

André Malraux is a prolific French writer, adventurer, art historian, statesman, and Minister of Cultural Affairs for 11 years (1958-1969). Malraux was a man of action in the service of noble causes. In 1933, one of Malraux's most famous novels, La Condition humaine (Man's Fate), was published. It won the Goncourt Prize and established his international reputation. Born on November 3, 1901 in Paris, he was a son of the 20th century. A witness to the history of his century, he left to the future generations a literary heritage of great importance. His main preoccupation was the “mystery of man” and art. The notion of man and his destiny is at the core of Malraux’s prolific work. The original and essential part of his literary work is the reflection on art. In my dissertation: La modernité esthétique chez André Malraux: La quête du “primitif,” I explore the enigmatic nature of the concept of the “primitive” in art history context and according to Malraux’s writing. My approach is to examine and analyze the multiple facets of the metamorphosis in time and space of the “primitive,” according to Malraux’s writing, and to find how his “essential man” fits with the idea of “primitive” art. Through later research, I hope to deepen the theme of the “primitive” in Malraux’s writing and end up with a comprehensive study of Malraux and modern artists like Braque, Chagall, and Picasso, among other artists, examining their relation with Malraux and his relation to modern art, always analyzing his thoughts regarding the “primitive”.

This thesis studies the differences in the cultural expectations of parents between the United States and France and examines how these cultural differences affect the behavior of children. Split into three parts, the first part of the thesis outlines behavioral theory of anthropologist, Erving Goffman. The second part discusses the parent-child relationship as outlines by American author, Pamela Druckerman and French psychologist, Francoise Dolto. The last part examines three different French children's books and discusses the behavior of each protagonist. Ultimately it is argued that behavior is culturally conditioned, even in young children.