This study compared and analyzed the premises of the three authors and their versions of the life of Joan of Arc. Their presentations enabled us to see the reasons of disparities among the authors' views. This study has shown that the philosophies of the three authors have different origins, differences which gave a unique slant to their individual interpretations. Their philosophical backgrounds were mainly obtained from diverse sources: published works, unpublished works, and personal interviews of my advisor with Andre Obey, one of the dramatists. We found in our research that the dramatists' theatrical works represented their own historical understanding of France's medieval heroine. They understood Joan of Arc's story in terms of their own existence and their own interpretations, which were different. The goal of this comparative study was reached through the juxtaposition of these differences. We concluded that each of the three authors had a unique experience. That uniqueness was articulated to rekindle the remarkable history of Joan of Arc. In 1750 J.-J. Rousseau advised that we should put a limit on theatrical art, because he said the theater perverts illusion. We used that advice as a yardstick to judge the three plays of the authors. That statement helped us to look at the work of these three playwrights as different chapters in the history of the life of Joan of Arc.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse works of Stephane Mallarme, father of Symbolism, pointing out romantic and parnassian elements. Symbolism, like Romanticism, attempted to express the interior thoughts of man. The symbolist movement then, was not only a revolt against Parnassianism but also a return to Romanticism. On the other hand, one would not be incorrect in saying that Romanticism reached its culmination in the works of the symbolists poets. For this reason, an attempt will be made to show that the works of Mallarme, father of Symbolism, can be considered as a synthesis of Romanticism and Parnassianism. This thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter is devoted to a discussion of Romanticism and of Parnassianism. Special attention is given to the origin, development, characteristics and influences of each school. The relationship of one School with the other is also pointed out. The second chapter consists of a biographical sketch of Stephane Mallarme. Special emphasis is placed on factors and events in his life which may have influenced or determined the elements of Romanticism and Parnassianism in his poetry. The third chapter is devoted to an analysis of some of the poems of Stephane Mallarme", "Les Fenetres," «V Apparition," "L'Azur," "Toast Funebre," "Le Vierge," "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune." In these analyses special attention is given to the romantic and parnassian tendencies of the poems. Since these romantic-parnaassian elements occur frequently throughout his works, it has been concluded that Mallarme's poetry can be considered as a synthesis of the two poetic schools.

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Most frequently enunciated as a questioning the notion of identity appears only when an interrogation such as "Who am I?" becomes even conceivable. Thus any reflection on the issue of identity involves an inquiry into the conditions of emergence of this questioning. Considered in the multi-faceted Palestinian context, this concept is particularly complex because of its political ramifications and its national and collective dimensions. Facing the Zionist project that claimed Palestine (supposedly a land without people) as the land of return for the Jews (a people without a land), the Palestinians had to face a denial of their existence that is rare in modern history. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (the Nakba for the Palestinians), expelled more than 700.000 Palestinians in the neighboring Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, transforming them into refugees who also had to face the societies of their host countries. This situation sharpened the Palestinians' conception of national identity and their awareness as a people even in the absence of an official state. The books by Elias Sanbar and Racha Salah that this dissertation examines share not only a historical background but a vision of a distinct Palestinian identity in which, I contend, collective memory and lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) play a crucial role. Yet in many ways these works are also strikingly different. The main objective of this dissertation is to study their respective representation of the Palestinian struggle to preserve and consolidate a particular identity as well as demonstrate how the particular literary forms they use are integral to the struggle they depict. Chapter I sets the historical and socio-political framework: Going back to the period when the fall of the Ottoman Empire was followed by the British mandate on Palestine, it analyzes the ways in which Palestinian nationalism developed in contending with both the British colonization and the Zionist ambition of establishing a Jewish national homeland. Chapter II considers several 20th-century theories on nationalism (by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith, among others) to assess the light that they help shed on the "Palestinian question" and its specificity. Chapter III first investigates the three historical periods whereby Elias Sanbar (a celebrated, second-generation Palestinian who lived mostly in exile in Europe) constructs the Palestinian identity in his socio-political essay entitled Figures du Palestinien. Identité des origines, identité de devenir; the second part of this chapter shows how Le bien des absents, in resorting to the different mode of biography (unusual in Sanbar's production) and a nonlinear narrative mode, builds upon various "sites of memory" and cultural artifacts to shape its representations of Palestinian identity. Chapter IV is devoted to Racha Salah's L'an prochain à Tibériade. Lettres d'une jeune palestinienne du Liban. It examines the situation of refugee camps and more specifically Salah’s representation of the camp within a host country in which she was brought up as a third-generation Palestinian refugee. This chapter shows how, paradoxically, this situation of near-detention enabled her persona to distance herself from the official discourse, not only to develop her own hopeful, yet sometimes disenchanted, vision of a reunified Palestinian nation but also to question, through the specific genre of epistolary fiction, the role and responsibility of the Western world in the "Palestinian question." Overall, this dissertation also seeks to draw attention to the important contribution made to the Palestinian cause by Francophone Palestinian writers (and Francophone studies scholars in general).

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