Patrick Chamoiseau is arguably the most prominent cultural personality from the French island of Martinique. His reputation is due to the worldwide success of his novels, especially Texaco, winner of the Prix Goncourt-award in 1992, but also to the fact that he is the leading theorist of the Créolité, an ideological movement whose aim is to preserve the character of Creole identity and culture against the threat of assimilation. Chamoiseau’s importance in an ideological context tends to overshadow his literary qualities, his novels being often seen as illustrations of his political ideas.Although Chamoiseau’s ideological views aren’t totally absent from his literary work, his novels strike the reader as extremely complex constructions, containing far more than a subversive aspect. An aspect that has been neglected by the critics is for example the supernatural. Probably because of the geographic vicinity to South America, Chamoiseau’s use of the supernatural has been, rather hastily, considered as typical of magical realism or marvellous realism. This dissertation aims at showing that the fantastic, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov (1970), is better suited to describe this aspect of Chamoiseau’s novels, especially Biblique des derniers gestes (2002).Our main objective is, however, not to decide whether the novel belongs to the fantastic as a genre, but to examine the reasons why it is used. A close analysis shows that it is often in relation to the past of Martinique that the supernatural appears. Thanks to the theory of the fantastic, we find three possible explanations of this fact. Firstly, the supernatural is juxtaposed to the real in order to reveal its limits and its “constructedness”. Martinican past thus appears as a French construction. Secondly, the fantastic can be used to reveal the absence of genuine Martinican history. Finally, the fantastic can be a reminder of a terrible event from the past. In conclusion it can be said that Chamoiseau uses the fantastic in order to write the history of an event that he sees as the origin of Martinique: slavery. By doing this he contributes to the fantastic as well, by showing that it is not necessarily gratuitous and by providing a good example of original and innovative use.

Dans la première partie du présent mémoire, l’essai Entre poésie, réalisme magique et postmodernisme : Madman Claro, je tente d’abord de définir les concepts du réalisme magique, de la littérature postmoderne et de la « mi-fiction » (qui englobe peut-être les deux premiers) afin de situer l’oeuvre de l’écrivain et traducteur français Claro au sein du spectre réflexif-mimétique que je propose. Je décris ensuite sa vision de l’écriture et de la littérature avant d’analyser la dissolution des personnages principaux du roman CosmoZ entraînée par le mauvais traitement qu’ils reçoivent aux mains des médecins et du Magicien d’Oz. J’essaie de montrer en quoi ces devenirs-autres sont liés au début et à la fin du monde (qui, lui, ne cesse de recommencer) dans cet ouvrage fabuleusement réaliste où Claro rend des personnages fictifs réels et les fait vivre des aventures rocambolesques et tragiques au début du XXe siècle en Europe et en Amérique. La deuxième partie du mémoire, intitulée Les Fleurs compliquées, est un recueil de nouvelles surréalistes qui demeurent toutefois ancrées dans le monde contemporain et qui mettent parfois en scène des versions diffractées de figures réelles. Alors que le premier récit mêle des contraintes formelles à des questions ontologiques et généalogiques, la deuxième nouvelle, davantage marquée par l’oralité, porte sur une expérience extracorporelle dans une boîte de nuit montréalaise. S’ensuit alors une version satirique et cauchemardesque de la désastreuse tournée 777 de la chanteuse Rihanna, rebaptisée La Reina, qui culmine en un combat inspiré des légendes amérindiennes. La dernière nouvelle comporte six courtes parties enchâssées racontant un même récit de façon non linéaire. Globalement, je vise une certaine saturation baroque : le travail sur l’image, les élans imaginatifs débridés et le rythme jouent donc un rôle important dans ces récits. Sur le plan thématique, je consacre autant mon attention aux silences éloquents du quotidien qu’au legs du colonialisme occidental sur la culture populaire d’aujourd’hui, le tout présenté d’un point de vue féministe et volontairement « ex-centrique ». Enfin, j’essaie, sur un fond d’humour tirant sur le noir, d’accorder une place aux voix marginalisées tout en évitant l’écueil du sentimentalisme et du moralisme sermonneur. / In the first part of this project, the essay Entre poésie, réalisme magique et postmodernisme : Madman Claro, I attempt to define the concepts of magical realism, postmodern literature and “midfiction” (which might transcend the first two) in order to situate the work of French writer and translator Claro within the reflexive-mimetic model that I have laid out. I then describe his view of writing and literature before analyzing the dissolution of the main characters in the novel CosmoZ that is caused by the poor treatment they receive at the hands of various doctors and the Wizard of Oz. My aim is to show how these becoming-others are related to the beginning and the end of the world (which, in turn, never ceases to begin anew) in this work that is both fable-like and realistic, as Claro makes fictional characters real and has them go through incredible and tragic adventures over the course of the first half of the XXth century in Europe and America. The second part of this thesis, entitled Les Fleurs compliquées, is a collection of surrealistic short stories that remain grounded in the modern world and which sometimes feature diffracted versions of public figures. While the first story mixes formal constraints with ontological and genealogical concerns, the second narrative, more conversational in tone, recounts an out of body experience in an after-hours nightclub in Montreal. This is followed by a satirical and nightmarish version of the singer Rihanna’s (renamed La Reina) disastrous 777 Tour, which culminates in a battle inspired by Amerindian folklore. The last story contains six brief interlinked parts that recount a single narrative in a non-linear fashion. Overall, I have aimed for a kind of baroque saturation: my work is thus mostly focused on creating vivid imagery by following flights of fancy while paying attention to rhythm. Thematically, I am interested in the eloquent silences of the everyday as well as the legacy of Western colonialism in modern popular culture, which I have presented from a feminist and consciously “ex-centric” perspective. I have tried, finally, to craft tales that are sporadically darkly humorous and which lend a voice to those who have been marginalized while avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentalism and preachy moralizing.

Submitted by admin tede (tede@pucgoias.edu.br) on 2016-12-12T17:54:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LUCAS RODRIGUES COELHO.pdf: 792518 bytes, checksum: b83c3b74ded9744558548239c84e64ea (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-12T17:54:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LUCAS RODRIGUES COELHO.pdf: 792518 bytes, checksum: b83c3b74ded9744558548239c84e64ea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-18 / The object of this study is Os pecados da tribo, by Jose J. Veiga. The reflection on the artist's fictional work, with its elements of fantastic literature and wonderful Latin American realism, led us to analyze the procedures of artistic creation that were not intuitive in the first readings, and a more accurate analysis of the resources And the stylistic language in literary art. The universe of the characters made the research more attractive to be imbricated with theories that denote the meanings of terms like real, reality, natural, supernatural, among others. To that end, we refer to the following authors: Tzvetan Todorov (1982), William Spindler (1993), François Laplantine (1996), Alejo Carpentier (1987), Irlemar Chiampi (1980), among others. From there, we choose to observe in the objectives the questions of unusual, magical realism, the fantastic and the marvelous, considering them as outstanding characteristics of the discourse, as well as demonstrating how the play of words occurs that affects the relations of the languages of Frontiers, with inferences in the artistic-literary allegory. The construction of strangeness, the fantastic and the marvelous aligns in this asymmetrical space, to generate the effect of the fiction of the narrative, in an imaginary world that is established by its senses / O objeto deste estudo é Os pecados da tribo, de José J. Veiga. A reflexão sobre a obra ficcional do artista, com seus elementos da literatura fantástica e do realismo maravilhoso latino-americano, levou-nos a analisar os procedimentos da criação artística, que não se mostrou intuitiva nas primeiras leituras, sendo necessária uma análise mais acurada dos recursos e da estilística da linguagem na arte literária. O universo dos personagens tornou a pesquisa mais atraente ao ser imbricado com teorias que denotam as significações de termos como real, realidade, natural, sobrenatural, entre outros. Para tanto, recorremos aos seguintes autores: Tzvetan Todorov (1982), William Spindler (1993), François Laplantine (1996), Alejo Carpentier (1987), Irlemar Chiampi (1980), entre outros. A partir daí, optamos por observar nos objetivos as questões do insólito, do realismo mágico, do fantástico e do maravilhoso, considerando-as como características marcantes do discurso, bem como demonstrar como se dá o jogo de palavras que incide nas relações das linguagens de fronteiras, com inferências na alegoria artístico-literária. A construção do estranhamento, do fantástico e do maravilhoso se alinha nesse espaço assimétrico, para gerar o efeito da ficção da narrativa, num mundo imaginário que se estabelece pelos seus sentidos.

Do you hope to promote, encourage and foster critical thinking and creativity in your library? Visit this session to discover reader response, literature-based, and interdisciplinary activities appropriate to selected works of magical realism (grades 4-7).

The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.

A House with People in It is a collection of stories working through concepts of identity, family, relationships, and how those things renew and replace themselves in perpetuity. I think of identity less of a rigid, singular thing and more of a swirling, fluid multitude. If the body is a house, then identity is the people who live inside it. How they live next to each other—who butts up against who, who sleeps in what bed—is what’s interesting to me. These works collected in this thesis are largely the stories that I think hew closest to the things that I am concerned with, in the identities that I occupy.

This thesis is comprised of a collection of short stories, most of which are set in southern, urban milieus. The fictional characters contained within deal in their own unique ways with the crises they face. Most of these sources of conflict arise from domestic complications. Six of the eight stories are written in the first person; the collection is voice-driven and concerned with the idiosyncratic points of views of the focal characters, and in this way borrows from the tradition of Southern fiction, which is in many cases laced with dark humor.

In her novel Tracks, Louise Erdrich tells the story of a band of Anishinaabe early in the twentieth century. Through the two narrators, one a tribal elder and the other a mixedblood who eventually abandons the traditions of the tribe, the novel offers two divergent perspectives of the events that take place as the government divests the tribe of its land. The conflicting perceptions of these occurrences, which are magical realist in nature, underscore the conflict within the tribe to maintain tradition in the face of the ever-increasing influence of European settlers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptions at odds with one another in order to shed new light on the significance of Erdrich’s use of magical realism in the text. Highlighting Erdrich’s engagement with magical realism, a largely postcolonial literary device, will hopefully expand notions of identity and authenticity within the Native American literary tradition.

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