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Irish male identity in James Joyce’s and Samuel Beckett’s novels shows evidence of abjection. The oppressive natures of the Church and State in Ireland contribute to abjection in some Irish men. Furthermore, the state of abject being can lead to masochistic practices. According to Julia Kristeva, abjection translates into a .conceptual space. that has its roots in the Freudian Oedipal complex. Kristeva, following Lacan, also points to the connection between abjection and language. Joyce.s character Stephen Dedalus and Beckett.s Molloy/Moran both utilize this conceptual space and language in the narrative provides clues to their abject states. Joyce.s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses show Stephen.s abjection through his feelings of separation from his fellow citizens as well as his status as an Irish Catholic. Like Stephen, Beckett.s protagonist Molloy/Moran endures abjection in terms of separation from the mother. Nevertheless, abjection by an oppressive social construct such as nationalism or religion is not as evident in Molloy. Although Beckett is an Irish author and Ireland is evident in the novel, Molloy/Moran is a universal character. He is abject by his own design . what Kristeva calls .self abjection. . in order to complete the search for the mother. Molloy/Moran.s search is also a search for the self as he reconciles with approaching death. This is similar to Stephen.s self-abjection but Stephen abjects himself in order to separate himself from his fellow Irishmen. Stephen.s concerns with death take on different ramifications, as Stephen is not at the same point in his life as Molloy/Moran. Death, for Stephen, is his mother.s death and the oppressive guilt she has instilled in him by her admonitions to repent. Masochism is a response to abjection. The age of modernism influenced Joyce.s writing, just as the shift from high modernism to postmodernism influenced Beckett.s. The Irish response to the changes attendant with modernization, both at the fin -de-siécle for Joyce and in the post- World War II years when Beckett wrote, is evident in Stephen Dedalus and Molloy/Moran. According to Suzanne R. Stewart, the turn of the century brought changes in culture through advertising and the advent of consumer capitalism and the bourgeois masculine status quo was threatened. Stewart argues that masochism is partly a masculine response to these changes. I argue that Stephen and Molloy/Moran reflect that response. The result of deferring or suspending either confrontation or resolution is pleasure, or jouissance as the term is used by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. Neither Joyce nor Beckett makes clear whether Stephen or Molloy/Moran achieve jouissance, effectively leaving the reader suspended, without resolution to the characters. stories. Abjection and masochism link Stephen and Molloy/Moran as symbols of unaccommodated man and are remarkable in that they reflect not only an Irish masculine identity but also a universal masculine identity at both the turn of the century and post- World War II.

This work is a comparative analysis of the works of the Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko (Field Work in Ukrainian Sex) and the Algerian writer Assia Djebar (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment). Although the lives of Algerian and Ukrainian women were shaped by different historical and social forces, discourses and traditions, common themes exist in their writings because of their common postcolonial background. Both authors examine the relations of women to history in the postcolonial setting, the problem of inscribing women into history, and the double oppression women experienced during colonial times (as colonized subjects and as gendered subjects). One of their main themes in the works of Djebar and Zabuzhko is that of the body. In their writings, Assia Djebar and Oksana Zabuzhko unite the discourses of female body, pain, and history. Woman’s body, “unseen” by the Algerian and Ukrainian societies, is inscribed into the historic process through pain. The experience unacknowledged before is expressed through details of (sexual) violence and rape that the women of the colonized nation suffered from the colonizers (the French or the Soviets), because the discourse of postcolonial nationalism ascribed to women the roles of chaste patriotic icons. In my research, I focus on the themes of the female body as a site of (colonial) violence done to a woman, as well as a site of resistance to patriarchal values. The methodology of my research consists in close reading of the texts of Assia Djebar and Oksana Zabuzhko. I analyze the texts providing historical context of women’s condition in Algeria and Ukraine and concentrating on the impacts of French and Russian/Soviet colonialism and nationalism on the lives of women. One of the issues under analysis is that of decolonization, or disengagement from the colonial trauma. I argue that the language chosen by these authors for writing (French by Assia Djebar and Ukrainian by Oksana Zabuzhko) contains a liberating potential.