Vertumne et Pomone. Une fable et son décor dans quatre tentures tissées d’or<p><p>Résumé de la thèse<p><p>L’étude porte sur quatre ensembles de tapisseries que se partagent actuellement le Kunsthistorisches Museum à Vienne, la Fondation Gulbenkian à Lisbonne et les collections du Patrimonio National à Madrid. Chaque série illustre la fable de Vertumne et Pomone issue des Métamorphoses d’Ovide dans un somptueux théâtre de pierre et de verdure. Tissées à Bruxelles vers 1545, les tapisseries racontent en neuf épisodes les transformations de Vertumne, le dieu des saisons, en vue d’approcher et de séduire Pomone, déesse des vergers. A travers l’exploration des composantes historiques, formelles et iconographiques des ensembles tissées, la thèse aborde l’art de tapisserie comme une forme d’expression qu’il s’agit de situer dans l’histoire artistique et culturelle des Pays-Bas méridionaux à l’aube de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle. <p>La thèse est divisée en quatre parties qui correspondent à quatre lectures complémentaires de l’œuvre.<p>Dans la première partie, l’histoire des pièces dans les collections introduit la description et la présentation des quatre séries de tapisseries. La seconde partie étudie les circonstances de production et de création artistique. La troisième partie qui constitue le cœur de la thèse est dévolue à l’étude des thèmes et des formes, à l’exploration de l’imaginaire du jardin de Pomone et de ses décors. La dernière partie dégage les significations secondaires qui naissent de la rencontre de l’œuvre (de son contenu et de son expression formelle) et des circonstances liées à leur usage comme décor princier.<p><p>La thèse se présente premièrement comme une contribution à l’histoire de la tapisserie. L’étude de la réception des formes mythologiques et architecturales dans ces chefs-d’œuvre textiles révèlent en outre l’existence d’un concept à la fois mental et formel qui inscrit dans l’œuvre, les rapports entre son destinataire et l’environnement social, idéologique et culturel de ce dernier. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

‘Becoming Animal’: Motifs of Hybridity and Liminality in Fairy Tales and Selected Contemporary Artworks serves as a theoretical examination of the concept of the hybrid. My research unpacks the liminal aspect of hybridity, locating the hybrid in the imaginative world of popular fairy tales, folk lore and mythology. In my accompanying MFA exhibition, Becoming(s), I explore these motifs through an installation of mixed-media sculptures which are based on the hybrid creatures that populated the fantasy world of my childhood. The written component of my MFA submission will relate directly to my professional art practise, developing it further and situating it within a relevant context. In my mini-thesis I will consider the liminal in relation to the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary art, with a particular focus on relevant artists working with the motifs of hybridity, such as Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander and Kiki Smith. The ‘animal turn’ is a term used by Kari Weil (2010: 3) to describe a contemporary interest in issues of the nonhuman, and in the ways that the relationship between humans and nonhumans is marked by “difference, otherness and power”. Of key concern to my research will be Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’. Rather than describing a transition from one stable state to another, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a radical dissolution of boundaries – not just between species (such as ‘human’ and ‘animal’) but between any essentialising binaries. As such, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a conception of identity as being fluid and mutable, rather than stable and fixed.

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This dissertation establishes a category of early Soviet “exodic” literature, which consists of works published in Yiddish or Russian between 1917 and 1935. Reading together texts by Peretz Markish, Andrei Platonov, Moyshe Kulbak, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Yiddish texts are placed on equal footing with Russian texts to underscore the singular role of Jews in the early Soviet period and demonstrate shared anxieties and practices of resistance to hegemony among groups seemingly separated by language and culture. These anxieties and modes of resistance are what make the Soviet exodic a literature of revolution as it grapples with the complexity of the Soviet period and Soviet identity formation. Drawing upon political theorist Michael Walzer and his text Exodus and Revolution as well as the critical response from Edward Said, this dissertation uses the biblical book of Exodus as a theoretical matrix for the identification and elaboration of narrative sequences and thematic material that constitute a revolutionary genre and applies it to the study of early Soviet literature. Because they are written and published between 1917 and 1935, exodic texts are positioned between the Bolshevik Revolution and the crystallization of high Stalinism. Therefore, they are situated within what is commonly known as the “interwar period.” Such a definition relies upon absence (the absence of war). The Soviet exodic provides this historical moment and its attending texts a positive definition in deference to the revolutionary framework that guides it. This dissertation also considers how the texts enact revolution with the help of critical and queer theory, most notably Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Mary Rubenstein’s Pantheologies. These theoretical supports serve to articulate the various queer—that is, non-normative—ways that the selected texts engage pluralism to resist ideological regimes and forces of control as they re-evaluate social and political categories and norms. Queer theory also serves to express the entanglement of self, other, and place, and in so doing, brings ecological anxieties to the fore. Resistance in the Soviet exodic thus takes shape through the queering or misalignment of categories like space, language, or gender performance, and culminates in the figure of the Soviet trickster, who, by means of their unfinalizability, is the embodiment of revolution.

Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.

Notre thèse a pour enjeu la poétique de la distance dans les fictions de dix écrivains français et francophones de la seconde génération de la guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962), c'est à dire à distance de cet événement. Leurs fictions, publiées entre 1987 et 2010, interrogent la transmission et la filiation. / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Le roman africain de la nouvelle génération s’élabore au carrefour des langues et des cultures. Dans son orientation théorique et paratextuelle, le discours romanesque de la nouvelle génération se résume en une « modernité universalisante », lieu de l’articulation dialectique entre l’africanité et la mondialisation. Le contexte idéologique de création de cette littérature et le questionnement identitaire nous amènent à considérer l’africanité comme une notion dynamique et la mondialisation littéraire comme une ouverture à la concurrence et à la légitimité littéraire. Le discours péritextuel, ce haut lieu de la lisibilité/visibilité, amorce les stratégies de cette altérité que le romancier développe largement dans l’énonciation textuelle.<p>La reconfiguration de l’énonciation dégage les ressorts d’une écriture nouvelle marquée par une narration éclatée, une spatialité multiple et une innovation thématique. La transgression narrative s’intègre au rang des discours de la déconstruction caractéristique de la postmodernité et se donne à lire comme le reflet de l’être de l’entre-deux qu’est l’écrivain migrant comme d’ailleurs son protagoniste. L’espace dans lequel évolue ce dernier peut être interprété comme une transteritorialité dans laquelle se moule la création littéraire marquée du sceau de l’altérité et traduit la « transidentité » du personnage évoluant dans cet espace. La perspective thématique renforce cette idée de l’altérité mondiale structurant le récit africain contemporain. Elle s’engage dans la voie des mutations et des transgressions caractéristiques de la mise en relation de l’africanité et de la mondialisation comme lieu de l’écriture/lecture du roman contemporain. <p>Le mode d’écriture nous offre un cadre linguistique et stylistique dans lequel se joue l’altérité africanité-mondialisation. Le romancier de la nouvelle génération retravaille la langue française à l’aide des ingrédients des langues et des cultures dans lesquelles il baigne. Cette manipulation linguistico-stylistique est rendue possible par le jeu interlinguistique et le registre humoristico-ironique qui produisent une esthétique du « risible » face aux défis de l’altérité. L’écrivain africain contemporain, décomplexé par ces manipulations linguistique et stylistique, exploite les ressources de l’oralité en vue de concilier la pluralité des formes d’expression et des pratiques langagières de son environnement. Cette stratégie d’écriture produit une esthétique de l’oraliture, celle-là même qui, tout en exaltant les vertus de l’écriture, recourt aux différents procédés offerts par l’oralité, versant de l’africanité du texte contemporain, pour marquer une opposition contre l’écriture et l’Occident qui l’incarne./The African novel by the new generation is made at the meeting point of languages and cultures. In its theoretical and paratextual orientation, the fiction discourse by the new generation can be summed up as a « universality-oriented modernity », a place of dialectic link between africanity and globalization. The ideological context of creation of this literature and the identity questioning bring us to consider africanity as a dynamic notion and the literary globalization as a way to competition and literary legitimacy.<p>The peritextual discourse, which is a high place of readability/visibility, initiates the strategies of this otherness which the novelist develops largely in textual enunciation. <p>Reshaping the enunciation shows the motivation of a new writing characterized by a breaking up narration, a multiple area coverage and a thematic innovation. Narrative transgression is integrated in the rank of discourses of deconstruction characterizing postmodernity. It is to be read as a reflection of the being in the space between, this is the migrant writer as well as his protagonist. The space in which the latter evolves can be interpreted as a transterritoriarity in which is moulded literary creation sealed by otherness and shows « transidentity » of the character evolving in that space. The thematic perspective reinforces this idea of global otherness structuring the African contemporary narration. It moves into mutations and transgressions characterizing the relationship between africanity and globalization as a place of writing/reading of contemporary novel. <p>The writing mode gives us a linguistic and stylistic framework in which takes place the otherness africanity-globalization. The new generation novelist works on the French language he uses by means of ingredients of languages and cultures surrounding him. This linguistic and stylistic manipulation is made possible by an interlinguistic game and the humoristic and ironic register which produce aesthetics of the “funny” in front of otherness challenges. The contemporary African writer, encouraged by these linguistic and stylistic manipulations, exploits the oral ressources in order to reconcile the plurality of forms of expression and of language practices of his environment. This writing strategy produces aesthetics of orality, the one which, in addition to exalting the virtues of writing, has recourse to different procedures of orality, showing thus africanity of contemporary text, to mark an opposition against writing and the Western world which embodies it. <p><p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Text in Afrikaans / In this thesis the term post-colonialism in the Afrikaans drama is investigated, focussing on the post-sixties. The term post-colonialism is difficult to define. Not only are theories of post-colonialism in a state of continuous flux and shifting emphasis, but as a result of different colonial dominations, separate identities have been constructed in South-Africa; so that defining the terms colonial, post colonial and post-colonial proves to be even more problematic. The purpose of this study is to determine to what extent the Afrikaans drama fits into these discourses. The basic point of departure is the fact that post-colonialism played a considerable role in the development of the Afrikaans drama, at the same time providing a more varied scope. The research covers several aspects of post-colonialism in Afrikaans drama; each dealt with in a separate chapter. A multitude of perspectives are featured within the broader discourse in order to obtain multiple norms and standards in a phase of self-criticism. The focus falls mainly on themes and not on performance aspects. New perspectives on issues such as canon texts, silence, hero-worship, the portrayal of woman, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism are presented (chapter 1). In chapter 2 focus falls on the period before 1960, and notably the question of nationalism (associated with apartheid) and the portrayal of the Afrikaner. The literary canon, forms of violence and the position of the super-Afrikaner are viewed in a new light during the re-writing of post-colonial history and the resulting paradigm shifts after 1960. Renewed emphasis is placed on discourse concerning land (chapter 3). Contrasting concepts regarding race, class, language, gender and religion are reconsidered in order to contribute towards the heterogeneous nature of post-colonialism (chapter 4). The function of theatre is to re-evaluate in the context of a post-1994 democratic system. Texts now focus especially on empowerment, re-discovery and re-ordering of history, reconciliation, inter-cultural contact and a post-apartheid syndrome (chapter 5). Anti-hegemonic resistance in Afrikaans literature since the sixties has confronted writers with the challenge of depicting or creating a larger post-colonial reality through their texts. / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / D. Litt. et Phil. (Afrikaans)