Meanings of Literary Childhood Spaces: The Garden in Twentieth-Century Literature focuses on the analysis of selected twentieth-century childhood novels for adults with regard to the relationship between child character and fictional space, and reflects generally accepted cultural concept of paradisal childhood and its images in literature. In theory, the dissertation is inspired by the treatises on spatiality of human existence by phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and O. F. Bollnow. It also elaborates insights of the Garden archetype in literary history. The critical reading of selected works examines phenomenological issues, such as child specific perception of space, nature as an extension of the human consciousness, sacred space, home, intimacy of space and death of space. Furthermore, it describes features the literary garden acquires by the union with the child in twentieth-century literature (childhood paradisal gardens, character of divine chid, character of child hermaphrodite, dynamism between fictional house and garden, garden as a miniature of the universe and children games as the imitation of Creation).

Silence et soumission aux valeurs patriarcales dominantes : ainsi peut être brossée dans son ensemble et sans pour autant la déformer l’image de la condition féminine encore pleinement opérante à la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe siècle en France. La femme, ouvrière, bourgeoise ou noble, est destinée à la maternité, et ses désirs sont méprisés au profit de ceux de son (futur) époux. En littérature cependant, à partir de Madame Bovary (1857) et parallèlement à la montée timide du féminisme, apparaissent plusieurs figures féminines éminemment tragiques qui contestent la condition féminine. Louise Marles, Véronique Cheminot, Mouchette et Thérèse Desqueyroux – et tant d’autres encore… – sont autant de (jeunes) personnages féminins qui rejettent plus ou moins violemment la mise sous tutelle de la femme et l’impossibilité d’avoir un statut social et juridique accepté en dehors du mariage. Pourtant, parce qu’en ces figures de femme – et souvent malgré elles – refuse de se taire une torturante aspiration à la liberté, elles sont fatalement vouées à la folie et à la mort, deviennent prostituées, criminelles, internées ou suicidaires, voire les quatre. Selon nous, la folie est l’état dans lequel ces personnages féminins s’enlisent car ils remettent profondément en question les valeurs établies par des hommes et pour des hommes. Nous pensons que la folie est le moyen littéraire utilisé par les écrivains pour montrer l’ampleur de leur souffrance existentielle et son unique langage possible ; en ce sens, la folie serait la représentation extérieure d’une écrasante souffrance morale et psychologique. Enfin, la possession diabolique est une autre cause portée par Bernanos pour répondre à la question de la folie des femmes. Notre étude portera sur quatre figures tragiques de personnages féminins imaginées par quatre écrivains catholiques : Louise dans En rade (Huysmans, 1887), Véronique dans Le Désespéré (Léon Bloy, 1887), Mouchette dans Sous le soleil de Satan (Bernanos, 1926) et Thérèse Desqueyroux dans le roman éponyme de Mauriac (1927). / Silence and submission to the prevailing patriarchal ideology : this is how one can describe the female condition at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century in France. No matter whether they come from the working class, the middle class or the aristocracy, women are destined for motherhood and their wishes are overlooked. Nevertheless, in literature one can notice several tragic female figures who rebel against their condition. Louise Marles, Véronique Cheminot, Mouchette and Thérèse Desqueyroux – and so many others… – are young women who reject more or less violently the fact that they are under the tutelage of men and the fact that they cannot obtain an acceptable social status outside of marriage. However, it is precisely because these female characters crave for freedom that they are doomed to madness and death or become criminals and/or suicidal women. According to us, these women are said to be mad because they challenge convention and reject patriarchal values. We think that madness is the literary tool used by these writers to show the brutality of their existential suffering. In other words, we believe that madness is the external representation of their overwhelming moral suffering. Finally, demonic possession is another reason given by Bernanos to explain women’s madness. Our study deals with four tragic female figures imagined by four Catholic writers : Louise in En rade (Huysmans, 1887), Véronique in Le Désespéré (Bloy, 1887), Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan (Bernanos, 1926) and Thérèse in Thérèse Desqueyroux (Mauriac, 1927).

Dans le sillage des guerres totales et des génocides du XXe siècle sont apparus des ouvrages d’un genre nouveau : les témoignages. Ils sont le fait d’hommes et de femmes survivants d’une violence politique extrême qui, endossant le rôle de témoins, ont entrepris de faire connaître leur expérience au plus grand nombre en rendant compte par écrit des sévices endurés. Leur mission : attester ce qu’ils ont vu et subi, rendre hommage aux disparus, initier un questionnement sur les mécanismes ayant conduit au meurtre de masse, et opposer aux tentatives de destruction de l’humain et de sa culture une réflexion sur le vivre-ensemble et la dissolution toujours possible des liens sociaux les plus fondamentaux. Le corpus légué par ces témoins constitue l’objet d’étude de cette thèse de doctorat, qui poursuit un double objectif : décrire, sur la base d’une lecture minutieuse des textes, partiellement assistée d’outils d’analyse textométriques, les principales caractéristiques du genre, et poser les jalons d’une histoire du témoignage et de sa réception, publique et critique, à partir de récits faisant état d’expériences aussi diverses que celles du feu pendant la Grande Guerre, de l’univers concentrationnaire sous le régime nazi et de la violence coloniale en Algérie. Comprendre ce qui spécifie génériquement ces textes au-delà de la diversité des œuvres et des événements dont elles sont issues, suppose de dégager le projet commun qui les sous-tend et les constitue en lignée, étant entendu qu’un genre ne se définit pas en fonction de critères ontologiques immuables. Il apparaît dans des circonstances socio-historiques précises, et se déploie à un niveau d’interférences sémiotiques qui justifie cette double approche, philologique et historique. / Books of a new kind appeared out of the total wars and genocides of the twentieth century – testimonies. They are written by male and female survivors of extreme political violence, who, taking on the role of witnesses, decided to share their experiences with others by writing of the suffering they had undergone. Their mission consists in testifying what they saw and experienced, paying tribute to those who did not survive, questioning the mechanisms which led to mass murder, and opposing to the attempts to destroy human beings and their culture a reflection about living together and the ever-present possibility of the most fundamental social relationships falling apart. The corpus left by these witnesses is the object of study of this PhD dissertation, which has two aims: to describe, based on a close reading of the texts, partially aided by the tools of textometric analysis, the main characteristics of the genre, and to create the basis of a history of testimonies and their public and critical reception, using accounts which reveal such diverse experiences as trench warfare during the World War One, the concentration camps of the Nazi regime, and colonial violence in Algeria. In order to understand the generic specificity of these texts going beyond the diversity of the works and the events they proceed, it is necessary to define the underlying common project which forms a tradition, given that a genre is not defined according to unchanging ontological criteria. It appears in precise socio-historical circumstances, and is situated at a level of semiotic interference which justifies this dual philological and historical approach.

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This thesis is a study of how the American author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) in a number of novels and short stories written between 1876 and 1937 depicts cultural encounters between Americans and Europeans, mostly Frenchmen. Chiefly concerned with Fast and Loose, “The Last Asset”, Madame de Treymes, “Les Metteurs en Scène”, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence, each of which articulates ideas relevant to the theme investigated, the thesis also contains a supplementary discussion of The Reef, The Glimpses of the Moon, The Mother’s Recompense and The Buccaneers. Borrowing terms and theoretical perspectives from Pierre Bourdieu and postcolonial literary criticism, particularly Homi Bhabha’s theories about inbetweenness, mimicry and otherness, the study contends through detailed analyses of single works that Wharton’s descriptions of Franco-American encounters are dynamic processes through which the parties involved are made aware of their own and “the other’s” distinguishing qualities and, in some significant cases, reach a heightened state of consciousness resembling Bhabha’s inbetweenness. Wharton’s cultural encounters often involve people with different levels of education and different economic and social positions, which justifies the use of Bourdieu’s method of analyzing the relationship between educational and social status in terms of different kinds of capital. While in her early works Wharton merely intimates the contours of the cultural encounter, in mature works such as Madame de Treymes and The Age of Innocence she views it as a highly complex process the many stages of which are intimated through the use of subtle narratological techniques. Throughout her work Wharton makes intricate use of imagery and keywords, some of them testifying to her interest in anthropology, to suggest the manifold dimensions of the cultural encounter, which is seen as both tempting and repelling. Her accounts of the Franco-American encounter are complexly related to the different phases of the American political and social situation described in her novels. The American experience of the meeting of the ‘old society’ and the ‘new’ is rendered even more complex by being seen as the background against which Europeans and Americans negotiate transactions of symbolic and economic capital. In most of her works these lead to tragic or tragic-comic misunderstandings; only in her last, unfinished novel does she describe a full-fledged Euro-American identity, a successful fusion of American and European experiences. / Den här avhandlingen är en studie i hur den amerikanska författarinnan Edith Wharton (1862-1937) i ett antal romaner och noveller skrivna mellan 1876 and 1937 skildrar kulturella möten mellan amerikaner och européer, främst fransmän. Avhandlingen behandlar huvudsakligen verken Fast and Loose, “The Last Asset”, Madame de Treymes, ”Les Metteurs en Scène”, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence, som alla uttrycker idéer om kulturmöten; den innehåller även en kompletterande diskussion av verken The Reef, The Glimpses of the Moon, The Mother’s Recompense and The Buccaneers. Med termer och perspektiv hämtade från Pierre Bourdieu och postkolonial litteraturforskning, främst Homi Bhabhas teorier om in-betweenness (”mellanskap”), mimicry och otherness hävdar studien genom detaljerade analyser av enskilda verk hur Whartons beskrivningar av fransmäns och amerikaners möten är dynamiska processer där i bästa fall båda parter blir medvetna om sin egen och ”den andres” särart, och i vissa fall även når ett intensifierat medvetande som påminner om Bhabhas in-betweenness. Whartons kulturmöten sker oftast mellan personer med olika bildning samt ekonomisk och social position, vilket gör att Bourdieus perspektiv för analys av relationen mellan utbildning och social status som styrd av olika sorters kapital kommer till användning. I sina tidiga berättelser antyder Wharton konturerna av det kulturella mötet, i mogna verk som Madame de Treymes and The Age of Innocence gestaltar hon det som en mycket komplex process vars många skeden antyds via hennes användning av subtil berättarteknik. Alltigenom sina verk tillämpar Wharton ett komplext bildspråk och nyckelord, varav vissa vittnar om hennes intresse för antropologi, som antyder kulturmötets många dimensioner, framställt som samtidigt lockande och frånstötande/avskräckande. Hennes redogörelser av det fransk-amerikanska mötet är komplext relaterat till de olika faser av den amerikanska politiska och sociala situation som beskrivs i hennes berättelser. Den amerikanska erfarenheten av mötet mellan den ”gamla sociala grupperingen” och den ”nya” skildras som mer komplext genom att ses som den bakgrund mot vilken européerna och amerikanerna förhandlar transaktioner av symboliskt och ekonomiskt kapital. I merparten av hennes verk leder dessa transaktioner till tragiska eller tragikomiska missförstånd; bara i hennes sista, ofullbordade roman beskriver hon en fullt utvecklad euroamerikansk identitet, en lyckad sammansmältning av amerikanska och europeiska erfarenheter.