This is the first full-length study of the writing of the South African Joy Packer (1905-1977), whose 17 works of autobiography and romantic fiction were primarily popular. Packer’s writing, which appeared mainly between 1945 and 1977, blends popular narrative with contemporary social and political discourses. Her first main works, three volumes of memoirspublished between 1945 and 1953, cover her experience of a wide area of the world before,during and after the Second World War: South Africa, Britain, the Mediterranean and theBalkans, and China. In the early 1950s she also toured extensive areas of colonial "DarkestAfrica." When Packer retired to the Cape with her British husband, Admiral Sir Herbert Packer,after an absence of more than 25 years, she adopted fiction as an alternative literary mode. Hersubsequent production, ten popular romantic novels and a further three volumes of memoirs, isnotable for the density of its sociopolitical commentary on contemporary South Africa. This thesis takes as its starting-point the dilemma, formulated by the South African critic Dorothy Driver, of the white woman writing within a colonial environment which compels herto adopt contradictory, ambivalent and oblique discursive stances and strategies. The pragmaticintention of this thesis is, then, to (re)read Packer for her treatment of that problematic in thecontext of South Africa. The approach adopted centres on the reciprocity within Packer’s writing between itsgeneric conventions and its discursive environment, broadly defined here as pre-1950 imperial Britain and, in the main, colonial and apartheid South Africa. Within a critical-biographical frame, attention is paid first to formal aspects of the popular memoir and the popular romanticnovel. Their discursive function vis-à-vis their apartheid environment is then examined withina series of comparative studies. The burden of the analysis rests, in part, on the identity of Packer’s fiction as politicised romans à thèse and, in part, on her personal identification withpolitical liberalism in South Africa, most notably the Cape liberalism of her youth and thevarious manifestations of liberalism under apartheid. By focusing on differing motifs—Packer’sprofessed adherence to political liberalism, her treatment of race within the idealising constructions of popular romance, the metonymy of the fictional family and the patriarchal state,and her portrayal of women held hostage by the racial and masculine other—the study discussesthe extent to which the contradictions predicted by Driver’s analysis exist within the apparentlyseamless fabric of Packer’s narratives. The investigation concludes by recentring its focus on the narrativised identity of the white woman in a colonial environment, at the same time seeking confirmation of the several reasons for Packer’s writing to have gained only contemporary rather than lasting approval. / digitalisering@umu

La présente étude vise à écouter la voix des femmes s’exprimant à travers leurs œuvres, à comprendre leurs motivations, leurs buts et leur place dans le discours littéraire et social ; on cherchera aussi à analyser la réception par les étudiants de la littérature française féminine contemporaine, considérée comme une proposition de lecture digne d’attention en raison de son caractère socialement engagé. Le fait de se demander de quelle façon la littérature française créée par les femmes observe les problèmes auxquels est confrontée la société contemporaine et de quelle manière elle entreprend un dialogue sur ces sujets, montrant par là un intérêt pour l’ordre social et politique, semble élargir avec profit non seulement les perspectives de l’analyse littéraire, mais également l’horizon de la didactique de la littérature. En se penchant sur la création littéraire contemporaine des femmes, on cherche à proposer un tour d’horizon des formes d’engagement et du degré d’intensité avec lequel sont traitées les questions de société dont la problématique influence la situation de l’individu et les communautés qu’il forme, à commencer par la plus petite d’entre elles : la famille. À travers l’œuvre de Claire Castillon, qui puise dans les modèles créés par les femmes écrivains des générations précédentes, nous pouvons observer la façon dont celles-ci entreprennent une réflexion critique sur leur place et leur rôle dans le tissu social, mais aussi sur l’état général de la société dans laquelle elles évoluent. De même, nous voyons quels problèmes de société apparaissent comme les plus sensibles de leur point de vue. Afin de suivre l’évolution de l’écriture féminine et de mieux comprendre sa place actuelle, il est essentiel d’analyser les motifs pour lesquels les femmes ont saisi la plume, notamment depuis la Révolution française, lorsque ces questions de société ont pris une importance particulière dans le discours public, également dans le champ littéraire. / This study aims to listen to the voices of women expressed through their works, to understand their motivations, their goals and their place in the literary and social discourse ; we also seek to analyze the reception by students of contemporary French women's writing considered a reading proposal worthy of attention because of its socially committed character. The fact wonder how French literature created by women observe the issues facing modern society and how she develop a dialogue on these subjects, thereby showing an interest in social and political order which seems to expand profitably not only the prospects of literary analysis, but also the horizon of didactics of literature. By focusing on the contemporary literature of women, it seeks to provide an overview of the forms of commitment and degree of intensity with which are treated the issues of society whose problems affect the situation of the individual and communities that it forms, starting with the smallest one: the family. Through the work of Claire Castillon, which draws from models created by women writers of previous generations, we can observe how women writers undertake critical reflection on the role od women in society, but also the general state of society in which they operate. Similarly, we see which social issus are most essential to their views. To follow the evolution of women's writing and understand its current position, it is important to analyze the reasons why women have seized the pen, especially since the French Revolution, when the social issues have taken a particular importance in the public discourse, also in the literary field.

Fondé sur la force performative de l’injure qui travaille l’écriture de trois poètes québécoises, ce mémoire s’intéresse aux stratégies discursives grâce auxquelles elles renversent la stigmatisation du féminin inscrite dans le discours haineux. Les « fées mal tournées », « plotes de riches », « crisse de folles », « bâtardes », « sorcières » et « chiennes » sont légion dans Filles-commandos bandées (1976) de Josée Yvon, Royaume scotch tape (2015) de Chloé Savoie-Bernard et La dévoration des fées (2017) de Catherine Lalonde. Les poètes font toutes trois entendre des voix qui se réapproprient des injures pour les « resignifier », au sens où l’entend Judith Butler dans Le pouvoir des mots (1997). À la fois injuriées et injurieuses, elles s’emparent du pouvoir qui anime l’insulte pour la dévier, y aménagent des significations inattendues et la transforment même parfois en un lieu positif d’identification. Reprenant à leur compte les injures reçues, les écrivaines les entremêlent aux personnages puissants de l’Amazone, de la sorcière et de la fée, et façonnent des figures qui rejettent les corsets dans lesquels on tente d’enserrer non seulement leur corps, mais également leur discours. Parfois violentes, vulnérables, souffrantes ou effrayantes, ces « filles » brillent d’une souveraine irrévérence. Ainsi, elles apparaissent toutes comme des incarnations de la « femme ingouvernable » (1995) de Kathleen Rowe, symbole d’insoumission. Emportés par les affects qui les habitent, leurs corps excessifs, désirants, désacralisés et parfois grotesques, voire abjects, sont traversés de pulsions et de fantasmes violents. Ce mémoire se penche donc sur les manières dont les « filles » d’Yvon, de Savoie-Bernard et de Lalonde s’approprient le pouvoir de la colère et, en se positionnant entre vulnérabilité et ingouvernabilité, se font à la fois menaçantes et rassembleuses. / Based on the performative force of insults that shapes the writing of three Quebec poets, this dissertation explores the discursive strategies through which they reverse the stigmatization of women embedded in injurious speech. Such vocabulary as “fées mal tournées”, “plotes de riche”, “crisse de folles”, “bâtardes”, “sorcières” and “chiennes” is plentiful in Filles-commandos bandées (1976) by Josée Yvon, Royaume scotch tape (2015) by Chloé Savoie-Bernard and La dévoration des fées (2017) by Catherine Lalonde. The poets all create voices that reclaim insults in order to “re-signify” them, as Judith Butler conceives in Excitable Speech (1997). Being both the insulted and the insulting, they seize the power that animates insults to deflect them, endowing them with unexpected meanings and transforming them into neutral and even positive terms of identification. Taking up the insults received, the writers intertwine them with the powerful characters of the Amazon, the witch and the fairy, and shape figures who reject the corsets that enclose not only their body, but also their speech. These “girls”, at times violent, vulnerable, suffering or frightening, all shine with sovereign irreverence. In that, they appear to be incarnations of Kathleen Rowe’s Unruly Woman (1995), a symbol of insubordination. Carried away by the affects that inhabit them, their excessive, desiring, desacralized and sometimes grotesque, even abject bodies, are filled with impulses and violent fantasies. This research thus examines the ways in which the “girls” of Yvon, Savoie-Bernard and Lalonde appropriate the power of anger and, positioning themselves between vulnerability and ungovernability, reveal themselves as both threatening and unifying.

In this study, I read late medieval vernacular texts of Mandeville’s Travels, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and Margery Kempe’s Book in terms of memory, place and authorial identity. I show how each author constructs ethos and alters narrative form by using memory and place. I argue that the discourses of memory and place are essential to authorial identity and anchor their eccentric texts to traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. In Chapter one, I argue that memory and place are essential tools in creating authorial ethos for the Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe, and John Mandeville. These writers use memory and place to anchor their eccentric texts in traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. Chapter two reads Mandeville’s treatment of holy places as he constructs authority by using rhetorical appeals to authority via salvation history and memory. His narrative draws on multiple media, multiple texts, memoria, and collective memory. Chapter three examines the rhetorical strategy of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as directly linked to practices of memoria, especially in her cataloguing of ancient and medieval authorities and scripture. Chaucer’s Wife legitimates her travel and experience through citing and quoting from medieval common-place texts and ultimately makes a common-place text of her own personal experience. Chapter four argues that memory is the central structuring strategy and the foundation for Margery’s arguments for spiritual authority and legitimacy in The Book of Margery Kempe. I read the Book’s structure as a strategic dramatization of Margery’s authority framed by institutional spaces of the Church and by civic spaces of the medieval town. Chapter five considers the implications of reading the intersections of memory and place in late-medieval construction of authority for vernacular writers as contributing to a better understanding of medieval authorial identity and a clearer appreciation of structure, form, and the transformation of the pilgrimage motif into the travel narrative genre. This project helps strengthen ties between the fields of medieval literature, women’s writing and rhetoric(s), and Genre Studies as it charts the interface between discourse, narrative form, and medieval conceptions of memory and authorial identity.

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A feminist examination of the life of the Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker is preceded by a look at the conventional literary biography with its unique dual nature: scientific enquiry combined with the art of storytelling, which is aptly called “fiction under oath” (Gutiérrez 1992: 49). Subsequently, an overview of the theoretical basis of feminist ideology and literary approaches is presented with the emphasis on the psychoanalytical point of departure, which views women’s marginalized position as social instead of biological in origin, and therefore as changeable. Biography owes its important place in contemporary women’s writing to the fact that it documents the history and experience of women in the patriarchal system. Feminist biographers, influenced by Postmodernism, force the genre from its traditionally linear form and narrow focus on a famous, usually male subject. The result is a more fluid, cyclical portrayal of (usually) influential women, shedding more light on the social, domestic and personal spheres. Because this kind of biography does not claim to be authoritative, the biographer’s personal contribution and her methods are made explicit. The intuitive and experimental nature of feminist biography makes it suitable for an intertextual and even interdisciplinary approach. Jonker’s life is analysed against the background of a folk tale, The Red Shoes, which is an allegory for the sacrifice of the instinctive creative self or archetypal “wildish woman”. Ancient myths, which narratives of almost every culture share, are seen as responsible for the tenacious survival of the patriarchy through time, social change, and across cultural boundaries. For this reason, feminists see the creation of new myths or infusing old myths with new meaning as the key to women’s emancipation. Against this background, the following subtexts also act as shaping elements in the Ingrid Jonker biography: · The concept of a person’s life “script” unfolding according to repetitive messages laid down in the unconscious by authority figures; · The “conspiracy” between a biographee and her biographers in forming her public image; and · Six archetypes in the Jungian idiom that characterise a person’s journey to spiritual maturity, Examined with these subtexts in mind, Ingrid Jonker’s life story unfolds as follows: A poet in conflict with her time and “abandoned” by her parents, is displaced in pre-adolescence from a unstructured rural milieu where her instinctive creativity was allowed to develop freely, to a highly structured, limiting and artificial urban environment. She seems prophetically destined for a tragic end. Her obsession with death is fed by an inability to have meaningful relationships and to adjust to society’s double standards. Ever the victim of imagined or real betrayal, she joins the ranks of other female artists who follow the same destructive archetypal pattern. She is spurred on not only by her own feral recklessness, but also by other artists who are inspired by her flirtation with death. Upcoming generations are mesmerised by her “moth around a flame” life and, like children, ask time and again for the disastrous though darkly romantic story with its mythical proportions, which turned Jonker into an icon. In doing so, they manage their own collectively unconscious fear of the annihilation of death. The Red Shoes links with Kristeva’s distinction between semiotic and symbolic language. The former is non-rational, intuitive and signifies the maternal whereas the latter represents language that is masculine, rational, linear and therefore patriarchal and logocentric. / Dissertation (MA (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

Le roman de la route est un genre narratif propre à l’Amérique du Nord. Prenant la forme d’un récit de voyage, il met en scène les pérégrinations d’un narrateur sur les autoroutes des États Unis. Au Canada francophone, plus précisément, ce voyage transcontinental prend un nouveau sens. Parfois, il est motivé par la poursuite d’un frère perdu et se transforme avec le temps en quête identitaire : le narrateur, confronté à une culture inconnue, est obligé de faire face à des enjeux d’identité culturelle qui hantent le Canada francophone depuis l’époque coloniale. Au Québec, par exemple, on cite autant le voyage de Jack Waterman dans Volkswagen Blues (1984) de Jacques Poulin que celui de Sal Paradise dans On the Road de Jack Kerouac (1957) en ce qui concerne leur influence sur le genre. Certains auteurs moins connus du genre, cependant, sont des femmes. Leurs récits s’articulent autour d’un voyage identitaire particulier qui prend en compte des facteurs extérieurs à leur situation géoculturelle, tels que leur âge et leur sexe. Ce mémoire analysera les romans « de la route » de trois autrices canadiennes, à savoir De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline ? (1982) de Gabrielle Roy, Soifs (1995) de Marie-Claire Blais et Distantly Related to Freud (2008) d’Ann Charney. Nous examinerons les raisons motivant le voyage aux États-Unis, pourquoi ceux-ci sont choisis comme lieu de destination et ce que les protagonistes des récits espèrent y retrouver. Curieusement, ce qu’ils trouvent tous à leur arrivée au pays est une société envahie par des formes de ce que le théoricien français Jean Baudrillard appelle l’hyperréalité ; c’est-à-dire une société submergée par des « modèles » du réel, ou des simulacres. Ces simulacres réussissent à brouiller la frontière entre le réel et le faux, désorientant complètement le voyageur. Notre mémoire examinera ces formes hyperréelles, leur représentation dans les trois récits comme inhérente à la société étatsunienne et, finalement, leur impact sur la quête identitaire des protagonistes. / The road novel is a narrative genre particular to North America. Taking the form of a travelogue, it depicts the narrator’s wanderings over the highways and byways of the United States. In French-speaking Canada, specifically, the transcontinental voyage of the road novel takes on a special meaning. Sometimes, it is motivated by the pursuit of a lost brother and transforms over time into a pursuit of the self: the narrator, faced with an unknown culture, is obliged to confront issues of cultural identity that have haunted francophone Canada since the colonial era. In Quebec, for instance, Jack Waterman’s journey in Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues (1984) is cited as frequently as Sal Paradise’s in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) with regards to their role in influencing the genre. Some lesser known authors of the genre, however, are women. Their stories are centered around a specific identity voyage that considers factors outside of their geocultural situation, such as their age and gender. This thesis analyzes the “road” novels of three Canadian authors, including Gabrielle Roy’s De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline ? (1982), Marie-Claire Blais’ Soifs (1995), and Ann Charney’s Distantly Related to Freud (2008). We examine the reasons for making the journey to the United States, why this country has been chosen as a place of destination, and what the protagonists of these stories hope to find there. Curiously, what they all find upon arrival is a society dominated by forms of what French theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “hyperreality”; that is, a society overwhelmed by “models” of the real, or simulacra. These simulacra blur the lines between the real and the artificial, completely disorientating the traveler. Our thesis explores these hyperreal forms, their representation in the three narratives as being inherent to U.S. society, and, finally, their impact on the protagonists’ quest for identity.