What does it mean for writing from the former French imperial territories of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) to become Maghrebi literature? How does literature come to count as belonging to or appertaining to a particular place? Today, in the international spheres of the university and the literary market,...
My dissertation takes as its point of departure the commonly held premise that WWI forever changed the horizon of French literary production. While deemed indescribable, many authors did attempt to represent the battlefields and aftermath of WWI in literature. Distinct from previous heroic accounts of war, these descriptions had to...
Dictating Manhood: Refiguring Masculinity in Haitian Literature of Dictatorship, 1968-2010 explores the literary representations of masculinity under dictatorship. Through the works of Marie Vieux Chauvet, René Depestre, Frankétienne, Georges Castera, Kettly Mars and Dany Laferrière, my dissertation examines the effects of dictatorship on Haitian masculinity and assesses whether extreme oppression...
This dissertation constitutes a re-evaluation of the popular and critical understanding of eighteenth-century libertinage. In particular, I contest the distinction between sentimentalism and libertinage, which are typically seen as two, irreconcilable approaches to emotional expression. As sentimentalism became prominent in the second half of the eighteenth century, I argue, it...
This dissertation is a study of the figure of the intruder in postcolonial francophone literature, film and graphic novels published and released in the second half of the 20th and early 21st century which develop a discourse on the Maghreb or the Maghrebian dispora in France. Postcolonial critics have long...
This dissertation casts an aesthetic light on a selection of polyphonic novels from the Francophone contemporary canon. From the forms of feminism around the prophet of islam in Far from Madina by Assia Djebar, to the multiple voices of Créolité in Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau, to the forms of...