Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785
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Item LA THEATRALITE ET LA CRITIQUE DE LA DROITE DANS LES MANDARINS DE SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR(2009) Bayliss, Ann; Verdaguer, Pierre; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the use of theatrical forms to illustrate social criticism in Les Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir draws from works of classic theater and literature to depict the confluence of art, politics, and money in a capital city. Henri, editor of a political newspaper and a writer, is a contemporary Alceste whose desire to live in a better world seems at odds with his impulse to abandon it. Anne, wife of the leader of a left-wing movement, and a psychologist, is a modern Marion, loving, practical, and idealistic. As they and their friends search for meaning and solvency, they struggle against pessimism, fatalism, complacency, artistic escapism, the national interest argument among nations, the military-industrial power complex, and paranoia. Their tragic missteps recall Hamlet, while their everyday life invites comparison to a medieval farce, and the lovers take their cues from Beaumarchais. For the protagonists, as for the author herself, art and writing become a reason and a vision of human solidarity, putting into question the necessity of a world order dominated by capital.Item LA 'NOUVELLE' LITTERATURE MAROCAINE DE LANGUE FRANÇAISE ET L'ESPACE PUBLIC: LE CAS D'ABDELLATIF LAABI(2005-05-26) Babana-Hampton, Safoi; Julien, Eileen; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the strategies adopted by the 'New' Moroccan writers of French expression to creatively engage art in social and cultural debates on identity, decolonization and democracy, thus promoting the emergence of a modern public sphere through literature, against the backdrop of absolutist power and a politically repressed society. The term 'new' is understood as a defining characteristic of a certain trend of Moroccan literary writing that not so much seeks to distinguish itself from what is commonly referred to as 'colonial' writing, but that sees itself in terms of an epistemological attitude, and as an event associated with critical self-questioning and creative engagement with modernity and the colonial/postcolonial situation. The analysis of a selection of texts in our case study of Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi aims at presenting a reading model that posits this literature in its relations with the evolving socio-political and intellectual environments. In order to reveal the limits and inadequacies of past approaches to the corpus of the 'New' Moroccan literature of French expression, the study draws on Habermas's notion of the 'public sphere'. For the purposes of this study, Habermas's concept allows for an interdisciplinary approach that has the advantage of exposing the intricacies of the literature/politics and literature/society relationships in the context of Moroccan society. The study engages the theories of art developed by Bakhtin, Jameson, Bourdieu, Said and others for the ultimate goal of presenting a reading model that privileges the analysis of the texts in question as literary texts seen in their relations with their context, and not as entities that are subordinate to or embedded in the realm of political activity, nor as closed entities leading an independent life of their own. The research questions raised by the thesis are set within larger postcolonial questions and themes such as the meaning of 'decolonization', the relationship between the Self and the Other, determinants of a post-independence (national) identity, the problem of language and the role of the postcolonial intellectual.