Ecriture romanesque post-apartheid chez J.M. Coetzee et Nadine Gordimer

Which changes has the official dismantling of apartheid brought in the novel writing of the two South African Nobel Prize winners? Focussing on Gordimer’s Get a life and Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, this study tries to reflect that main question. Theoretically, some elements of the cultural studies such as the popular, the liberalism and the fiction as a political work, help me develop my work. Narratology and structuralism help me for the literary study of the narratives, which constitute the core of my reflexion. From my study it appears that the post-apartheid novel as written by Coetzee and Gordimer has the same ideological orientation as their writing during the apartheid era. They write from the dominant perspective and dominant group. This situation challenges as Gordimer’s as Coetzee’s popularity on the ground of South African literature.

Writing the Unspeakable: an Ethical Approach to a Traumatized Narrative

This project uses the works of contemporary author Tim O’Brien, whose fiction often performs the trauma of the Vietnam War, to explore new ways of encountering the traumatized text. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, and Sigmund Freud’s and Dominick LaCapra’s work on the narratology of the melancholic and the mourner, I consider the different ways we respond to the suffering Other and explore the paradox that through reading a traumatized narrative empathically we may come face-toface, as it were, with the suffering Other. If this is indeed the case, I reason, then the obligations that are due to the Other are also due to the text itself.

"She Was Not Even Normal": Unreliable Narratives of Female Insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea

In my thesis, I interrogate narrative reliability related to depictions of female insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea. By subjecting the trustworthiness of her storytelling to criticism, especially as regards the concealed madwoman, Bertha Mason, Jane's narration is revealed as unstable, offering problematic insight into a character long considered unflinchingly honest. In du Maurier's later literary adaptation of Jane Eyre, Bertha's parallel character, the eponymous Rebecca, comes to the fore, while the novel's unnamed narrator remains in the shadows, and bases much of her storytelling upon hearsay, rather than the "autobiography" of Jane Eyre. The most transparent narrative voice, however, is Antoinette, the main character of Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre. Despite her madness, Antoinette's narration makes no attempt at dissemblance, speaking forthrightly about her marriage and experience, proving a truthful narrator and openly rejecting the marginal status the earlier narrators try desperately to hide.