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This thesis, consisting of four chapters, explores female alienation and subjectivity as described by post-war French women writers. The first chapter will focus on critical and theoretical approaches to female alienation. Through feminist and Marxist criticism, I explore the condition of women as a dominated class. The second chapter examines literary strategies such as irony, humor, parody and satire used by the authors of my corpus to undermine and question gender stereotypes which they inherited from the tradition of the French novel. The third chapter is devoted to the issue of women novelists' uses of the figure of the naive female narrator. Through their reworking of this stereotype, they perform a political act of providing agency to a figure who was traditionally deprived of all agency. The fourth chapter analyzes the question of the female body. By playing with the concept of the grotesque female body and its representation, the novelists whom I study, attempt to liberate their female narrators from the status of an object and the influence of the beauty myth. What interests me most is the potential of feminist literature to create alternative representations of women in French literature. In the novels studied here, narrators move from a position of naivety and alienation to an unexpected sense of agency and subjectivity. Thesis Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) This thesis examines the evolution of the representation of female alienation and female identity in the postwar French novel, as well as the textual strategies of resistance used by three postwar French women novelists to subvert and rework the trope of the naive female narrator. My research project highlights the emergence of female agency in the French novel in recent decades through the examples of novels by Christiane Rochefort, Marie Redonnet and Marie Darrieussecq. The novels studied in this dissertation feature the point of view of female narrators who move beyond their initial naivety and passivity to discover unexpected forms of agency. |
