Date range: March 2024 – November 2024
MA in French Studies
Hubert Odikamnoro
Une étude des attitudes linguistiques des Igbos envers les langues majeures au Nigeria
Abstract: Cette thèse porte sur les attitudes linguistiques envers les trois langues dominantes du Nigéria : l’igbo, le haoussa et le yoruba. Ces langues se distinguent non seulement par leur grand nombre de locuteurs mais aussi par leur rôle important dans la politique nationale. Comprendre les attitudes envers ces langues est crucial pour examiner les dynamiques intergroupes, car cela pourrait révéler des sentiments et des préjugés sous-jacents qui influencent la cohésion nationale. L’objectif principal de cette recherche est d’explorer les attitudes linguistiques des Igbos envers ces trois langues et leurs locuteurs. Pour ce faire, les participants (tous d’origine igbo) ont été interrogés à l’aide d’un questionnaire ouvert conçu pour recueillir leurs attitudes envers les langues igbo, haoussa et yoruba et les locuteurs. Les données recueillies auprès de 54 participants ont été soumises à une analyse thématique à l’aide du logiciel MaxQDA. Cette analyse a permis d’identifier les thèmes récurrents reflétant les attitudes prédominantes parmi les participants. Les résultats révèlent que les Igbos montrent des attitudes plus positives envers leur propre langue et groupe, tout en conservant des attitudes quelque peu négatives envers le haoussa et des attitudes ambivalentes envers le yoruba.
PhD in Hispanic Studies
Patricio Robles
Abstract: This dissertation engages with narratives set in the Southern Cone of the Americas: the Pampas and Patagonia. I focus on two periods—the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries—during which there has been considerable writing. This dissertation centers on one aspect: the relationship between nature and culture, a dualism that, I argue, becomes a regional trope. In the early chapters, I examine how both regions were characterized by European travellers and Argentine writers, analyzing foundational figures such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Charles Darwin, and Francisco Moreno. They described these geographies as spaces dominated by untamed nature, sometimes as deserts that impose adverse conditions for establishing society. With nuances, they promoted the taming of these regions to develop the Argentine nation. In a word, they fostered the drive for modernity. In this first period, I also analyze narratives from the gauchesca genre. They reflect a questioning of the postulates of modernity, but I state they still operate within the foundational parameters. They reveal, though, that when there is a critique of modernity, the narratives tend to emphasize the other aspect of dualism, in this case, nature. Following this assertion, my central observation is that the dichotomy tends to be subverted in contemporary narratives following an extensive questioning of modernity. In the last two chapters, I examine travel writing in Patagonia by authors such as Bruce Chatwin, Luis Sepúlveda, Mempo Giardinelli, and Maristella Svampa, and novels of the “rural turn” in the Pampas by authors like Matilde Sánchez, Natalia Rodríguez, and Samanta Schweblin. Although I state that there is a reversal of the dualism, the perceptions of both regions differ, due to what I call space occupation and affective intensities. Different levels of intervention in both regions influence the narratives’ portrayal. During the twentieth century, the Pampas became Argentina’s main productive area, while Patagonia remained largely unaltered. Analyzing these divergent trajectories, I study how representations evolved differently. In Patagonia, narratives tend to depict a space that requires protection. Meanwhile, in the Pampas, they lean toward portraying a space completely altered by human intervention.
María Julieta Cordero Noguera
Spiritual tides : religion, memory and history in three Caribbean novels
Abstract: This dissertation starts with the conviction that the Caribbean is a site of knowledge. With an analysis of Puerto Rican Mayra Montero’s Del rojo de su sombra, Jamaican Patricia Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones, and Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s En attendant la montée des eaux, it privileges Caribbean intellectual heritage with its modes of thought, discourses, styles, and idiosyncrasies. I do not dismiss Western epistemic developments, or deny their geopolitical repercussions. Instead, I approach contemporary Caribbean narrative to examine how knowledge emerges from literary texts to claim authority over reasoning about itself and others. Specifically, this dissertation investigates the intersections of religion, memory, and history as they are depicted in these novels, while addressing the nonlinear experience of time, with particular emphasis on the coexistence of multiple temporalities. To carry out this project, I devise an experimental mode or method for literary analysis named archipelagic reading. This i) positions Caribbean aesthetics and scholarship at the forefront of the literary discussion; ii) acknowledges the novels as works of fiction purposefully engaged with memory-making, re-historicising, and understanding the role of religion locally; iii) invites to suspend our reliance on linearity, despite the fact that this experiment is rendered in a linear layout through the linearity of written language; iv) emphasises the richness of paradox undeterred by contradictions; v) encourages curiosity and active participation from its readership to experience the development of the arguments; vi) demands a shift in the imaginary to reorient cultural, geopolitical and linguistic coordinates toward the Caribbean; and finally vii) responds to the call echoing in the texts. To consolidate these possibilities, I offer a literary analysis of the novels that evolves in tandem with the fashioning of the research method.
