Telling stories about the past: Reading history in the fictions of Marguerite Duras, Edouard Glissant, and Anne Hebert

This dissertation is a study of how history figures in the fictions of Marguerite Duras, Edouard Glissant, and Anne Hebert. Its purpose is to analyze the ways in which these French-language authors incorporate historical experience, understanding, and representation into their works of fiction. Through close readings of the primary texts, it argues that the works of Duras, Glissant, and Hebert contain a complex vision of the individual subject living in, and writing, history.; The introductory chapter treats an overlapping series of contexts applicable to the writing and reading of history within fictions of the second half of the twentieth century. The discussion is centered on the epistemological and mimetic problems presented by postcolonialism, postmodernism, and trauma. In varying ways, these areas of discourse offer significant ideas and strategies for the reading of the primary texts. This study thus establishes a transcultural context that permits the grouping of three writers not united by geography, politics, or race.; The three following chapters of this dissertation are devoted to close readings of six fictional works: Hiroshima mon amour and La douleur by Duras; La Lezarde and Le quatrieme siecle by Glissant, and Les fous de Bassan and Le premier jardin by Hebert. These texts pose significant problems of interpretation that are related to the relationship between the individual characters and past events. In particular, this study concentrates on problems associated with narrative voice and structure, and on the influence of trauma on the understanding and recounting of events of the past. The readings of the narratives suggest that their fragmentation and discontinuity signify a variety of meanings: absent knowledge, hidden knowledge, uncertainty, and trauma.; This dissertation offers new interpretations of the use of history in French and Francophone works from the second half of the twentieth century. It argues for a metatextual relationship between fictional and historical discourse. Therefore, it demonstrates some of the ways in which the texts of Duras, Glissant, and Hebert insightfully probe central problems of historical understanding and representation in the period following World War Two and Decolonization.