Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Batraville, Nathalie

Titel

Révolution poétique et isolement politique: l'avant-garde littéraire haïtienne, 1957-1971

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation provides a literary and intellectual history of François Duvalier's regime and analyzes how during those years, a new literary modernity struggled to represent the isolation of Haiti's working poor. Written in French, this dissertation constructs a general literary history of the period by analyzing a selection of works: two poetry collections, Idem by Davertige (1962) and Jacqueline Beaugé's A vol d'ombre (1966); and two works of prose: Mûr à crever by Frankétienne (1968) and Marie Vieux's Amour, colère et folie (1968). I approach these texts by examining, on the one hand, the social world in which they existed (the groups their authors formed, the journals they created, the interviews they gave, the reception of their works, and the heated debates that often followed); and, on the other hand, by reading closely the texts themselves.Past scholarship has focused either on the formal aesthetic achievements of these authors, or on their engagement with the social problems of loneliness and isolation. This dissertation will examine both phenomena--the formal and the social--at once and in relation to each other, in this time and place. Writers and critics under François Duvalier's regime explored representations of isolation and debated the legitimacy of such representations, and through these processes made room for forms that were modem in that they were innovative, but also in that they articulated central tensions within global capitalism and post-1957 Haiti. My dissertation takes on the task of reading together these mutually constitutive characteristics, and more importantly still, demonstrates that modernity and isolation must be understood in relation to questions of class. Bearing in mind the central role that communists and socialists played in opposing the regime, I track the poetics and politics of isolation during the 1960s and argue that a growing awareness of and anxiety about the economic, social, political and geographic isolation of Haitian workers shaped a new literary avant-garde.The first chapter examines one of this period's masterpieces, Marie Vieux's Amour, colère et folie, published in 1968, and focuses on "Folie," the story from the trilogy that has received the least attention from critics. With this narrative, which tells the story of four poets who have barricaded themselves in an attic, Vieux superimposes the writers' isolation with that of the nation. After situating Vieux's own participation and marginalization within Haitian intellectual and literature, I analyze, through close readings, how in "Folie" she theorized Haiti's place within global capitalism by looking at colonialism and imperialism through the prism of incarceration.My second chapter analyzes this period's most influential poetry collection: Idem by Davertige (pseudonym of Villard Denis). Published in 1962, Idem sparked a brief literary debate that revealed anxieties about the isolation of the working poor in Haiti in relation to literature. I analyze these exchanges, then turn to a close reading of three of Davertige's poems which draw on the interplay of isolation, death, and revolution, as well as intertextuality with Apollinaire's "Zone." Part of this argument, to which I return in my final chapter, posits the emergence of an iterative vision of history and revolution in Haiti during the 60s. The third chapter takes on the notion of the absurd in relation to isolation and concentrates on a poetry collection, À vol d'ombre, published by Jacqueline Beaugé in 1966, and on the literary circle that she was part of at the time, Hounguénikon. The group generated a discussion in the press about the relevance, in Haiti, of the absurd, a category critics associated with Albert Camus. I examine these articles, and then move to a close reading of À vol d'ombre. I argue that Beaugé's work inscribed onto the Haitian landscape the violence of isolation, and that this violence became foundational in structuring a poetic and political understanding of the absurd that is specific to Haiti and to the Black Atlantic.The fourth and final chapter examines Frankétienne's first novel, Mûr à crever, as well as the aesthetic he created, spiralisme. In 1965, along with three other writers, Frankétienne conceived of spiralisme, an aesthetic that called for literature to reflect the chaos of Haiti, the Caribbean, and the universe. Using "Spiralisme et vision," an essay he published after Mûr à crever, as well as the novel itself, I explore how this modem aesthetic articulates a poetic vision of isolation that constructs revolution as repetition and that itself enacts this repetition through mimesis.