Title:
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Masculinités francophones : an exploration of textual performances of gender in contemporary men's fiction in French
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With the unprecedented cultural changes that have swept late twentieth- and early twenty first
century Western society, the notion of "masculinity" has been increasingly subjected to
critical scrutiny. This thesis explores how the deconstruction of an idealized, monolithic
masculinity that has, arguably, resulted from such scrutiny is represented and performed in
contemporary men's fiction in French. Mixing textual analysis with attention to aesthetic
codes and socio-political context, it follows a tripartite structure, apportioning its chapters to
"gay literary masculinities", "black literary masculinities" and "white heterosexual literary
masculinities", in each case focusing specifically on the work of one principal author, namely
Herve Guibert, Dany Laferriere and Michel Houellebecq respectively. In addition to Judith
Butler's analyses of the performative nature of gender identities, this thesis is informed by a
range of scholarly interventions in the areas of masculinity, gender, feminist, gay, queer,
African-American and postcolonial studies. Engaging with these interventions - historical,
sociological and theoretical - it examines how contemporary men's fiction, and its
performative modes of representing men, intervene in current debates about masculinity.
Specifically, it interrogates how contemporary male-authored narratives engage with
masculinity through performative strategies of representing men that draw attention to
masculinity's discursive limits and dramatise its deconstruction. And, conscious that gender
is always performed to be read in certain ways by a certain audience, this thesis also
examines what such performances might feasibly seek to achieve in terms of impact on their
readership, addressing the relationship between narrator and reader and renewing the question
of the politics of literature. In so doing, it sets out to redress the remarkable lack of critical
attention devoted to French-language literary masculinities.
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