Whereas literary history is traditionally seen as a chronological succession of authors and movements, the surrealists were among the first to highlight that this conception does not apply to poetry. Insisting that surrealism depends neither on a historical period nor on specific individuals, they considered surrealism a phenomenon that transcends periodization. This atemporal aspect is nowhere more apparent than in surrealism’s engagement with medieval literature: from Breton’s examination of medieval alchemy and Aragon’s essays on Chrétien de Troyes, to Eluard’s medieval anthology, the Middle Ages are a continuous source of fascination for the surrealists. More than an object of interest, however, this kinship with medieval literature posits an alternative view of modernism, one not defined by chronological proximity to the present, but founded on a notion of atemporality that unifies and consolidates the preceding tradition. Whereas many approaches to surrealism to date focus on the movement’s chronology, on individual works, or on theories articulated by specific members (in most cases those by its principal theorist André Breton), a large number of studies fail to accentuate the uniquely surrealist characteristic that unites the literary works of various de facto surrealists with those of their predecessors. These ideas concerning non-linear time are theoretically embedded in the principles of surrealism itself, centered around a notion of death that is intricately wrapped up with surrealist writing practice as well as with the movement’s overall approach to life: abolishing any claims of authorship in favor of a poetic language independent of authorial control, surrealism proposes that it is precisely through the portal of the imagination—of poetic language—that one can enter literary history, and, conversely, that literary history can manifest itself in the present. It is in this sense that Breton writes: “Le surréalisme vous introduira dans la mort qui est une société sècrete.” Yet, this induction into death also contains a belief in overcoming death, suggesting an upheaval of the life-death dichotomy that, to the non-initiated, passes for reality. It is precisely under the aegis of death, then, that I conduct readings of medieval, 19th-century, and de facto surrealist texts, examining how surrealism challenges our traditional perception of literary history as linear and chronological. The first chapter delineates how a surrealist notion of death derives from an understanding of automatism. Departing from Breton’s definition of surrealism as psychic automatism in the first Manifeste, this chapter shows how this definition renders fluid the temporal boundaries assigned to the group. The second chapter looks at the way in which notions of death already marked surrealist thought even before the first Manifeste in 1924—especially in relation to the experiences of World War I and the suicide of Jacques Vaché, giving rise to a duality in Breton that would become the very reason for his practice of automatism. Through a close reading of Breton’s early text “La Confession dédaigneuse,” this chapter sets forth an analysis of Eros and Thanathos in relation to Freud’s views on trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The third chapter, in turn, explores the surrealist notion of death as a liminal state. Comparing the role of Desnos during the hypnotic sleep experiments to the figure of Lancelot in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la charrette, this chapter depicts both Desnos and Lancelot as liminal figures bridging two previously separate realms of experience. Finally, the fourth chapter examines the transition from liminality to universality. Drawing on observations by Mircea Eliade concerning religious thought and the creation of myth, this chapter considers three sources in close relation with one another: Nerval’s Chimères, Breton’s Arcane 17, and the 14th-century Mélusine legends by Coudrette and Jehan d’Arras. Thus, drawing on literary and theoretical texts as well as on visual artwork, “Literature as an Open Window: Surrealism, Death, and Literary History,” demonstrates that surrealism’s truly avant-garde characteristic does not consist in a radical break with the past, but that it lies in rendering the literary past as alive as the present.

This study traces the emergence of the category “Turkish literature” within the French-speaking scholarly community in eighteenth-century Europe. By uncovering forgotten debates in the eighteenth century among French scholars, courtiers, and diplomats about the existence of Turkish literature, I show how the articulation of the notion of literature drew boundaries between France and the Islamicate world. These debates offer insight into how competing definitions of “Turk” and “literature” conditioned whether the French Republic of Letters integrated or excluded Ottoman “men of letters.”

My analysis of French definitions of Turkish literature highlights two core themes: politeness as literature and the borderlines between French and Ottoman. In the chapter “Worthy of Crossing the Sea,” I show the fluidity of both categories in the words of Jean de Laroque. A journalist writing for the widely read Mercure de France, Laroque used his native Marseille as a template for his beliefs about the Muslim Ottomans, leading him to define literature as an active commerce among persons. In a series of letters published in the periodical Mercure de France between 1732 and 1738, Laroque emphasizes the role of the court in policing the society of men of letters. The following chapter, “People before Print” builds on this court-centered and interpersonal definition of Turkish literature, arguing that the reactions of the Parisian academic milieu to the establishment in 1727 of the first Arabic movable-type press at the Ottoman court contrasts with ongoing cultural exchanges between French and Ottoman diplomats. Rather than representing a threshold, I reveal, print was actually ancillary to the activities of the Republic of Letters. Rather, French men of letters perceived Turkish literature as the product of Ottoman elite formation and the circulation of manuscripts. These manuscripts, in turn, provided the source material for a number of translations of Oriental tales. The chapter “The Snake in the Library” examines the collections published by French Orientalists Pétis de La Croix, Caylus, and Cardonne from 1707 to 1770. Close readings of these three authors’ adaptations bring to light the representation of a “Turkish style.” Over the course of the century, this style comes to replace references to Ottoman poetics with a generic and self-referential Orientalist literary corpus. Together, the analyses conducted in these three chapters demonstrates the importance of elite and court-centered practices to the integration of Islamicate culture within the Republic of Letters.

Ultimately, the findings of this dissertation contribute to two fields of study that have witnessed a resurgence of interest in recent years. First, by exhuming long buried debates about Turkish literature, I provide a more comprehensive account of the movement of Muslims and the circulation of Islamicate culture in Europe in the eighteenth century. In addition, I add my work to an emerging critique of center-periphery models of “world literature” by retracing the historical processes by which Orientalism comes to absorb Turkish literature into the French Republic of Letters.

"Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State" addresses the way the Algerian civil war has been portrayed in 1990s novelistic literature. In the words of one literary critic, "The Algerian war has been, in a sense, one big murder mystery." This may be true, but literary accounts portray the "mystery" of the civil war--and propose to solve it--in sharply divergent ways. The primary aim of this study is to examine how three of the most celebrated 1990s novels depict--organize, analyze, interpret, and "solve"--the civil war. I analyze and interpret these novels--by Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal--through a deep contextualization, both in terms of Algerian history and in the novels' contemporary setting. This is particularly important in this case, since the civil war is so contested, and is poorly understood. Using the novels' thematic content as a cue for deeper understanding, I engage through them and with them a number of elements crucial to understanding the civil war: Algeria's troubled nationalist legacy; its stagnant one-party regime; a fear, distrust, and poor understanding of the Islamist movement and the insurgency that erupted in 1992; and the unending, horrifically bloody violence that piled on throughout the 1990s. Alternating close readings with deep contextualization, I examine how the novels conceptualize the civil war within Algerian history, then propose a reading of the novels themselves by drawing out their positions in relation to each other and to the civil war.

After a general presentation in the first chapter, Chapter 2 offers a reading of Boualem Sansal's Le serment des barbares, a novel that presents the larger themes of the dissertation: the distortion of public memory; the difficulty in narrating the civil war; the mythification of history; and the role of the state in contributing to violence in Algerian society. Chapter 3 follows the paths proposed in Sansal's novel by considering the novel's claim that the popular understanding of the war of independence is largely a myth, and that insidious but important episodes of that struggle were deleted from history. Chapter 4 examines the treatment of the civil war in Yasmina Khadra's Les agneaux du Seigneur, an enormous commercial success that frames the civil war as a noir genre fiction of terror and crime in a village outside Algiers. Chapter 5 examines the discourse used to discuss the civil war, and focuses specifically on the rhetoric of state discourse. Chapter 6 reviews the basic political context of the civil war and what is known about the violence itself. Chapter 7 examines the role of political Islam in Algeria, since this is a crucial element of the civil war and its treatment in the novels. Chapter 8 considers the civil war in the depiction of Assia Djebar's Le blanc de l'Algérie and synthesizes the dissertation's major themes.