Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations by Author "Brenner, Natalie"

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    Generating Geographies and Genealogies: Jewish Women Writing the Twentieth Century in French
    (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Brenner, Natalie; Gould, Evlyn
    This dissertation offers an alternative account of Jewish history and experience from within the post-Holocaust and postcolonial Francophone world through the study of six autobiographically-inclined texts written by three generations of Francophone Jewish women of diverse geographical origins. While France was the first European nation-state to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791 and the French Republic has since branded itself as a beacon of tolerance, this tolerance has been contingent upon a strict politics of assimilation and has been challenged by French colonization and participation in the Holocaust. Simultaneously, the evolution of French memory politics and official historical narratives throughout the second half of the twentieth century has reflected a slow coming to terms with and official recognition of French participation in the Holocaust at the expense of acknowledging the traumas of de/colonization also inflicted by the French State. As a result, Jews and postcolonial populations – all marginalized groups affected by these traumatic episodes of modern French history – have been placed in separate categories. This separation has on the one hand reinforced identity politics and narratives of competing victimhood, occluding the interconnections between antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia, and on the other hand excluded Jews from debates concerning multiculturalism and inclusive citizenship. This dissertation demonstrates that these histories of assimilation, exclusion and marginalization are interconnected rather than separate. With an intentional focus on Jewish women and their writing as a means of demonstrating these false separations, I posit and trace the development of “écriture juive féminine” (“Jewish feminine writing”) across the three generations of writers, a textuality characterized and driven by five principles: an ethics of openness to the true, untheorizable and irreducible alterity of others achieved through listening, extreme and perpetual liminality that calls readers into the discomfort of uncertainty, an imperative to mourn and remember losses, an endlessly regenerative writing that resists singular interpretation and opens into further questions, and writing with the body against phallologocentrism. This writing addresses politics of assimilation and exclusion, proposing instead a radical universalism that includes the particular without reducing it to essentialist categories.