William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann as Intertexts
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Date
2010
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Abstract
This dissertation is entitled “William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aimé
Césaire’s Une Tempête and Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann as Intertexts”. It aims
to investigate how William Shakespeare, as a Western bard, influences and
gives an impetus to the non-Westerners mainly the postcolonial writers and
playwrights to follow his path, and sometimes, to respond to his negative
portrayal of the non-westerners. The post-colonial writers tend to answer back
what Shakespeare embedded about non-westerners in his works in general and
The Tempest in particular.
Accordingly, in this research, we have investigated in The Tempest, Une
Tempête and Toufann how Aimé Césaire and Dev Virahsawmy were influenced,
positively and negatively, by William Shakespeare.
In order to realize the objective of this research, we have opted for two
important literary theories. These theories concern the Russian theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin’s dialogism, and the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s
postcolonial theory.
We have divided our dissertation into two chapters. In the introduction we have
introduced and given some explanation of the theme of our research including
the review of literature in which we have mentioned some works and critics that
in one way or another dealt with the three playwrights and studied them from
different perspectives. Afterwards, we have introduced our problematic which
concentrates on the analysis of how the three playwrights clash over the referent
of colonialism and all what the latter implies on the one hand, while on the
other hand, Césaire and Virahsawmy through their adaptations have stylized to a
great extent the English national icon “Shakespeare”.
To analyze this theme, we have divided our research paper into two chapters. In
the first chapter which is entitled Shakespeare, Césaire and Virahsawmy:
Life, Times and Influence, we have provided the reader with useful information
about the historical events which took place in England, Martinique and
Mauritius when, respectively, The Tempest, Une Tempête and Toufann were
written and performed. The second chapter contains two sections. The first
section which is entitled Césaire and Virahsawmy as Hidden Polemics
explains the clash and the conflict of ideologies among the three playwrights that can be shown
at the level of the setting, characters and themes, as well as language whereas the second section
is devoted to the analysis of how Césaire and Virahsawmy have stylized Shakespeare by
imitating his way of writing and borrowing from him many aspects related to the form as well as
to the content in relation to the setting, characters and themes, in addition to language.
Finally, in the conclusion, we have given an overview about the ideas that are developed in the
present dissertation at the same time we have confirmed our hypotheses which have been
introduced in the introduction.
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120p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
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literature