The Image of Women in American and Algerian Fictions: A Case Study of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Amin Zaoui’s La chambre de la vierge impure (2009)
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Date
2014
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university Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This Dissertation is a case study which compares the image of women in American and
Algerian fictions through the works of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925),
and Amin Zaoui’s La chambre de la vierge impure (2009). The purpose of this dissertation is
to show how close backgrounds may produce similar literary productions. This was achieved
by applying Fredric Jameson’s theory The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (1981). In fact, the interest of this theory lies in the fact that it helped us show
how the two ideological battlegrounds that the American society of the 1920s and the
Algerian society of the 1990s were rendered through fiction by the two authors. In the first
chapter we have put emphasis on the analysis of the major female characters of each novel; in
order to sort out the prevalent ideologies in presence during the time the two novels were
composed. Our work has shown that though the two novels may seem different, they share the
same representation of women; both authors portrayed ambiguously women’s physical
appearance, inner thoughts, desires, and their situation in society. Then in the second chapter,
we have studied the two novels as socially symbolic acts, and reached the conclusion that
close backgrounds may produce similar literary productions.
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70p.;30cm.(+cd)
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Comparative Literature