Browsing by Author "HALIL, Houria"

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    William shakespeare's representation of empire : revision of some classic postcolonial theories
    (Universite Mouloud MAMMERI Tizi-Ouzou, 2020) HALIL, Houria
    This research seeks to explore William Shakespeare’s representation of the so-called British Empire and its relations with the other European powers and the World of Islam, with a special emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Morocco.Five of Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays are used for illustration, most notably The Merchant of Venice (1596), Othello (1603),Antony and Cleopatra(1607), Cymbeline (1609-10)and The Tempest (1611). Taking its theoretical bearings from the new historicist and postcolonial approaches developed by literary scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Edward Said, the research argued that the issues of imperial relationships in Shakespeare are not solely centred on the transatlantic colony of Virginia, but also extended to the Mediterranean basin wherein Britain had much more trade and diplomatic activity, during Shakespeare’s time. This activity also created a cosmopolitan zone of contact, wherein peple of the orient elbowed people from the West, which inevitably gave rise to a pre-modern form of orientalism reflected in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays. Postcolonial reactions and responses to the colonial advocates promoted the idea of dominance and subordination of the post-colonial world and put the latter at the mercy of the colonial power. Hence, Orientalist or Postcolonial theories are discarded rather than appealed to in this study. The reason is that my research reversed these traditional beliefs as well as the roles of both the West and the East by questioning the Western supremacy mainly the English by focusing on the fact that it was the East, not the West, that had the power in both the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries when it comes to the political and military matters. Here, I am fully aware that the main players on the political and military scene at that time were the Ottomans, the French, the Portuguese and the Spaniards. I am also conscious about how the West used to think, and still does, of the Orient as the inferior “Other”. In this research, I have argued that at a time when the English were not well known enough to the Turks and the Arabs, the former had to identify themselves as French instead. According to some historical records, I can say that it is less logical to speak of the English as a colonizing imperial as the other Western European powers like the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the French who dominated trans-Atlantic trade and the New World riches as the Bard of Avon implied it in his plays. Therefore, I can confirm that in my research, I tried to give evidence that Shakespeare is no longer an advertiser of the colonial enterprise (spirit of the empire) but he is one of its victims.
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    William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann as Intertexts
    (2010) HALIL, Houria
    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.