Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the question of technology in twentieth-century French and Francophone literature.

摘要

In this dissertation, I propose a new understanding of the relationship between the inhabitants of the metropole and the colonies, by showing how a number of major Twentieth-Century French and Francophone authors depict technology as a mediator, both productive and destructive, between them.;Chapter One establishes a theoretical framework for the study through a reading of Walter Benjamin, which demonstrates how his insights about modernity can serve as a basis to describe the way technological innovations change the perception of the colonies in the metropole in this period. Chapter Two provides an analysis of the representation of this new mode of perception in the works of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, including the literary techniques they invent to evoke an expanding worldview.;The second part of this dissertation considers the representation of technology transfer from Europe to the colonies in the work of the two most influential writers of Negritude, Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor. In my analysis of Cesaire in Chapter Three, I show that his shift from poetry to theater was accompanied by a move toward an extremely favorable view of technology. My discussion of Senghor in Chapter Four describes how his readings of Heidegger and Marx fundamentally shaped his notion of the ideal role of technologies within culture, and provided him with a means of dissociating modern innovations from discursive reason.;In the third part, Chapter Five, I consider the arrival of modern Western technological innovations---the railway, motorized boats, and a dam---to African communities in the works of three Francophone African novelists of the independence/post-independence era beginning in the late 1950s: Ousmane Sembene from Senegal; Olympe Bhely-Quenum from Benin; and Ake Loba from Cote d'Ivoire.