Combattre la honte grâce à l’agentivité dans la trilogie de la faim de Neel Doff

Details

Supervisors

Piret, Pierre

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité didactique

Abstract

enIn her “trilogy of hunger,” Belgian-Dutch author Neel Doff (1858-1942) depicts memories of her life, marked by misery and humiliation, through her protagonist Keetje. This dissertation aims to examine the role of shame in her novels Jours de famine et de détresse (1911), Keetje (1919), and Keetje trottin (1921), as well as the strategies of agency mobilized to overcome it. First, it will explore how shame is represented in the trilogy, through an analysis of its manifestations in the texts and its influence on Doff’s writing. Second, it will analyze how agency can contribute to the deconstruction of shame, by examining the margins of action in the narrative and the strategies of agency in the discourse. Drawing on concepts and theories from gender studies, this dissertation also seeks to identify a form of feminist commitment in Neel Doff’s work by focusing on the themes of the body, sexual violence, and prostitution.