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Le Moi Double: Les Inconscients (Post)Coloniaux Chez Césaire Et Breton, Emma A. Krosschell

Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the poetic works of two French-speaking surrealist poets of the twentieth century, Aimé Césaire and André Breton. Despite their common point of surrealism, Césaire and Breton's poems differ because of their identities in a society afflicted by Western colonization. Using the literary theories of postcolonialism as a perspective for the analysis of Breton and Césaire's poems, I show that both men have a double consciousness based on the complicated influence of a colonizing society. Literary criticism of postcolonialism examines individual identities in colonial societies in relation to their symbolic position as "colonist" or "colonized." Césaire, a Martinican …