French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

In The Wake Of Medea: Neoclassical Theater And The Arts Of Destruction [Table Of Contents], Juliette Cherbuliez

Literature

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy usually appears as a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. In the Wake explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persisted. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. Paradigmatic also of the refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms our concept of the social while threatening its integrity, Medea’s presence is this book’s organizing principle ...

The Velvet Glove: Virtuousness And Class In Balzac’S Paris, Nicholas C. Peters

Anthós

This piece has attempted to select a key passage in Père Goriot, and identify textual elements in order to create a taxonomy which reveals patterns from which possibilities of meaning stem. Balzac creates this scene as a condemnation of the current state of the aristocracy, as well as the greed and ambition of the middle class which further corrupts the values and integrity of the ruling class. This essay uses textual explication to analyze the descriptions, and diction used in the chosen passage to explicate a larger meaning in the novel, as well as offering a new understanding of the ...

Bodies Behind The Lines: A Look At Quarantine In Albert Camus' The Plague, Caroline R. Buxenstein

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

This research argues that the physical quarantine in Albert Camus' The Plague creates a psychological isolation that puts into question the limits of the human in the diseased environment. In The Plague quarantine is enforced to stop the spread of disease and fear and to maintain their hope and evade fear, the characters cast themselves into their memories. Since there is no end to the quarantine in the future and the present is ravished with fear, fear even that this outbreak is the punishment of god, the characters have nothing left but the past. Their memories allow them to once ...

Honoré De Balzac’S Portrayal Of The Feminine Condition In The Wild Ass’S Skin, Père Goriot, And The Lily Of The Valley, Brooke V. Musmeci

Honors Theses

In 19th century France, women appeared to be second class citizens. They were often limited in their abilities to have independence and secure their own wealth. This perception of women perhaps justifies why, as Honoré de Balzac’s novels illustrated the realities of French society, he attempted to characterize women’s struggles to obtain control and power in their lives. In his novels The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), The Lily of the Valley (1835), and Le Père Goriot (1835), Balzac sought to prove how women could improve their lot.

Firstly, in studying how women had been relegated to second-class ...

Representations Of Religious Injustice In The Works Of François Villon And Emile Zola, Alexis Windecker

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

François Villon and Emile Zola are two French authors who critiqued society and its structures in their time. Although Villon and Zola are separated by four centuries and by stylistic differences, a theme that is pervasive in each author's writing is that of religious injustice. Both authors suggest that the structure of organized religion in their era creates a false hope in the power of the Church to save humanity. In Zola's novella, L'Inondation [The Flood], his critique is subtle, and the reader is forced to view his work through an allegorical lens to discern his underlying ...

Les Gilets Jaunes Et L'Inégalité Économique En France, Earl Chase

French Honors Projects

Dans cette analyse, on discutera des contextes politiques et socio-économiques qui expliquent le mouvement du Gilets Jaunes. On étudiera en particulier la culture du travail en France ainsi que la crise de la dette publique. Après, on fera une évaluation économique des mandats de Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande et Emmanuel Macron. En utilisant notre savoir sur la situation, on va explorer ce que le mouvement révèle : l’inégalité économique. On terminera notre analyse en étudiant les implications de l’inégalité économique avant de proposer quelques envisageables solutions.

Joan Of Archetype: Gendered Images Of Joan’S Heroism In French Cinema, Julianna Luecke

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores images of Joan of Arc in French cinema, using two main criteria - gender performativity and agency. It links Joan's imagery in French film to concurrent events in society, and argues that Joan of Arc, as the quintessential French hero, represents what female heroism looks like at any point in time.

Modernity Leave: The Sexual Mother Of The French New Wave & Beyond, Theodore Wansink

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The 1960s saw radical changes in the discourses surrounding both cinema and motherhood in France. However, the French New Wave has traditionally been studied more so in terms of its aesthetic and theoretical contributions to cinema, not as cultural artifacts revealing conceptions of motherhood in 1960s France—despite their monumental impact on French culture and world cinema. Between the prostitute-mother of Vivre sa vie and the exotic dancer mother of Lola, one common trope of New Wave cinema has gone largely unexamined: the sexual mother. Using a combination of cultural studies and feminist psychoanalytic theory, this paper examines the sexual ...

Breastfeeding And Feminism In France, Megan Wadsworth

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

Women in France have some of the lowest breastfeeding rates among high-income countries in Europe. The World Health Organization encourages new mothers to breastfeed for up to two years, and globally around 60 percent of women are still breastfeeding at this point. However, only 63 percent of French mothers ever start breastfeeding, and typically stop after just 17 weeks. These numbers are perplexing because they are significantly lower than the breastfeeding rates among other high-income countries such as the US at 74.4 percent and the UK at 81 percent. After researching the debate surrounding breastfeeding in France it became ...

Battling A World Of Hate With Hope: Unearthing The Life And Work Of Adolphe Duhart, Audrey Gibson

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

During the era surrounding the Civil War in the United States, a time where the country was likely at its most racially tense and divided, there was a group of writers in Southern Louisiana endangering their livelihood in order to publish their essays, short stories, and poetry that challenged their intellectual contemporaries. This group consisted of educated, free, Creole men of color, who wrote fervently, showing that they too could create art like their white counterparts. These men would frequently publish in black-run newspapers, often protecting themselves from violence towards them by writing under pseudonyms. This is the case for ...

"Mister Sartre And Señora Beauvoir Are Old News": Queer Arab Resistance In Abdellah Taïa's "A Country For Dying", Emilie Hautemont

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

This paper examines how French-Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa's 2015 novel "A Country for Dying" offers a queer, postcolonial critique of mainstream French discourse around gay rights. My objective is to understand how this critique represents a break from Taïa's earlier, more "mainstream" works. Through the use of queer critical theorists Jasbir Puar and Lisa Duggan's concepts of homonationalism and homonormativity as the appropriation of LGBT rights by an imperialist state, I highlight how Taïa's portrayal of two undocumented North African prostitutes challenges France's self-image as a haven for marginalized sexualities as well as its rigid ...

The Fourth Estate: French Resistance To Nazi Occupation In The Press, Nathan Johnson

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

Liberté, egalité, fraternité. The three totems of the French revolution have dominated the nation’s cultural and political system for centuries. And even as the three estates, clergy, aristocracy, and as Abbé Sieyès questioned, “ Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?” in profound and impactful ways for the revolution, a fourth estate was growing and earning its place as the protector of French principles. First coined by political thinker Edmund Burke in 1787, the idea of the freedom of the press as the guardian of veritas and as essential to the workings of a democractic government, were called into action during the ...

My Grandfather Was Alsatian, So I Guess I Am Too? Stories From Strasbourg, France, On Alsatian Identity, Elda Hricko

Senior Scholars Day

While I was on my semester-long GO program, I interviewed individuals in Strasbourg, France, on Alsatian identity, because Alsace is historically the region in which Strasbourg exists. Alsatian culture grew strong regional uniqueness during war, as the region was alternatively French and German four times in just 30 years. They developed their own identity due to the precarious nature of their national identity. Since 1945, however, Alsace has been happily French. Most descendants today do not speak the Alsatian dialect and consider their nationality French. While in Strasbourg, though, I noticed that “Alsatianness” still exists. Looking at opinions of interviewed ...

Musical Materiality: 19th Century French Music Culture Embodied In The Palais Garnier Main Facade, Noelle Yongwei Barr

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

My research project analyzes the main facade of the Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris in the context of nineteenth-century French music culture. During the Second Empire of France, Napoleon III entrusted the commission to build a new imperial opera house to the architecture Charles Garnier. This structure played a major role in the urbanization of Parisian under Baron von Haussman, who brought "air, light, and cleanliness," to create a city worthy of an empire. The Neo-Baroque style of the new Paris Opera House synthesized classical and baroque elements, creating a dazzling edifice that met those standing along the axis ...

To Put The Plough Before The Cows Or To Put The Cart Before The Horse? An Investigation Of The Role Of Romance Language Knowledge In The Processing Of French-Derived Idioms, Maria A. Civitello

Senior Theses

This study investigated whether knowledge of one Romance language facilitates the processing of idioms that have been literally translated into English from another Romance language. There were eleven participants, of whom three were English monolinguals, one was a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English, two were bilingual speakers of English and a Slavic language, and five were English speakers who had studied Spanish. Participants read a list of forty idioms, of which ten were familiar English idioms, ten were less familiar English idioms, ten were literal translations into English of French idioms with a semantic counterpart in English, and ten ...

A Story To Tell… How To Integrate The Three Modes Of Communication Through A Story Time Program In French, Frederique Grim

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

Bilingual story time programs found in local community libraries not only benefit children, they can also serve a need for L2 college students: the development of their communicative skills in an authentic environment. In addition to linguistic benefits, experiential learning has proven to prepare students for real-world skills, such as networking, mock professional experience and a sense of community engagement. This paper recounts how a world language story time program supports L2 learners’ three modes of communication, as articulated by ACTFL, and necessary for language development. Based on students’ perceptions, this study highlights their increase in motivation and confidence in ...

L’Espace Et La Vulnérabilité Féminine : Une Analyse De Rose Amer De Martine Delvaux, Sushma Dusowoth

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Dans cette étude, nous nous penchons sur la problématique que représente l’espace par rapport à la femme à travers une analyse de Rose Amer de Martine Delvaux. De plus, nous dévoilons la vulnérabilité de la femme qui contribue à l’exposer à la violence autant psychologique que physique dans l’espace privé ou public. Les différents déplacements de la femme dans l’espace démontrent que la sécurité et l’insécurité ont un rôle déterminant à jouer dans la capacité des personnages féminins à s’ancrer dans un endroit. Lorsque l’appropriation spatiale se révèle être un échec, la fuite ...

Peuples, Quentin Bouvier

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Five poems about the experience and life in a Parisian banlieue. In a country where racial tensions are occurring, it is essential to put the emphasis on the beauty of plurality.

Langue D’Écriture Et Construction De L’Identité Propre Chez Les Auteurs Bilingues : Le Cas De Milan Kundera, Nancy Huston Et Jorge Semprun, Kathy Asari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La problématique identitaire et la question de l’engagement avec l’altérité comptent parmi les préoccupations majeures en littérature francophone aujourd’hui. Alors que les migrations en masse dans notre monde provoquent de plus en plus des rencontres entre des langues et des cultures, nous constatons la parution d’un nombre grandissant d’œuvres littéraires créées par des auteurs bilingues.

Ces auteurs, par le fait de leur pratique littéraire particulière, qui les place constamment dans l’entre-deux linguistique et culturel, se trouvent souvent en pleine négociation identitaire. De ce fait, il existe chez eux une compréhension aiguë du rôle joué ...

Bridging Past, Present And Future Through Art: El Mal Querer And Le Roman De Flamenca, Georgina Wilson

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

This on-going project examines how a best-selling Latin pop album resulted in a sudden and significant increase in the obscure medieval Occitan novel which inspired it. The widespread success of El Mal Querer (2018) by Spanish musician Rosalia has generated popular interest in the 13th century novel Le Roman de Flamenca which had previously been confined almost exclusively to the realm of academic interest. El Mal Querer presents the thematic framework of Le Roman de Flamenca – a vindication of the role of woman in love and in society – with a combination of folkloric flamenco stylization and urban musical influences. Rapid ...