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Those That Trespass Against Us: Childhood, Violence, And Memory In The White Ribbon, Joseph Kuster

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines aesthetic representations of childhood and violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I argue that Haneke’s film interrogates notions of the idealized child in the context of German history/the history of the Tätergeneration in order to question the possibility of affixing particular objective truth to historical or cultural narrative. First, I examine and deconstruct culturally accepted representations of the child as a symbol of innocence and purity, and explore how Haneke’s film manipulates and subverts these tropes. I then approach the film using three different theoretical structures: the gaze of the monstrous child in the horror …

Performance Of Gender Social Status: Social Identity Through Clothes, Fanny M. Hamon

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

I focus on the study of the role of the ball gowns in fairy tales, and I argue that Donkey Skin and Cinderella’s civilization process happens through their clothes. I demonstrate that the garments bear considerable historic values in the narratives. The performance they put in place is allowed by the wealth of their dresses.
I apply Butler’s performance theory to show that the performance of the two heroines is the inherent necessity to their social ascent and social recognition. For both heroines, the performance is a strategy to overcome the punitive aspects they underwent in their animal state. The …

L'Élégie Française Entre Désordre Et Analyse (1720-1810), Massimiliano Aravecchia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La problématique de cette étude s’ancre dans un constat : le Romantisme voit se produire une révolution dans le domaine de la poésie française, laquelle passe par un recentrage sur le registre lyrique. L’idée s’établit que les formes poétiques obéissent davantage à l’intériorité du poète qu’à un système de règles reçues. Le lyrisme devient une catégorie supra-générique, susceptible d’englober toute forme poétique pourvu qu’elle se prête à l’expression d’un état de malaise historique et générationnel.

Mais les poètes des années 1820 ont moins réinventé la poésie lyrique qu’ils n’ont recueilli les fruits d’un débat séculaire portant sur la représentation de …

Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems …

The French Revolution In The French-Algerian War (1954-1962): Historical Analogy And The Limits Of French Historical Reason, Timothy Scott Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of the French Revolution as an explanatory device for discussing the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Anticolonial intellectuals in France invoked the French Revolution to explain their reasons for supporting colonial reform as well as their solidarity with Algerian nationalist aims. Through an examination of intellectuals’ public interventions alongside French and Algerian historical narratives, I examine the ways in which historical alignment signaled political and cultural distance between France and Algeria. Making an independent Algeria analogous to eighteenth-century revolutionary France lent political and conceptual legitimacy to Algerian claims to an independent national identity while also reinforcing the …

Jules Verne Constructs America: From Utopia To Dystopia, Dana L. Radu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I examine visions of the United States in Jules Verne’s (1828-1905) Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1905). Of the sixty-four novels that make up that series, twenty-three, over one-third, feature American characters or take place on American soil. I demonstrate that in his early novels (1863-1886), he presents the United States in an optimistic and utopian light, while in his later novels (1887-1905), his depictions of the United States take on a pessimistic and dystopian aspect. In also showing that Verne had been influenced by utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), I provide …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spirituality has been increasingly studied to determine the laity’s role within Church history in the Middle Ages. However, secular literature is often overlooked as a source of understanding lay spirituality, even though it is a crucial aspect of cultural and social history. I fill this gap by analyzing nine important vernacular texts to uncover several distinctive definitions of holiness, all of which blend the religious and the secular. Close reading of these texts reveals various paths to holiness, which undermine the Church’s attempts at sole control over spirituality. This study demonstrates that secular authors were concerned with exploring spiritual matters; …

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis argues that the interior space of each individual mind has infinite potentiality to do or create x new reality in one’s life via possible worlds. I use Lawrence Durrell’s short story “Zero” (1939), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as literary representations of how readers outside of the literary text share an unbreakable bond with universal space. I discuss the infinite potentiality of the finite being, and the experiential data in the process of entelechy, or epistemological maturation of the mind. I bring Leibniz’s theory of the continuum of infinitesimals …

Repenser Une Double Altérité: Expérience Commune Et Trajectoires Plurielles De La Femme Étrangère En France Métropolitaine (Xviiie-Xxe Siècle), Joanna Merkel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the figure of double alterity represented by foreign women living in metropolitan France, from the 18^th to the 20^th century. I argue that although these varied figures offer different trajectories, possess diverse origins, and have been described or described themselves through a variety of literary genres and non-literary genres; they share a common experience revealing unicity. My objectives are, first, to establish the outlines of this shared experience through the analysis of general trends and micro-events; and second, to explore what this analysis has to teach us about French society, past and present. The texts …

Rethinking L'Exception Culturelle In French Music Then And Now: Language, Memory, And Political Order, Melanie Ann Lafoy

Masters Theses

Through this thesis, entitled “Rethinking l'exception culturelle in French Music then and now: Language, Memory, and Political Order,” I explore the concept of exception culturelle as it relates to music in France. I break down this concept by situating current French music trends within a historical landscape, highlighting certain moments of tension between music, politics, and language that appear in the decades after the Dreyfus Affair (1894), which I consider to be a turning point in the way French music is and was perceived inside and outside French national borders. I also examine the years after the second World …

Anachronisme, Rebuts Et Survivances Dans Les Escaliers De Chambord Et Le Dernier Royaume De Pascal Quignard, Etienne Lussier

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the particular conception of time developed by Pascal Quignard in his series Dernier Royaume and his novel Les escaliers de Chambord. We argue that this conception of time, which Quignard refers to as Le Jadis, operates through an anachronistic method based on a semiotic apparatus of waste, or rejects. The argument is presented in three different chapters. The first chapter uses the work of Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman to show the way in which the concept of anachronism embraces a temporality that blurs the lines between past, present, and future and creates openings to …

The Ethics And Politics Of Love In Postwar France: The Case Of Beauvoir, Camus, And Sartre, Christian Wood

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The Ethics and Politics of Love focuses primarily upon Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre during the period 1935 to 1960, specifically the periods before and after the Second World War (1939 -- 1945), and the Franco-Algerian War (1954 -- 1962). I argue that inquiring into each thinker's theory of love yields crucial and hitherto unexplored insights into their ethical and political theories: "love" thus represents my particular Ariadne's thread to guide us into, and then back outside of their daunting oeuvres and singular lives. I use their documented thoughts on love as an analytical tool with which …

Le Détective Biblique: Daniel, "Le Festin De Balthazar" Ou Une Histoire Souterraine Du Roman Policier, Rebecca Josephy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La problématique de cette étude s’ancre dans un constat : à la fin du XIX^e siècle et au cours du XX^e un épisode biblique dans le Livre de Daniel, mieux connu sous le titre « Le Festin de Balthazar » apparaît dans un nombre significatif de romans policiers, y compris le tout premier texte de la série Sherlock Holmes, Une étude en rouge. Que pourrait expliquer cette occurrence fréquente dans un nombre aussi canonique d’œuvres du roman policier ? « Le Festin de Balthazar », pourrait-il être considéré comme un ancêtre lointain de ce genre littéraire ? …

Intonation Et Contact De Langues: Le Cas De L’Intonation Du Français Parlé À Rivière-La-Paix, Alberta, Diverson Mzemba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

L’intonation des variétés du français laurentien en situation minoritaire de contact intense avec l’anglais représente un domaine de recherche très peu étudiée. S’inscrivant dans le projet Phonologique du français contemporain, l’étude que nous proposons décrit le français de la région de Rivière-La-Paix, Alberta, et elle a pour but de « fournir une meilleure image du français ». Ce travail de recherche repose sur la théorie métrique-autosegmentale (MA) (Jun et Fougeron 1995, 2000, 2002; Ladd, 1996/2008; Pierrehumbert, 1980) et elle cherche à décrire la grammaire intonative du français de Rivière-La-Paix. Nous avons examiné les faits intonatifs suivants: l’alignement tonal, et la …

Les Passerelles De La Réécriture: Des Transpositions De "Soundjata" Aux Autoadaptations D'Ousmane Sembène, Elhadji Moustapha Diop

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Le présent travail porte sur une série de questions liées au transfert de formes narratives et expressives, d’un médium à un autre, d’un texte ou contexte à un autre. On suit un parcours se déclinant en deux mouvements : parti d’une discussion des théories de l’adaptation, de la réécriture, et des recherches sur la littérature orale, on en arrive à l’étude des pratiques effectives de la transposition et de l’autoadaptation. La Première Partie, « Discussions Théoriques », est consacrée à la littérature critique sur l’adaptation, y compris ses récents prolongements postmodernes et postcoloniaux. Dans la Deuxième Partie, « Études …

À La Recherche De La "Femme Fatale" Perdue: Une Nouvelle Trajectoire De La Femme Fatale Dans La Poésie De Maurice Scève Et Charles Baudelaire, Tyler C. Rowe

Student Research Submissions

No abstract provided.

Language, Memory, And Exile In The Writing Of Milan Kundera, Christopher Michael Mccauley

Dissertations and Theses

During the twentieth century, the former Czechoslovakia was at the forefront of Communist takeover and control. Soviet influence regulated all aspects of life in the country. As a result, many well-known political figures, writers, and artists were forced to flee the country in order to evade imprisonment or death. One of the more notable examples is the writer Milan Kundera, who fled to France in 1975. Once in France, the notion of exile became a prominent theme in his writing as he sought to expose the political situation of his country to the western world--one of the main reasons why …

L'Écriture Du Voyage Dans Le Roman Africain Francophone Contemporain, Ghislain Nickaise Liambou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dans la réception du roman africain de langue française, la thématique de l'engagement

littéraire en termes de contestation de l'ordre colonial ou post-colonial a largement préoccupé

le discours critique. Pourtant cet espace littéraire, à travers le mouvement de la Négritude, a dès

les origines mis en avant les problématiques des voyages et des échanges culturels. Cette

dimension, très souvent ignorée dans le discours critique, a cependant été récemment mise en

avant grâce à l'ampleur du phénomène de l'immigration dans les anciennes puissances

coloniales européennes. On a parlé à cet égard d'une littérature de la "migritude". Or ce

néologisme réactive l'actualité …

Crossing Boundaries: The Transnational Third Space Of Contemporary Chinese-Francophone Writers, Paula S. Delbonis-Platt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, a group of Chinese writers who pen their works in French, their adopted language, have garnered prizes in France and received international acclaim. The transnational voices of these writers have drawn attention to Chinese history, literature, and human-rights issues, as well as to their own diverse intersections with French culture. The four Francophone-Chinese writers studied—François Cheng (b. 1929), Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Dai Sijie (b. 1954), and Shan Sa (b. 1972)—constitute themselves as subjects at least partially through their Chinese birth and French citizenship or residency and through the production of literary works that range …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

Les Reincarnations De Carmen: La Creation D'Un Mythe, Mary Kathryn Pope

Honors Theses

Carmen, the title character of Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, has taken on many lives in the creative world. Adaptations of her story have been produced over the past 150 years in operas, ballets, and films. With each new reincarnation of Carmen, her identities as a femme fatale, gypsy, and sorcerer have been altered in order to appeal to her audience. Carmen’s character changes with the audience, presented as relatable and desirable to each new generation. Each piece represents Carmen in a new light, and I explore what allows this character to be able to be altered time and time again …

Cartooning For Peace? The Necessity Of Political Cartooning To Democracy And Understanding The Struggle Of Inclusion Exclusion And Citizenship For French Muslims, Ashley Enger

Honors Theses

This combined thesis for Political Science and French and Francophone Studies will address the issue of political cartooning in relation to democracy. This thesis will show how political cartooning explores the ambiguities and contradictions of citizenship for Muslims in France. Cartoons reveal the ostracizing of citizens, the challenges of integration, and the difficulties of discovering an identity as an immigrant through explicit, shocking, and often uncomfortable imagery. By analyzing the backlash against cartoons, the effects of cartoons on the Muslim minority in France, and the ways in which traditional French cartooning has the potential to be a positive force for …

L' Absurdite De Bonheur Et Hotel Trois Mures, Olivia Merchen

Honors Theses

Absurdist literatures are known for their focus on the meaninglessness of existence and the indifference of the world. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, emphasize the importance of action in this absurdist world whereby our choices and actions create the people that we become and in which we are a product of our decisions. This process can be daunting, because it renders individuals responsible for their own destiny. My analyses focus on a lesser-studied aspect of these writings: their exploration of the beauty of life, in spite of its fragility, and their expression of the appreciation and joy that …

Incorporating Study Abroad Experiences Into The High School Classroom Using Practices Informed By Cognitive Research, Grace Carroll Zimmermann

Senior Theses

This senior thesis project is a Unit Plan designed for at-risk high school students that incorporates literature from places where I have studied abroad and employs classroom practices that are based upon research in the fields of cognition, motivation, and pedagogy. The accompanying paper addresses the rationale behind choices made for each lesson and the research that supports it.

Parables Of Love: Reading The Romances Of Chrétien De Troyes Through Bernard Of Clairvaux, Carrie D. Pagels

Doctoral Dissertations

In three romances Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval, Chrétien de Troyes utilizes the intimate relationships of his courtly knights and their lady loves to explore and present the Christian ideology of Bernard of Clairvaux as expressed by his four degrees of love in the treatise, On Loving God. Previous scholarly works have only examined the Christian ideology and symbolism in Chrétien's romances as isolated occurrences specific to a single text. In contrast, I argue Chrétien's romances form a progression mirroring the Bernardian steps (or degrees) man must make in order to draw closer to and deepen his relationship …

U101: Global Perspectives A Semester Course For First-Year Students, Chrissie Faupel

Capstone Collection

This capstone paper introduces a special section of the already existing, and quite successful, University 101 programs at the University of South Carolina (USC). U101: Global Perspectives is a semester-long program proposal for first-year students (freshman and transfer students), offered by the Study Abroad Office (SAO) at USC. Functioning as part of the Global Carolina initiative, the USC SAO is committed to providing students with the knowledge and cultural awareness to be responsible and successful citizens in today’s globally integrated world. With the goal of increasing the number of students studying abroad, as well as creating unique opportunities for students …

Identité, Genre, Et Proto-Nationalisme Chez Christine De Pizan Et Alain Chartier, Matthew Lee Blair

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Deeds Of William Of Villehardouin: An Annotated Translation Of A Part Of The Medieval Work, La Chronique De Morée, Houston Franklin Mcclure

Masters Theses

In this thesis, titled The Deeds of William of Villehardouin: An Annotated Translation of a Part of the Old French La Chronique de Morée, I have translated a portion of one of the remaining French texts from a period just following the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204). The portion I used of the text is taken from Jean Longnon's critical edition in Middle French based on the sole 14^th century manuscript now at the Royal Library in Brussels 15702. However, the events related in the Chronique span an earlier period of 1095-1304[1]. The stanzas that I will translate, …