Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Memory, Violence, And Detours: Strategies Of Resistance To Epidermal Invisibility Within The French Republic, Claudine E. David

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subjection of black citizens in France and their invisibility in the (post)colonial space has been marked by segregation in peripheral urban zones, with a hardening of policing methods and controls based on racial appearanc. I argue that monumental representation in public space is not neutral but participates in the promotion of a specific ideology. I show thé ellipses in French patrimonial monumental glorification, including the appropriation of the memory of revolutionary heroes such as Louis Delgrès and Toussaint Louverture, concomitant with the occultation of many other black figures. I argue that representation matters, that France must repair this asymmetrical …

L'Impuissance De La Représentation : Sur La Possibilité De La Représentation Du Terrorisme, Youtian Sun

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I attempt to explore the possibility of representing terrorism in literature by analyzing four literary works: Paris (1898), La Condition Humaine (1933), Nada (1973), and Khalil (2018). These four works depict four different stages of the development of terrorism from the late 19th century to the 21st century. I will use these literary works to analyze the relationship between terrorism and capitalist modernity.

Political Economy In Lettres D'Une Péruvienne: Françoise De Graffigny As Philosophe And Reformer, Marguerite J. Van Cook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies the significant presence of political economics in Lettres d’une Péruvienne by Françoise de Graffigny, née Françoise d'Issembourg du Buisson d'Happencourt (1695 –1758), to affirm its author as a pioneer in the field. It explores Graffigny’s use of the sentimental novel as a vehicle to carry those ideas to the reading community. It reviews Graffigny’s preparation to propose novel ideas in the area of political economics and to fully participate in the then-emergent discourse with her male contemporaries. Her wide reading in the subject of Political Economy, from Voltaire to Mandeville and Montesquieu and her interactions with contemporaries …

Humoring The Third Republic: Le Rire In French Politics And Popular Culture, 1894–1918, Andrew C. Kotick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the illustrated satirical periodical Le Rire in its historical context between its debut during the Dreyfus Affair and the conclusion of World War I. Adopting a multivalent approach to the historical study of graphic humor, it argues that Le Rire constitutes a significant corpus of evidence for understanding the political, commercial, social, and cultural novelties of its time, and maintained an ambivalent relationship with the young institutions and functionaries of the French Third Republic. As France’s leading satirical periodical, Le Rire served as a powerful medium for broadcasting nascent and extreme ideas to a mass reading public …

Heritage Repair: Revisiting Familial And Collective Histories In Filiation Narratives By Dalila Kerchouche, Colombe Schneck And Martine Storti, Rebecca R. Raitses

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a critical reading of three French narratives: Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (2003), Colombe Schneck’s Les guerres de mon père (2018), and Martine Storti’s L’arrivée de mon père en France (2008). These works combine representations of familial history with the explorations of personal and collective traumas or repression. The study addresses the following dimensions of the texts: 1) The catalyst of intergenerational silence behind these and many other similar works; 2) The textual interplay between storytelling and material evidence; 3) The ways in which the authors combine narratives of familial hardships on one hand, and of …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

Warrior Women And The Shaping Of Narrative In Medieval French Literature, Sara Rychtarik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Warrior Women and the Shaping of Narrative in Medieval French Literature focuses on the representation of women warriors in medieval French literature, but it is also concerned with contemporaneous historical accounts and texts. Additionally, it examines representations of the woman as warrior in a different medium, which is still narrative-based, showing the impact of illuminated manuscripts on visual culture. The study looks at a specific character in medieval French literature – the woman warrior – in order to see how her existence in a text contributes to its narrative shape and to the production of the text itself. Through close …

Armored Feelings: Romantic Love, Sexual Consent, And Gender-Based Violence In French First World War Narratives (1914–1956), Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Armored Feelings examines how the First World War reconfigured how the French thought and wrote about romantic love, sexual consent, and gender-based violence. It posits this devastating event as a critical juncture during which the misogynistic and racist notion of amour à la Française took its modern shape as a rhetoric buttressing the nation’s brittle sense of cultural superiority while obscuring diverse forms of gendered aggression – especially those perpetrated by its citizens against women. This dissertation also establishes that the notion of women’s sexual consent coalesced during the period under examination as a troubled and troubling response to the …

Engagement Et Jeunes De Banlieue : Quand Le Roman Policier Rejoint Le Rap Pour Dire ¨Je Suis Français¨, Iziar De Miguel

Publications and Research

Avec la grande ville au cœur des romans noirs, les activités illégales, les portraits de délinquants, ainsi que de détectives et de flics qui naviguent entre des valeurs morales et amorales prennent place au sein du roman policier. Proposant une image mitigée de la banlieue nord, montrant une culture et des valeurs qui lui sont propres mais aussi ses contradictions et ses malaises, les romans de Rachid Santaki se démarquent du reste de la littérature policière par leur mise en scène de héros issus de l’immigration. Si l’intrigue policière se concentre sur la description de milieux criminels liés au trafic …

French In Culinary And Pastry Arts, Elaine Suarez

Publications and Research

The purpose of this project was to find out the impact of the French jargon used in the culinary and pastry industry and its origin. I investigated this topic through reading online articles that were based on the research of others. I found out that after the French Revolution, the French language as well as its culture was influenced many parts of Europe. Prior to that, other cultures influenced Europe, but regarding cooking, French was the one that stuck around to this day. It was shocking to hear those other cultures like Italian and German had a large impact on …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

Serial Killer: Gustave Flaubert's Pro-Woman, Woman-Killing Madame Bovary, Francesca Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that Gustave Flaubert kills the women in Madame Bovary, all of whom are married and/ or mothers in the novel, in order to overtly represent the impossible conditions of womanhood and domestic life in nineteenth century France. Further, I will expose the ways in which Flaubert, through these killings, aims to release his woman characters from their lives of oppression and imprisonment, detailing their increasingly limited options in life and their lack of agency. Although Flaubert does attempt to give his women, in particular Emma Bovary, limited agency in the work, this agency is always …

The Surreal Voice In Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa To Franco Loi, Jason Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of Italy’s linguistic history, dialect literature has evolved a s a genre unto itself. The scope of research presented in this study examines the question of dialect literature as a valid genre which bears lines of demarcation that would assign it the distinction of genre. Research reveals that in fact the simple election of a language, or dialect, does not itself constitute a genre; moreover, most dialect literature bears characteristics that would neatly place it in another genre.

To examine this verity, this research compares two dialect poets who employ Milanese as a means of transmission …

The Provocative Strangeness Of Camus's L'Etranger And Coetzee's Disgrace, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), are two of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century. Their contested and exhaustive critical reception suggests that readers continue to be hailed by these texts in complex ethical ways. In each text, a white male protagonist engages in a violent encounter with an individual identified as Other. If they initially arouse discomfort by appearing to divest others of their alterity, these characters ultimately recognize and preserve that otherness, inviting readers to consider the requirement that we privilege others over ourselves in order to become subjects.

“Islam, Immigrants, And The Angry Young Man: Laurent Cantet And The ‘Limits Of Fabricated Realism’.”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

My paper juxtaposes Laurent Cantet’s films The Class (2008) and The Workshop (2017) to explore how they are infused with concerns about radical Islam and the place of Muslim immigrants in the West. Both films center on "angry young men" facing class-based marginalization, who are prone to anti-social behavior. In The Workshop, however, a great effort is made to reveal the intellectual potential and moral complexity of the young white French-born Antoine, whose alienation is defined by his attraction to the xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric of the Far Right, whereas viewers of The Class are kept at arm’s length …

Martial Caillebotte’S Mélodies And Scènes Lyriques: Analytical Essays And Performance Guide, Dominique Mccormick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Composer, pianist and photographer, Martial Caillebotte (1853–1910) was the unknown younger brother of famous Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte. Martial studied piano and harmony at the Paris Conservatory from 1870–1874. Martial created a substantial number of musical compositions including mélodies, scènes lyriques, operas, symphonic poems, as well as sacred choral and symphonic works. Born into a wealthy Parisian family, he did not need to work for a living and did not self-promote, therefore his pieces were rarely performed and after his death, most of his compositions were left in family archives. In the late 1990’s a rebirth of interest in the …

The Art Of Opacity: Guy De Cointet In L.A., Media Farzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides the first detailed study of the work of French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983), specifically the books, objects, and performances he produced in Los Angeles between 1971 and 1983. Much of this work mined pop-cultural sources—genre fiction, magazine advertising, and television serials—for texts, which he reused in deliberately obfuscated ways: in pseudonymous publications written in code or invented languages, as well as in sigil-like paintings that doubled as props for performances in which actors delivered contradictory interpretations of the encoded objects. I argue that Cointet’s appropriations of the visual and narrative logics of postwar culture provide a …

Rewriting The Oeuvre: Raymond Queneau And The Art Of Translation, Christopher Clarke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the literary oeuvre of French author Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been extensively studied, his work as a literary translator has been largely overlooked. Queneau was a prominent member of the French literary avant-garde, but also a literary translator for two decades (1934-1953), and his writing was greatly influenced and impacted by his readings and translations of Anglophone writers. This dissertation provides insight into the role of translation in his conception of writing and language, and the inseparability of the different facets of his career as a writer, literary translator, and publisher. I examine his personal linguistic and literary history …

Queer Displacements: Minorities, Mobilities, And Mobilizations In French And Francophone Literature, Thomas Muzart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on the work of Virginie Despentes, Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, and Abdellah Taïa, this dissertation challenges the antisocial turn taken in queer theory, by means of a parallel study of the authors’ geographical and intellectual itineraries. While critics like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have suggested that the revolutionary potential in queer identity lies in its opposition to romanticized forms of community, I argue, along with José Esteban Muñoz, that their praising of singularity and negativity is similarly extreme. Alternatively, my study shows how the geographical displacements both experienced and imagined by my primary authors can illuminate the passage …

Where Do We Go From Here? Québécois Identity In The Road Novel From 1964 To 2008, Antoinette Williams-Tutt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Made famous with American of French-Canadian origin Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the road novel genre typically expresses evolving values and beliefs through the lens of the lone adventurer, embarking on journeys that are not only spatial but also social and cultural. The Québécois road novel adapts and reinterprets the American model, moving its protagonists within and without the province to address the deep-seated questions of Québec’s identity and nationalism through confrontations with the past, loss, grief, family, and cultural others. Car travel and cultural border crossings allow the protagonists to achieve a complicated individual and collective autonomy in …

Pratiquer Ou Incarner La Vertu? L'Agentivité Des Femmes Chez Marie De France Et Christine De Pizan, Kathe Blydenburgh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the treatment of women in Medieval literature as active agents in their roles of upholding the virtues of the societies in which they live. This study focuses on works written by the female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan.

Effects Of Speech Cues In French-Speaking Children With Dysarthria, Erika S. Levy, Gemma Moya-Galé, Younghwa Michelle Chang, Luca Campanelli, Andrea A. N. Macleod, Sergio Escorial, Christelle Maillart

Publications and Research

Background: Articulatory excursion and vocal intensity are reduced in many children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP), contributing to the children’s intelligibility deficits and negatively affecting their social participation. However, the effects of speech-treatment strategies for improving intelligibility in this population are understudied, especially for children who speak languages other than English. In a cueing study on English-speaking children with dysarthria, acoustic variables and intelligibility improved when the children were provided with cues aimed to increase articulatory excursion and vocal intensity. While French is among the top 20 most spoken languages in the world, dysarthria and its management in …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Out Of Home: Social Class In Women’S Writing, 1950–2016, Lisa M. Karakaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Out of Home: Social Class in Women’s Writing 1950 – 2016 employs an intersectional feminist and critical race theory methodology to examine social class in relation to gendered and racial subjugations in the work of selected French and francophone women authors across diverse regions. This dissertation features Annie Ernaux’s texts in the introduction, and then the colonial societies of French Indonesia and Algeria as depicted by narrators in the position of colonizers in the first two chapters. In the last two chapters, post-colonial or settler societies of Guadeloupian and Québécois texts are shown as depicted by colonized or marginalized narrators. …

Addressing Extremism Through Literature: An Online Cross-Cultural Conversation On Mahi Binebine's Horses Of God, Habiba Boumlik, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

In the Fall of 2017, first year liberal arts students at Community College and second year Masters’ Students in literature at a university in Morocco collaborated in an online and live conversation focusing on the novel Horses of God (Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen) written by Mahi Binebine. The novel describes the lives of four childhood friends growing up in a slum near Casablanca, navigating poverty and purposelessness and being drawn to religious fundamentalism. Students in the two colleges engaged in an online discussion on Facebook and live Google Hangouts exchange in which they shared questions about the …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris

Theses and Dissertations

Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …

The Transformation Of Women's Roles In Fashion In Eighteenth-Century France: Femininity, Fashion, And Frivolity In Fiction, Christine M. Carter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The crime of luxury is that it makes us judge a man not according to what he is, but according to what surrounds him.”[1]

There is a significant existing body of scholarship surrounding the establishment of France as the European epicenter for fashion and taste beginning in the seventeenth century and reaching its apogee during the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was a period of extensive growth for France in terms of textile production, and an increase in particular professions. These were key factors in perpetuating economic growth. Women in particular were affected by these changes. Not only were …

The Subject Of Jouissance: The Late Lacan And Gender And Queer Theories, Frederic C. Baitinger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Subject of Jouissance argues that Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis, far from being heteronormative, offers a notion of identity that deconstructs gender as a social norm, and opens onto a non-normative theory of the subject (of jouissance) that still remains to be fully explored by feminist, gender, and queer scholars. Drawing mostly on the later Lacan, The Subject of Jouissance shows that by locating the identity of the subject in the singularity of its bodily mode of enjoyment (that Lacan calls “jouissance”), and not in the Imaginary illusions of the ego, nor in the Symbolic social structures, Lacan fosters thinking …