Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

L’Art Féminin, Un Cri D’Espoir Pour L’Humanité, Zohra Lhioui

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

A travers une étude réalisée au Maroc, dans la Région de Meknès-Tafilalet (Centre-Est du royaume), et qui a été couronnée par la publication d’un ouvrage d’art portant le titre Femmes artistes de Meknès- Tafilalet (voir couverture jointe à cette proposition de communication), il ressort que l’art chez les femmes de cette région n’est pas une simple question de créativité et de passion, il est aussi un moyen esthétique d’exprimer la richesse du patrimoine, la culture de leur société et leur attachement à la nature, à l’environnement, bref à la vie tout court. Que ce soit par la danse, le stylisme, …

In Between Realms: The Search For Feminine Selfhood In The Essais Of Montaigne, Anna Suarez

Comparative Woman

My purpose is to explore factors of the Renaissance that determined women’s selfhood in Montaigne’s Essais. I argue that the shift into modernity is responsible for the loss of women’s autonomy as well as the anxiety experienced by men regarding their power as well as their potential. Montaigne and Renaissance discourse defines women only by their bodies (sexual organs) and I explore the elements that established biological essentialism. This paper exemplifies comparative literature in the sense that it combines literature, theory, and art for the purpose of creating a well-researched examination of the root causes for why women were …

La Figuration De L'Art Dans Les Romans De V.Y. Mudimbe, Olga Hel-Bongo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Mudimbe's novels, art depicts the author and his writings, through a play of substitution and decentering. The author uses the artistic medium to escape constraints of discursive, religious, political or sexual order and as a place of transfiguration of the characters' desires. The aim of this article is to show that references to painting, literature, cinema and music reflect the refusal of the I to speak about oneself, except indirectly. The author chooses a strategy of decentering by combining the language of words and of images, and suggests, behind the mask of narrative representation, a taste for provocation, social …

The Tapestry Of Memory, Kathryn M. Lawson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis will investigate how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. In the introduction, this work will be placed in the context of the phenomenological tradition. The first …

Precarious Provenance: Legitimacy, Surrogacy And Betrayal In The Value Of Art And Family In Honoré De Balzac's Le Cousin Pons And Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Ryan Coburn

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the problematic nature of art valuation, more specifically concerning the ideas of use-value and exchange-value in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Written in nineteenth-century France, Balzac’s novel paints a bleak portrait of what he believes to be a morally corrupt society obsessed with the lesser things in life such as money and status rather than what is truly important: culture and art. In her novel, which bears a striking resemblance to Balzac’s, Tartt presents her perception of present-day United States, also plagued with moral corruption and disregard for the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

L'Art Et L'Amour À Travers Un Amour De Swann De Marcel Proust, Sarah M. Robertson

Scripps Senior Theses

The esteemed French author, Marcel Proust, revolutionized the way that literature fuses with visual art. Through the detail of his novella Un Amour de Swann, Proust creates a world in which the idolatry of a painting destines one man to a life void of fulfillment in love. This thesis explores the intrinsic connection of painting and literature to love through Proust’s treatment of the Botticelli fresco, Les Épreuves de Moïse, and the carefully crafted lesson that Proust teaches to integrate art into the fabric of life. Proust’s advice reaches far beyond the constraints of his own words, and …

Proust, The Suffering Artist, Matthew G. Buyachek

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

This thesis examines the interrelationship between suffering and art in the context of À la recherché du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. I first trace a lineage of suffering and art, conduct a literature review of relevant criticism on Proust's work and on suffering and art, and finally explicate volumes one and five of Proust's magnum opus. I interpret the scene of the goodnight-kiss to be the genesis of Marcel’s search and his path to artistry. In this scene, Marcel profanes his mother qua maternal and artistic ideal, and subsequently sublimates Mme de Guermantes and Albertine in an attempt to …

An Innocent Victim?: The Portrayal Of Anne Boleyn In French Drama, Art, And Literature Of The 1830s, Molly Driscoll

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 1830s in France saw a revival of artistic interest in and representations of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII of England. This thesis traces Anne's influence on artistic, dramatic, and literary works of the 1830s and focuses on how these portrayals differed from one another as well as contemporary and modern opinions of Anne.

Proustian Metaphor And The Automobile , Shawn Gorman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, the automobile produces a transformation in the relationship between space and time and, by analogy, a parallel transformation in art. In Proust's famous notion of involuntary memory, the similarity of a past sense impression to a present one leads to transcendence of time and space, and ultimately to metaphor. The metonymical speed of the automobile endlessly chases the sort of metaphorical "simultaneity" at work in involuntary memory. Structurally, the automobile offers the possibility of bringing together two terms by eliminating the middle term (time, space) that separated them; yet the automobile is never …

Boris Vian's American Movie: The Lost Authorship Of I Will Spit On Your Graves , M. Martin Guiney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Boris Vian (1920-1959) is today considered one of France's foremost avant-garde novelists of the twentieth century, but in his lifetime he was known to a wide audience as the author of one work: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Will Spit on Your Graves), a pastiche of American hard-boiled fiction which he published in 1946 under the name of a fictitious Black American author, Vernon Sullivan. Vian died twelve years later of heart failure while viewing the film adaptation, which he had no part in producing. Vian-as-author "died" long before that fateful moment, however: first when he perpetrated a …

Modern Literature And Christianity: The Religious Issue In Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux Étendards , Pascal A. Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux étendards (The Two Standards) has been hailed by a number of critics as one of the best novels written in France since World War II, it is surrounded by a wall of silence because its author actively supported the Nazi movement before and during the war. Yet the novel does not deal with politics but with love, art, and religion. Based on real events, it is the story of a love triangle involving Michel, who has lost his Catholic faith, Régis, who studies to become a Jesuit priest, and Anne-Marie, a young student who shares …

"Borges And I," A Narrative Sleight Of Hand , Armando F. Zubizarreta

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Because of its autobiographical appearance, critics have paid little attention to the narrative of "Borges and I" which is so masterfully handled that its complex and transparent texture is almost invisible. A close analysis shows, however, that, in the confessional mode, the two individuals—I and Borges—are true characters involved in a narrative action that is taking place to allow the implementation of vengeance. By focusing on his victim's experience, the narrating I offers an attractive bait to his victimizer, Borges. Borges, the writer, driven by a compulsive pattern of stealing, unsuspectingly takes over the victim's grievances against him by virtue …

From Iron To Glass: Transparency And Pluralism, Maryse Fauvel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The author reads a number of recent architectural constructions in Paris (mainly the Louvre pyramid, but also the Musée d'Orsay and the Institut du monde arabe) and argues that they affirm the plurality of contemporary France while at once inscribing and subverting the conventions of its (once) dominant culture: the Arab world in the heart of Paris, the museum cum railway station as the focal point of conflicting tastes, the pyramid as both accomplice and critic of history. Their pluralism qualifies them as postmodern. These monuments also propose a new role for today's museum. The building itself becomes an art …

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control Of Imaginary, Alberto Moreiras

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control of Imaginary

The Dialectics Of The Archaic And The Post-Modern In Maghrebian Literature Written In French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maghrebian literature written in French has been since its inception a literature of and about the abyss. For the Maghrebian the abyss is esentially the space of modernity, that forbidden citadel of art, science and technology from which s/he was excluded and marginalized. Recently, writing of/in French has become the site/scene of a polemos between the archaic (identity) and the post-modern (difference).

Our study of the archaic focuses on cultural, literary and critical knowledge and centers around two main themes: that of a beginning, that is a search for events in the past that explain the abyss (or retardation vis-à-vis …

Embodiments Of Shape: Cubes And Lines And Slender Gilded Thongs In Picasso, Duchamp And Robbe-Grillet, Emma Kafalenos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An account, from several perspectives, of a structural type exemplified by Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), generally considered the first Cubist painting; Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier (1912), and Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de rendez-vous (1965). To compare contemporary texts to paintings that arose in the moment immediately preceding the full achievement of the non-representational suggests that both incorporate trivial—and even popular—elements because they are so eminently cuttable. In each work, the decomposition of objects to their pieces shifts interest from paradigm to syntagm, while retaining sufficient reference to paradigm to embody syntagm, to make structure perceptible. All …

Art And Androgyny: The Aerialist, Naomi Ritter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Among the many circus performers who have fascinated writers and artists since Romanticism, the clown and the aerialist predominate. In the nineteenth century, the tightrope artiste inspired comparisons with the (self-styled) equally daring and equally craftsmanlike poet. The vertical metaphor suggested a vision of transcendent art that Romantics and their heirs claimed for themselves. In the twentieth century, vestiges of the same identification and transcendence remain, but a new sexual focus appears also. Two important texts by Cocteau and Thomas Mann, "Le Numero de Barbette" (1926) and Chapter 1 in Book III of Felix Krull ( 1951), show the aerial …

The Maze Of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, And Kant, Arkady Plotnitsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy …

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life And Death: Androgyny And The Creative Process , Bettina L. Knapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death deals with the creative process, from the uncreated work of art embedded in the prima materia to its completion in the book. The Writer, the focus of Sarraute's attention, takes the reader through the multiple stages of his literary trajectory: the struggle involved in the transmutation of the amorphous word into the concrete glyph on the blank sheet of paper; the pain and anguish accompanying the birth of the created work, alluded to as the "thing" or the "object"; the attitude of the successful Writer, who postures and panders to his public, and the …

Meaning In Structure And The Structure Of Meaning In La Modification And La Route Des Flandres, Katherine Passias

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Stream of consciousness novels employ a variety of narrative techniques to depict the flow of consciousness. This article examines narrative structures underlying the subjective frame created by a sole character/narrator in two French New Novels, Michel Butor's La Modification and Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres. There is a dynamic relationship between form and content. Conventional narrative syntax in Butor's work reflects the evaluative and associative processes of the mind attempting to resolve an emotional conflict. In Simon's work, narrative structures mirror the complex embedding of four main fables as the narrative process attempts to depict the uncontrolled thought …