French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Foreign Students In France, Valerie J. Spaeth

French Model Lesson Plans

No abstract provided.

The French Print Media And Their Influence On Public Opinion: An Enduring Trend?, Leah Long

Honors College Theses

The French print media, “la presse”, are a diverse and rich method of mass communication. As media are a driving force behind the formation of public opinion, this study looks at the influential role of French print media on public opinion in France, a trend that began with the Dreyfus Affair in the late nineteenth century. Through investigating two relatively recent events and their place in French print media, the formation of the European Union and the millennial economic crisis, we can assess the durability of this trend into the modern era of mass communication. With worldwide newspaper readership declining …

La Muerte, La Memoria Y La Filosofía Existencial En La Literatura Testimonial Pos-Dictatorial De Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún Y Jacobo Timerman, Andrew Mcnair

Senior Theses and Projects

What effect does the ubiquity of death in a traumatic experience have on an individual's memory and soul, and how is this manifested in one's written testimony? Through the analysis of their philosophical introspection, the testimonies of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, Jorge Semprún's Literature or Life, and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number meditate on the atrocities they experienced during Levi and Semprún's incarceration under the Nazi regime in Europe between 1942 and 1945, and Timerman's imprisonment under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The …

George Sand Et La Vie Littéraire Dans Les Premières Années Du Second Empire (Book Review), Juliana Starr

Juliana Starr

No abstract provided.

"J'Ai Pétri De La Boue Et J'En Ai Fait De L'Or": L'Evolution Morale Des Fleurs Du Mal, Rebecca L. Prigot

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Le Rapport Entre La France Et Le Rwanda Au Passé, Au Présent, Et À L’Avenir, Claire Nadolski

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Le Rwanda est un pays d’Afrique centrale de l’est. Peuplé d’environ 10. 942.950 millions d’habitants parlant français, anglais, et Kinyarwanda. Bien que la France n’ait jamais colonisé le Rwanda, les deux pays ont un rapport très spécial. L’évènement historique auquel tout le monde pense est, sans aucun doute, le génocide au Rwanda et « l’Opération Turquoise » dans laquelle les Français ont aidé et protégé les Hutus qui tuaient des millions de Tutsis dans le but « soidisant » de la paix. Le génocide est un élément très important dans l’histoire du Rwanda, mais ce n’était pas la seule partie …

Reading The Restaurant: Social Class, Identity, And The Culture Of Consumption In The Nineteenth Century French Novel, Joseph J.B. Rienti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The restaurant, like so many of the institutions of French modern society, developed at a very particular moment in history. In this project, I tell the story of the maturation of the restaurant and study its unique role in the social history of Paris during the nineteenth century. By examining the restaurant as a site of modernity, I illuminate its important role in precipitating class distinctions, locating the emerging consumer culture, highlighting gender differentiation, challenging prevailing views of domesticity, and revealing a debate over public and private space.

Through a close reading of the realist novel as a discourse on …

Partir Marron: Un Parcours Sémantique À Travers Les Trous De La Mémoire Collective Haïtienne, Lucie Carmel Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word "marron " represents both a totality, and a specificity. Totalizing, the term refers to the slave who fled from the plantation, against the colonial order, that is, the fugitive slave. Specific, in the Haitian lexicography, it stands for a shifty and cunning individual, particularily a " Woule m debò "1. One has to recognize that there is a double meaning associated with the word, and at the same time, the syntagmatic locution "partir marron " reflects the individual's dependency on phenomenology. The moment of crisis is one of an explosion, through which one can only be …

Beur In Name Only? A Comparison Of La Honte Sur Nous By Saïd Mohamed And Le Gone Du Chaâba By Azouz Begag, Mark Nabors

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper compares the narrator-protagonist in La Honte sur nous by Saïd Mohamed to the protagonist in the paradigmatic work of Beur fiction, Le Gone du chaâba by Azouz Begag. I argue that Mohamed’s protagonist does not have a hybrid identity as traditionally defined by Beur fiction. Even so, he is automatically relegated to the margins and assigned a hybrid identity by society, although he does not have the necessary profile. In closing, I ask if Mohamed’s work can be classified as Beur fiction given the weak parallels between the works.

Albert Camus And The Anticolonials: Why Camus Would Not Play The Zero Sum Game, James D. Le Sueur

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In 1994, I returned from Paris to Hyde Park just in time to catch a lecture about Albert Camus that an esteemed colleague, the late Tony Judt, was giving at the University of Chicago. I was much younger then, eager to engage in debate, and I had just spent most of the past two years turning over the recently opened pages of Camus’ private papers in Paris and trolling through the private papers of other prominent French intellectuals, as well as newly declassified state archives for what was to become my first book, Uncivil War.2 I had also done dozens …

Editor's Note, Laura Kanost

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Editor's Note

A Significant Source For The Madeleine And Other Major Episodes In Combray: Proust's Intertextual Use Of Pierre Loti's My Brother Yves, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The most famous passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and one of the most famous passages in Western literature, is the moment when the narrator sips tea while eating a shell-shaped pastry called a madeleine and suddenly recalls very vividly an apparently long-forgotten scene from his childhood. From this episode Proust developed his theories about involuntary memory and its important role in our emotional welfare.

Proust was an avid reader of the French novelist Pierre Loti when he was young. Contemporary accounts show that he was able to recite whole passages from Loti’s work in public …

Accumulation And Archives: Sophie Calle’S Prenez Soin De Vous, Natalie Edwards

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

French project artist Sophie Calle has become well-known for her iconoclastic performance art that blends visual and textual elements. Beginning with Les Dormeurs in 1979, in which she invited 24 strangers to sleep in her empty bed and photographed them hourly, through her project of following people around Paris and photographing them like a private detective in Suite vénitienne, Calle has blurred the boundaries between private and public, between photographer and photographed, and between viewer and participant. In this article, I focus on her recent exhibition, Prenez soin de vous. The title comes from the last line of …

Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores the relationship between feminist criticism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Much of the critical work on Bataille assimilates his psychosocial theories in Erotism with the manifestation of those theories in his fiction without acknowledging potential contradictions between the two bodies of work. The conflation of important distinctions between representations of sex and death in Story of the Eye and the writings of Erotism forecloses the possibility of reading Bataille’s novel as a critique of gender relations. This article unravels some of the distinctions between Erotism and Story of the Eye in order to complicate …

Aspiration, Consumer Culture, And Individualism In Les Belles-Sœurs, Julie Robert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The premise of Michel Tremblay’s revolutionary 1968 play, Les Belles-Sœurs, is a working bee. A group of working-class women gather to paste a million trading stamps, won in a sweepstakes, into booklets that once full can be redeemed for household goods. As the guests surreptitiously pilfer what they see as their hostess’s underserved windfall, their actions problematize the links between the individualistic aspects of consumer and material culture and the communal values they share as members of Quebec’s working class.

Taking consumer culture and material desire as a starting point, this essay considers the relationship between the individual and …

Migration And Metamorphosis In Marie Ndiaye's Trois Femmes Puissantes, Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 2009 Goncourt-Prize-winning novel, Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women), Marie Ndiaye experiments with a polyphonic, semi-fantastical rendering of identity-threatening displacements experienced by three women from different socio-geographic backgrounds. In a brief "Counterpoint" at the end of each of the novel's three sections--a narrative take on the musical technique employed by Ndiaye to introduce new focalizations and unexpected turns of events that complicate interpretations of the characters' behavior--each of the women is perceived as metamorphosed into a bird or a birdlike persona. This essay examines the innovative embedding of the shape-shifts in Trois femmes puissantes in both harrowing …

Falling Into Salvation In Cioran, Joseph Acquisto

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While, at first glance, there seems to be very little room in the thought of E.M. Cioran for the notion of salvation, a closer look reveals that Cioran returns constantly to the vocabulary and the concept of redemption. This article teases out Cioran’s complex use of the topos of salvation throughout his works, with special emphasis on his middle period. I begin by tracing Cioran’s notion of humanity’s fall into time and language, from which he claims there can be no salvation in the traditional Christian sense. Nonetheless, he retains the concept, claiming at various points that there is a …

Névine El Nossery And Anna Rocca, Eds. Frictions Et Devenirs Dans Les Écritures Migrantes Au Féminin: Enracinements Et Renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 Pp., Natalie Edwards

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Névine El Nossery and Anna Rocca, eds. Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin: enracinements et renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 pp.

A Beautiful Grave: Innocent Objects, Museums, And The Modern Self In Driss Chraïbi's La Civilisation, Ma Mère!... And The Ben M'Sik Community Museum, Katarzyna Pieprzak

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two-thirds through Driss Chraïbi’s 1972 novel La Civilisation, ma Mère!... ‘Mother Comes of Age’ about an un-named Moroccan woman and her path to modernity, the Mother makes a powerful statement that innocent objects from her past deserve a beautiful tomb and preservation from ridicule. In this article, I discuss the idea of innocent objects – innocent in terms of unknowing, and innocent in juridical terms as absolved from guilt in a crime and undeserving of punishment – in relationship to the Mother’s tomb and the 2006 Casablanca Ben M’Sik Community Museum (BMCM). Both the novel and the museum …

Taking Stock: Marie Nimier’S Textual Cabinet Of Curiosities, Adrienne Angelo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many life-writing projects, the seemingly innocuous description of heteroclite objects and how those objects are stored and recalled in fact plays an important role in demonstrating their importance to the process of memory work. At once the lingering traces of one’s past and also an aggregation of stories evoked by an examination of them, these curios focus attention on the relationship between the individual and the storage of memories. This article will focus on certain collectibles, collections and collectors that appear throughout the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional world that Marie Nimier has scripted to date. This textual cabinet of …