French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

Creating Knowledge, Volume 8, 2015

Creating Knowledge

Dear reader,

I am delighted to introduce this eighth volume of Creating Knowledge: The LAS Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship. This volume features 19 essays and 14 art works, representing advanced coursework produced in twenty different departments and programs during the 2014-2015 academic year. Several of the essays have been honored with department awards and several draw on research supported by undergraduate research grants. Many were originally written in senior capstone seminars, research-intensive seminars, and independent studies, and many were presented in some form at one of the numerous conferences and showcases sponsored by departments and programs throughout the year. All …

Acknowledgements/Image Credits, Molly Lynde-Recchia

Transference

No abstract provided.

First Mill (Excerpts) By René Char, Nancy Naomi N. Carlson

Transference

Translated from the French with commentary by Nancy Naomi Carlson.

The Fisherman By Anonymous, Luke J. Chambers

Transference

Translated from the Old French with commentary by Luke Chambers.

Just Above Silence By Anna Greki, Lynda Chouiten

Transference

Translated from the French with commentary by Lynda Chouiten.

Foreword, David Kutzko, Molly Lynde-Recchia

Transference

Thoughts on the second volume by editors-in-chief David Kutzko and Molly Lynde-Recchia.

Transference Vol. 2, Fall 2014, Molly Lynde-Recchia

Transference

Transference is published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Dedicated to the celebration of poetry in translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, classical Greek, Latin, and Japanese, into English verse. Transference contains translations as well as commentaries on the art and process of translating.

Into The Red: A Look Into The Reasons Why Refugees Decide To Flee, Settle Or Migrate To And From Morocco, Fadeelah E. Holivay

Master's Theses

This research paper explores some of the main reasons why refugees and asylum seekers, particularly from sub-Saharan African countries, embark on a journey and decide to settle, flee or migrate to and from Morocco. Because of this phenomenon, Morocco has seen a 96% increase of refugees migrating to the borders of Morocco each year for the past three years. Many say that this astonishing increase of migrants choosing Morocco is due to such factors as: wars breaking out regionally across central African and Middle Eastern countries causing them to flee; Morocco being a culturaly diverse francophone country whose laws and …

Chercheurs D’Afrique Et Archive Coloniale, Jean-Pierre Karegeye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The main goal of this article is to demonstrate that discourse on the Rwandan genocide has an origin. In other words, the hamitic myth transcends the question of race and is present in its most radical form in the events of 1994 in Rwanda. However, the myth itself is not intrinsically genocidal, but it did clear the path. The danger arose when the myth was demythified, that is to say, perceived as historic reality and scientific knowledge, and entered a new environment of genocide discourse. To proceed based on the notion of archive is to approach the genocide in relation …

L’Usage De La Rhétorique Émotionnelle Dans Les Récits De Jean Hatzfeld, Michael Rinn

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In France, the books of Jean Hatzfeld -- journalist and writer -- have played a key role for the public opinion to become aware of the tragedy of the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi in 1994. Our paper aims to show how the discourse strategy of Jean Hatzfeld aims to influence the reader by using emotions. We would like to know how this rhetoric of emotions relies on specific cultural codes which are largely western centered. Our thesis is that since Auschwitz, those codes have constructed an argumentative framework for contemporary understanding of passion and pain in discourse.

La Fiction Du Génocide Ou Le Partage Des Émotions, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The goal of this study is to show that the fiction of genocide aims to share emotions between the narrator and the reader. It is possible to consider the narrator as representing the real reader and not only as the simple recipient written into the text. This is to say that the narrator is a part of the story but is also the reader’s counterpart as the real recipient, because both-- narrator and real reader-- are integrated in the imaginary world of the story. The role of the author is to construct intermediate mechanisms between the reader and the author. …

Esquisse D’Un Projet Épistémologique Pour La Science Politique Dans Une Afrique Post-Génocide, Mame-Penda Ba

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article attempts to answer two main questions: “What does it mean to teach political science in an African university when oneself is African?” and “what social realities are we documenting (or should we document)?” As a political scientist, I came to ask myself these questions based on my encounter with the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and based on the questions that this major event had kindled in me. My encounter with the subject of “genocide” was in all respects an upheaval because I understood suddenly a large weakness in the way political science was taught at Université …

Tracing The Origins Of Success: Implications For Successful Aging, Nora M. Peterson, Peter Martin

French Language and Literature Papers

Purpose of the Study: This paper addresses the debate about the use of the term “successful aging” from a humanistic, rather than behavioral, perspective. It attempts to uncover what success, a term frequently associated with aging, is: how can it be defined and when did it first come into use? In this paper, we draw from a number of humanistic perspectives, including the historical and linguistic, in order to explore the evolution of the term “success.” We believe that words and concepts have deep implications for how concepts (such as aging) are culturally and historically perceived.

Design and Methods: We …

La « Langue Fantôme » : Une Présence Familière Dans L’Écriture – Présentation Du Poète Malek Alloula Suivie D’Un Entretien, Yamna Abdelkader-Chaldi.

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The evolution of Malek Alloula’s works, an important poet of Algerian literature whose first works date back to the sixties, is analyzed by Yamna Abdelkader. Afterwards, she interviews him on his poetic work and its relationship to language. The poet thus explains his writing ; how he composes his poetry in relation to the creative process ; his technique ; the influence of its cultural origins, and its relationship to language. In using the term “phantom language”, the poet refers to the haunting presence of the Arabic language spoken in Algeria, which, while unseen, has a major influence on his …

La Langue Seconde Au Service De La Créationcinématographique. Les Séries Télévisées En Afrique Subsaharienne Francophone, Dragoss Ouédraogo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The African sitcoms in the wake of South American telenovelas build steps to win spaces on TV screens. The case of Burkina Faso shows the vitality of filmmaking in second language, with breakable structure of production context.

Pourquoi J’Écris En Français, Julien Kilanga Musinde

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Why have I chosen to write in French? My personal engagement in front of French language, my profession of teacher and researcher in French linguistics, my quality as a writer and the years I worked as director of French at the International Organization of Francophonie have largely contributed to increase my link with this tongue. We say, the language belongs to his speakers and particularly to the people who use it as the place of expression of art and original thought.

La Langue De Banlieue : De L’Oral À L’Écrit, Christelle Lottereie

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Behind the existence of a social malaise in the suburbs and of numerous stereotypes, a linguistic innovation characteristic of young people has developed. Most of these young people, who consider themselves excluded from society, have created their own social and linguistic space. They have appropriated the French language and transformed it after introducing their own identity marks. The resulting language turns out to be a linguistic refuge for identity, which leads to the finding of a subjective stability.

Créativité Et Lecture En Langue Seconde : Propositions Pour La Lecture Des Textes Des Journaux Francophones Du Cameroun, Louis Martin Onguéné Essono

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Nowadays, it is common to say that the French press in Africa greatly contributes to the lower level of French. If true, this assertion hides a much deeper problem that concerns the act of writing and the act of reading in a non-native language. The performance of newspaper, radio or television journalists show that these writers share the same competence and face the same difficulties as the entire French-speaking population who is compelled to transmit ideas and information in a second language they do not master, or just a bit. This paper aims at understanding the reasons why non-African readers …

Nous Habitons Les Langues Et Les Langues Nous Habitent, Cheikh Tidiane Sow

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Who has not his mother, suckles his grandmother. This wolof of Senegal adage tells us that the absence of the native language and the adoption of another language, far from being a handicap, would open more “naturally” to the universal. The author, whose parents are Fulani speaking Pulaar, delivers his experience and his relationship to his two family “second languages”, Wolof and French.

Les Villes Jumelées: Finding Bowling Green A Francophone Sister City, Sarah Kinnicutt

Student Research Conference Select Presentations

No abstract provided.

Creating Knowledge, Volume 7, 2014

Creating Knowledge

Dear Students, Faculty Colleagues and Friends, It is my great pleasure to introduce the seventh volume of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ Creating Knowledge—our undergraduate student scholarship and research journal. First published in 2008, the journal is the outcome of an initiative to enhance and enrich the academic quality of the student experience within the college. Through this publication, the college seeks to encourage students to become actively engaged in creating scholarship and research and gives them a venue for the publication of their essays.

Beginning with the sixth volume of the journal, we instituted a major …

Egiazko Misterioa Euskararen: La Politique Linguistique, Les Methodes Educatives, Et La Revitalisation De La Langue Basque En France Et En Espagne Du Vingtieme Siecle Jusquau Present, Rose Cooper-Finger

Scripps Senior Theses

The Basque people and their language have been politically oppressed for centuries. I examine the history of the Basque language and how its oppression and revitalization have been shaped by the language policies of France and Spain, the two countries spanned by the Basque country. I focus my research and predictions on the French Basque Country, which is currently subject to a more oppressive language policy than Spanish Basque Country. The number of Basque-speaking bilinguals in the French Basque Country is decreasing and attitudes regarding instruction of the language have become more apathetic. I explore governmental, community, and combined efforts …

Unspoken Prejudice: Racial Politics, Gendered Norms, And The Transformation Of Puerto Rican Identity In The Twentieth Century, Cristóbal A. Borges

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Dissertation uses border theory to craft a comparative study that explores the promotion of the white jí­baro in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century and the challenges to that racialized identity that emerged simultaneously. Through a biographical approach that examines the lives of José Julio Henna (1848-1924), Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938), Muna Lee (1895-1965), Juano Hernández (1896-1970), Ruby Black (1896-1957), Luis Muñoz Marí­n (1898-1980), Pura Belpré (1899-1982), Inés Mendoza (1908-1990), and Roberto Clemente (1934-1972) as symbols of Puerto Ricanness and contributors to its definition, the Dissertation analyzes the racial and gendered inequalities that persisted during twentieth century Puerto Rico. …

L’Empreinte Du Renard De Moussa Konaté Et Les Transformations Africaines Du Polar, Alexie Tcheuyap

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Within sub-Saharan Africa, Moussa Konaté is undoubtedly the contemporary writer dedicated to producing the most original crime fiction. In L’empreinte du renard, he offers a fundamental subversion of the genre that breaks with conventional thought on crime narratives. Moreover, the subversion of the canon accompanies a subversion of political structures by which the end of the story accompanies the end of the postcolonial state as it is known, and often caricatured: the State of corruption. As a result, such intrigue also becomes that of governmentability.

Géotropisme De Chamoiseau, Jean-Louis Cornille

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

There seems to be a strange parallel between the vegetable kingdom in which Patrick Chamoiseau sets his Biblique des derniers gestes and the way the narrative is being played out. The mangrove, with its entangled roots and stems, constitutes a perfect image of the novel, whose multiple branches are no longer anchored in any reality or in a centralised system, but seem moved by a principle which we could call “bibliotropic”, since in Biblique one could easily find traces of Perse, García Márquez, Glissant, Césaire and even of Rabelais. But certain “stems” are more difficult to track within this dense …

Archéologie Du Cachot, Lydie Moudileno

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay examines the relationship between writing, memory and prison, as it is deployed in Patrick Chamoiseau’s tenth novel Un dimanche au cachot (2007). In this text, the inscription of the writer within the space of a small prison located on a Martinican plantation, serves Chamoiseau’s larger project to survey the Caribbean territory in order to unveil memorial traces. As it exhumes the ruins of an old disciplinary prison cell, this archeological move triggers a series of crucial transformations: in Un dimanche au cachot, prison writing reclaims a new glissantian “Lieu”, while making room for a therapeutic way of dealing …

La Condition Postmétisse, Célestin Monga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Patrick Chamoiseau’s thought has evolved considerably over the past twenty-five years. Whether it inscribes itself in the registers of utopia or counter-utopia, it has moved away from the linguistics issues of creoleness to acquire a humanistic thickness. It now advocates the advent of a global identity that could be viewed as “post-mestizo”. This essay analyzes its invocation of the Tout-Monde and its faith in a universal poetics of relation. It also assesses the empirical basis for his views in a world where nihilism appears to be the only credible virtue.

Transference Vol. 1, Summer 2013

Transference

Transference is published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Dedicated to the celebration of poetry in translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, Classical Greek and Latin, Japanese, and Russian into English verse. Transference contains translations as well as commentaries on the art and process of translating.

La Critique Des Langages Consacrés Et La Recherche D’Un Nouveau Rapport Au Monde Dans L’Oeuvre De V. Y. Mudimbe, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article shows how V. Y. Mudimbe’s work is both a space where consecrated languages (Christianity and Marxism) that wrap up themselves while pretending to explain the world or justify it are criticised, and a search for a new language to establish a new relationship with the world as it is lived, that means outside of any dogmatism and mystification. It is through this dynamic that Mudimbe has contributed to the renewal of thought and forms in Africa.

Violence, Altérité De L’Intérieur Et Citoyenneté De Seconde Zone, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article proposes an examination of violence in the French banlieues where riots erupted in the fall of 2005. Building on the observation that violence seems to have become the main determiner for banlieues inhabitants in the media and political discourses, the author scrutinizes Mohamed Razane’s Dit Violent (2006) in order to understand the status of young banlieue dwellers as outsiders within who are caught between second-class citizenship and exclusion from the French public political sphere. It is the contention of the author that the public construction of an enemy within imply shadows a socio-political reality, which is the invisibility …