French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

Turn-Taking And Gaze Behavior Among Cajun French And Cajun English Speakers In Avoyelles Parish, Andrew Mandell Riviere

LSU Master's Theses

Languages are the verbal and non-verbal codes of a culture. A culture houses a language(s) and is comprised of the gaze and distance/use of personal sphere. Linguists and anthropologists have long since argued over which takes priority: culture or language. French and Louisiana are synonymous: it is unimaginable to picture Louisiana without French because French constitutes the culture in Louisiana. Since linguists have debated the priority of language or culture, looking at Louisiana within the confines of this debate proves informative.

The language shift forced upon the residents of South Louisiana by the 1921 State Legislature made English the sole …

Ananda Devi's Narrative Strategies And Subversions., Ritu Tyagi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a feminist narratological study of texts by Ananda Devi, a contemporary Francophone writer from Mauritius. I examine three principle narrative strategies that allow Devi to challenge the dominant androcentric discourses. These discourses ignore the feminine world of domesticity and impose images of submission on women, thereby curbing feminine expression and quest. Inspired by the efforts of critics such as Alison Case, Robyn Warhol, Susan Lanser to study narrative structures in the context of cultural constructions of gender, I argue that Devi employs narrative strategies that allow her marginalized narrators to intervene in dominant structures of narrative construction …

Mais, I Sin In French, I Gotta Go To Confession In French: A Study Of The Language Shift From French To English Within The Louisiana Catholic Church, Emilie Gagnet Leumas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

To study language change within South Louisiana Catholic Church, I examined the sacramental registers of more than 250 churches, the country of origin of 1043 priests, the parish visitation reports of 37 individual churches and 160 original data cards from 1906 Census of Religious Bodies. Metalinguistic elements were collected from various files available at the archives. This study reveals the complex nature of the language switch from French to English, a network structure of top down management and elements of change in each community of practice which pressured the other levels. It is specific to the Louisiana Catholic population, the …

Postcolonial Writing In Louisiana: Surpassing The Role Of French Traditionalism In Alfred Mercier's L'Habitation Saint-Ybars, Mary Florence Cashell

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis explores the roles of French patriarchal ideologies of the Enlightenment and exoticism in Alfred Mercier’s novel, L’habitation Saint-Ybars. His novel portrays the antebellum Creole plantation as a hierarchy of strict gender roles similar to those that Enlightenment philosophy espoused. I use the family in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s classic, Paul et Virginie, as one example of such a hierarchy. There are also, however, several instances where Mercier departs from the paternalistic norm. I interpret Mercier’s moving away from this model to be a declaration of a unique Louisianian identity.

Getting Warm(Er) An Investigation Into Linguistic Relativity And Its Significance In The Translation Of The English Lexical Term "Warm" Into French, Elizabeth Neuerburg Addison

LSU Master's Theses

Students of foreign languages are well aware that every language has its own vocabulary and word-for-word translations are rarely valid. It is therefore unsurprising that identifying literal translations in French for the English lexical term “warm” is problematic. This study demonstrates that not only is there a variety of French lexical terms that can be used to convey the meaning that the English lexical term “warm” conveys, but that certain French lexical terms are more likely to be used only in certain situations. Furthermore, an examination of this phenomenon through the lens of linguistic relativity has revealed differing conceptualizations of …

Louis Aragon And Pierre Drieu La Rochelle: Servility And Subversion, Oana Carmina Cimpean

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the use of literature in support of political ideologies, starting from the cases of Louis Aragon and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Aragon and Drieu wrote extensively about man’s alienation in the modern world and, more importantly, about the possibility of overcoming that alienation. Both argued for the creation of a new man who could erect a new world on the ruins of the old. Though Aragon was a communist and Drieu a fascist, they shared an apocalyptic view of the world and believed themselves to be living in the last stage of history, the prelude to a …

Vassilis Alexakis: Exorciser L'Exil Déplacements Autofictionnels, Linguistiques Et Spatiaux, Marianne Bessy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the writings of contemporary Francophone writer Vassilis Alexakis. I interpret Alexakis’s œuvre as an attempt by the writer to exorcize his own exile. The author left Greece in the 1960s, settled in France, and started to publish novels in French in the mid-1970s. By looking closely at the patterns of cultural dispossession, language loss, estrangement, and identity crisis in his writings, I show that Alexakis constructs an aesthetic of displacement that allows him to free himself cathartically from the angst of exile. A close analysis of Alexakis’s eleven novels, his autobiographical text, and his collection of short …

In Black And White: The Effect Of Race On Listener Judgments Of Cajun And Creole French, Alison Landry

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Introduction To A Poetics Of Diversity: English Translation Of Édouard Glissant’S Introduction À Une Poétique Du Divers, Julee Rebecca Laporte

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Les Cuisines Mères: Une Analyse Historique Des Racines Francophones De La Gastronomie De La Nouvelle Orléans, Mark Huntsman

LSU Master's Theses

New Orleans’ culinary history is amongst the most rich and storied of any American city, yet very few academic works have addressed this subject. While texts ranging from cookbooks to explorer’s journals offer glimpses into the evolution of the gastronomy of the city, the stories they present are often rife with myth, legend, and misinterpretation. Contemporary and historic authors also paint a misleading picture of the evolutionary processes involved in the creation of the cuisine and gastronomy of New Orleans, presenting a “melting-pot” model that portrays the culinary landscape of the city as a homogenous and over-simplified product of a …

Claude Simon Et Paul Ricoeur: Identification Et Identité, Guy-Marcel Mbira

LSU Master's Theses

Narrative identity is one of the very controversial concepts in literature. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the question is still the same as it has been since it was discovered or since its invention in literature and philosophy: What is a narrative? What’s the basis of a self identity? The authors selected in this essay have each in his own manner, first Paul Ricœur, by means of a philosophical discourse, and then Claude Simon, in terms of a fictional discourse, have explored the notion of narrative identity in both practical and theoretical terms. Some may say that the narrative identity is …

Local Norms And Innovations Within The System Of Locative Prepositions In Cajun French, Sibylle Maria Noetzel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Cajun French presents variable use of linguistic features, as any other variety of French does. Many Cajun French features are considered as deviant from the French norm or triggered by attrition although fluent speakers of Cajun French have always used them. In this sociolinguistic study, we analyze the use of locative prepositions. We add two important dimensions to existing studies: real-time evidence for a diachronic descriptive perspective, and a methodological tool, measuring the degree of exposure to French (MDI). This approach allows us to establish the local prepositional norm of Cajun French and phenomena due to attrition. Large amounts of …

How Legend Constructs French National Identity: Jeanne D'Arc, Stephanie Louise Coker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since the fifteenth century, French authors have (re)told the story of Jeanne d’Arc. There is a sense of timelessness that accompanies her reception by the French public. In this transhistorical study, I look at Jeanne’s legend in light of four centuries and reveal how French authors (re)appropriate the Maid for their own political purposes. Along with the timeliness of Jeanne’s appearance, I investigate the gendered nature of her depictions. In short, I examine how Jeanne’s legend constructs, reconstructs, and deconstructs French national identity. In 1429, Christine de Pisan composes Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, a poem that celebrates her contemporary in …

Exceptions To The Rule Of Gender: Ambition, Writing, And Subjectivity In Christine De Pizan, Jeanne D'Albret And Marie-Catherine Desjardins De Villedieu, Lori Anne Knox

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Critics often focus on how ambitious French women who were “exceptions to the rule of gender” disrupted egalitarian political structures that appeared after 1789. Geneviève Fraisse, for instance, theorizes that exceptional women in egalitarian systems such as democracies/republics pose a threat to patriarchal social order. In theory, all women in political circumstances such as these have the “right” to imitate the exceptional woman. The fear in “egalitarian” patriarchal societies is that all women might emulate the ambitious women who aspire to cultural echelons usually reserved for men. In a hierarchical regime, such as the ancien régime, exceptions are a normal, …

Franc̦Ais Acadien, Franc̦Ais Cadien: Variation Stylistique Et Maintenance De Formes Phonetiques Dans Le Parler De Quatre Generations De Femmes Cadiennes, Carole Lucienne Salmon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study examining the phonetic variation in the speech of four generations of Cajun French women, living in four Louisiana parishes: Avoyelles, Lafourche, St Landry and Vermillon. Based on the Gold 1975 corpus and the Dubois 1997 Cajun French corpus available at LSU, a sample of 29 speakers was chosen for the analysis of five traditional phonetic variables: O in front of nasals MM/NN and liquids R and L, Œ in front of R, E in front of R and at the third person ending of the imparfait, J in lexical words, personal pronoun JE, and …

Zachary Richard's "Faire Récolte": A Translation From The French, Michael D. Bierschenk

LSU Master's Theses

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cajun language, which had been entirely oral for most of its history, began to emerge as a productive literary language. One of the prominent new authors of the period was Zachary Richard, also an important Cajun musician. One of his collections of poetry, Faire récolte (Les Éditions Perce-Neige, 1997), is translated here. This thesis also includes a translator's note that briefly explores the broad themes of the poems and the methods used in translating them.

The Education Of Girls In Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Mother-Daughter Relations And Portrayals Of Identity In George Sand And Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Christina Grace Thomas

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationships between mothers and daughters against the background of education in early nineteenth-century France. This era was the first time that a large population of French girls was separated from their mothers. Because of their attendance at school, girls created an identity separate from that of the one that their mothers had helped them to create. By using George Sand’s autobiography Histoire de ma vie and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poem “Ondine à l’ecole,” the process of distinguishing the daughter from the mother has been analyzed from both the mother’s perspective and the daughter’s perspective. For Sand, who …

Liminality In Gender, Race, And Nation In Les Quarteronnes De La Nouvelle-Orléans By Sidonie De La Houssaye, Christine Koch Harris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines themes of race, gender, and nation in a series of four novels by nineteenth-century Louisiana author Sidonie de la Houssaye. The series, called Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Quadroons of New Orleans), is based on the system of plaçage. Plaçage, a system of concubinage in which white men took women of mixed racial heritage (such as “quadroons”) as mistresses, becomes a source of conflict and contradiction in the series. The author sees plaçage as a tragic necessity for some educated and morally “upright” quarteronnes. For others, those quarteronnes depicted as libidinous and avaricious, it is a …

La Réécriture Des Mythes Et Le Combat Des Femmes Pour Leur Libération: Étude De Maïéto Pour Zékia De Bohui Dali, De La Guerre Des Femmes De Zadi Zaourou, De La Révolte D'Affiba De Régina Yaou Et De Assémien Déhylé, Roi Du Sanwi De Bernard Dadié, Souleymane Fofana

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the rewriting of myths by writers from the Ivory Coast: Maïéto Pour Zékia by Bohui Dali, La guerre des femmes by Zadi Zaourou, La révolte d'Affiba by Régina Yaou and Assémien Déhylé, roi du Sanwi by Bernard Dadié. I analyze these texts in the context of nineteenth and twenty century French works by Baudelaire (Le peintre de la vie moderne); Camus (Le mythe de Sisyphe); Aragon (Le paysan de Paris). Comparisons with feminist texts by Beyala (Femme nue, femme noire); Djebar (Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement); Bâ (Une si longue lettre) underline how the rewriting of myths …

Writing As A Cultural Negotiation: A Study Of Mariama Bâ, Marie Ndiaye And Ama Ata Aidoo, Catherine Afua Kapi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Critical review of the existing literature on African women writers clearly shows that nowhere is the question of writing as a cultural negotiation posed, discussed or much less addressed. This is a lacuna that this dissertation addresses for the first time by proposing a re-reading of the selected works of Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ and Marie NDiaye through the new prism of writing as part of cultural negotiation. In doing so, the dissertation goes beyond the paradigm of binary oppositions that undergirds the critical literature on writing by Sub-Saharan women in favor of the innovative concept of negotiation. In …

Attitudes Des Éducateurs Envers Le Français Et Le Créole: Le Cas D'Haïti, Lesly Jean-François

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Language attitudes represent a serious challenge for Haitian education policy makers. This research is the first attempt to study the attitudes of elementary school educators toward the linguistic situation in Haiti. A survey of 154 teachers addressed their attitudes toward language use, preference and choice, and their stereotypes toward other Haitian native speakers. Three instruments (quantitative questionnaire, Match-Guise-Technique, and qualitative questionnaire) were utilized and two Statistical Methods (descriptive and inference), along with Chi-Square were used in order to observe the significance of differences in independent variables. Since Haitian teachers who participated in this study were assumed bilingual, the questionnaire first …

Voix, Mémoire Et Écriture: Transmission De La Mémoire Et Identité Culturelle Dans L'Oeuvre De Fadhma Et Taos Amrouche, Nathalie Malti

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines the question of memory and cross-cultural identities in the context of diasporic cultures, focusing in particular on the works of two Algerian women: Fadhma Amrouche and her daughter Taos Amrouche. Both occupy a unique position in Maghrebian literature. Precursors of women’s writing in Algeria, their works reflect the experience of exile and displacement, and the shift from orality to the written word, from artistic creation to preservation of cultural patrimony, from identity crisis to a quest of one’s own cultural identity. Women writers at this time were marginalized and Fadhma’s and Taos’ marginalization appear as threefold. Firstly, …

"Nos Frères D'Outre-Golfe": Spiritualism, Vodou And The Mimetic Literatures Of Haiti And Louisiana, Jean-Marc Allard Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The nineteenth-century Francophone literatures of Haiti and Louisiana are often dismissed as pale imitations of literary trends in metropolitan France. This study revisits these literatures and explores how Creole writers used borrowed ideas and imitated styles to assemble "relational" Creole identities. Two interrelated spiritual practices-the mid-century craze for "table turning" commonly known as modern Spiritualism, and the syncretistic New World religion Vodou-structured these writers' mimetic methods, enabling them to speak as, and thereby subvert the hegemony of, their cultural forebears. In France, the mid-century interest in Spiritualism provided French fantastic literature with a useful system for producing the many "revenants" …

Marie Darrieussecq Et Ses Truismes, Carla Bota

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the relationship between language and themes in Marie Darrieussecq's novel Truismes. Having as its core the theme of metamorphosis, Truismes tells the story of a young woman who after passing through a multitude of experiences transforms into a pig. The character's journey through the metamorphosis is marked by excesses. The excess manifests itself at all levels: in the physical and mental transformation of the female character, in the description of the secondary characters, in the composition of the environment that sustains the narration, and ultimately in the language. By using Julia Kristeva's …

Samuel Beckett And Bilingualism: How The Return To English Influences The Later Writing Style And Gender Roles Of All That Fall And Happy Days, Julien F. Carriere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses Samuel Beckett's bilingualism in an effort to understand how the author's use of language affected his writing style and depiction of gender. Beckett began writing in English, switched to French for the composition of new works for ten years, and then returned unexpectedly to English. His first English works are characterized by stylistic virtuosity, erudition, and misogyny. With Beckett's adoption of French his style became simple, spare, and cerebral. Plot structure based on a journey in early works was abandoned in favor of static situations and dialogue. Women were either ignored or viewed negatively. In 1956, Beckett …

Les Implications De La Littérature Dans L'Avènevement De La Démocratie Dans Les Pays Du Golfe De Guinée Entre 1988 Et 1998, Bani Gouda Ningbinnin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is focused on the contribution of literature in the establishment of democracy in four French-speaking countries of the Golf of Guinea between 1988 and 1998. They are Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Togo. In 1991, a democratization movement that started in Benin occurred in many West African countries. It was propelled by an invented idea of National Conferences that were gathered by the countries elites either with the support or against the will of the ruling government. Thus, it was possible to organize a successful National Conference in some of those countries like Benin, Mali and Niger. But …

Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mots And The Nouvelles Autobiographies Of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, And Marguerite Duras: A Comparison, Julie Driessen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography Les Mots (1964) is shown to be a departure from the Sartrean oeuvre because it represents an abandonment of littérature engagée. In Les Mots Sartre not only abandons littérature engagée, but also embraces a view of literature which he formerly opposed--l'art pour l'art. Sartre defines his views of literature--littérature engagée--in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1948) Robbe-Grillet defines l'art pour l'art in Pour un nouveau roman (1963). In Les Mots Sartre embraces Robbe-Grillet's l'art pour l'art and abandons his own littérature engagée. Since these two views of literature are theoretically opposed, it is interesting to find that Sartre …

La Grande Force Est Le D'Sir: Guillaume Apollinaire's Rewriting Of Merlin's Mother And The Dame Du Lac In L'Enchanteur Pourrissant, Allison Bateman Roark

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Guillaume Apollinaire's rewriting of Merlin's mother and the Dame du Lac in L'Enchanteur pourrissant as a commentary on writing. I consider Merlin's state in the tomb as an effect of his desire for the Dame du Lac and relate this to the poet's relationship to writing, which is the result of his desire for a unity of expression -- to express what can be designated in the text, but not directly communicated in its totality through language. There is always something missing from any writing, but the very absence of meaning influences poetic production by encouraging attempts …

Anti-Americanism In France, 1914-1945: Hollywood As Cause And Cultural Symbol, Louise G. Hilton

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

19th And 20th Century French Exoticism: Pierre Loti, Louis-Ferdinand Cé́Line, Michel Leiris, And Simone Schwarz-Bart, Robin Anita White

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study of four 19th and 20th century colonial texts, as well as a later postcolonial novel exposes the cadres exotiques, or exotic frameworks, of literary exoticism. The thesis names and interprets the moods of and reactions to exoticism, including colonial exoticism, antiexoticism, and autoexoticism. Poetic and theoretical interpretations of exoticism, such as Victor Segalen’s Notion du Divers and Edouard Glissant’s Opacité and Poétique de la Relation challenge the prevalent assumptions that the literary practice was only an unfortunate byproduct of colonialism. The first chapter presents literary history and theoretical considerations relating to exoticism: Orientalism, nostalgia, colonial literary history, and …