French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

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 …

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. …

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 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 …

Re-Defining Gender And Sexuality In West African Theatre: Women Artists, Feminist Representations, And Same-Sex Desire In The Twenty-First Century Theatre Of Benin, Burkina Faso, And Togo, Heather J. Denyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines French-language theatre in the West African countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo that tackles gender-related themes. Topics often considered taboo, including domestic violence, child brides, and sexual desire, are publically addressed through contemporary theatre. The study focuses on the growing presence of women artists, including playwrights, actresses, and directors. Particularly since 2010, these artists have shifted the aesthetic and thematic substance of the theatre being created. Their presence has also generated new paths for plays written by and directed by men, including gay male characters and bold women. By considering the field of African women's studies …

Rhetorique Du Soi Dans La Litterature Francophone Haïtienne Du Xxe Siècle. Manques Et Manquements?, Jasmine Narcisse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Partant du constat de la précarité du genre autobiographique dans la littérature haïtienne, et des théories formelle (Lejeune), philosophique et historique (Price-Mars, Gusdorf, Fanon, Glissant…), psychanalytique et rhétorique (Fanon, Doubrovsky, Kristeva…) sur le genre lui-même ou traitant de l’identité et de l’individuation, je propose un cadre d’établissement d’un corpus haïtien de l’écriture de soi. Ce sera l’occasion d’analyser les mécanismes mis en place par ces textes pour dire le soi dans une société comme la société haïtienne où le JE est pris en otage par un NOUS lui-même lourdement « surdéterminé » par un legs historique paralysant et l’encombrement social …

Dostoevsky As A Translator Of "Eugénie Grandet", Julia Titus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of this study in comparative criticism is a close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication - his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834) and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading this dissertation analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, the dissertation focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation …

Lost And Found In Translation: A Study Of The Bilingual Work Of Samuel Beckett, Julien Green, And Nancy Huston, Genevieve Waite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While much has been written and theorized about translation, until recent years, considerably less attention has been paid to the product and process of self-translation, and self-translation studies has only recently emerged as a new and growing field of interest in academia. In my dissertation, I analyze the extent to which literal, linguistic loss in translation leads to figurative gain in the self-translated work and non-authorial translations of three translingual Franco-Anglophone authors: Samuel Beckett, Julien Green, and Nancy Huston. In addition to examining how self-translators and non-authorial translators afford themselves liberties in translation, I investigate the ways in which a …

Desire, Curiosity, And The Search For Truth In Proust, Moreno, And Bechdel, Santiago Parga Linares

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marcel Proust’s influence on twentieth century literature is broad and has been well documented. This dissertation attempts a comparative reading of À la recherche du temps perdu that places it in contrast with Colombian writer Marvel Moreno’s 1987 novel, En diciembre llegaban las brisas, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 comic memoir, Fun Home. Starting from a Deleuzian reading of the Recherche, this dissertation proposes the notion of the “proustian truth seeker”, a thematic and stylistic phenomenon which can be traced in all three writers. The characteristics of the truth seeker can be used to understand the ways in …

Clemence Of Barking And Valdes Of Lyon: Two Contemporaneous Examples Of Innovation In The Twelfth Century, Lisa Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Twelfth Century in Western Europe was a remarkable time in history. Scholars have noted that Roman law was being revived, Aristotelian theory was being studied, Romanesque and Gothic art was being produced, scholasticism was being cultivated, and economic growth was being fostered by the rise of towns. These are just some of the developments that help give this era the well-known term “twelfth-century renaissance.” Despite the flourishing of creativity that this label suggests, there are few surviving, specific examples of innovation from this time that have been passed down to us. In AD 1175 the Benedictine nun Clemence of …

La Symbolique Païenne Dans L'Oeuvre De René Depestre, Wilson Decembre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My goal in this thesis is to show that the different metamorphoses of René Depestre’s works can be schematized under two determinant stages in which the author’s paganism has different functions and significations. In the first stage, his paganism gives him the tools for his revolt that is purely artistic and existential before it becomes political on account of the author’s discovery of the socialist realism. In the second stage that follows the break of Depestre with Marxism as well as his reevaluation of the Négritude ideology, his paganism becomes truly Dionysian, in the Nietzschean sense of the word, to …

Albert Camus's Mediterraneanism In La Peste, Jacquelyn Libby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following dissertation uses the speech Camus gave at the inauguration of a new community arts center in Algiers in 1937, entitled “La Culture Indigène. La Nouvelle Culture Méditerranéenne,” to show that this expression of Mediterraneanism, as well as its evolution, can be detected in his novel La Peste, which was published ten years later in 1947. The bearing of Camus’s identification with the Mediterranean world on his speech is that it generated a sense of in-betweenness. This in-betweenness, I argue, is a key feature of Camus’s Mediterranean thought that is also found in La Peste’s subject matter, …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Region, Nation And Gastronomy: Regionalism In Gastronomic Texts Of The Early 20th Century (1900-1939), Lauren Reches

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is far from being a uniform culture and yet the food of French provinces is often subsumed into one universally known “French cuisine.” While 19^th-century haute cuisine ignored regional differences, gastronomes of the early 20^th-century, such as Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff, Austin de Croze, and Pampille, defined a new French culinary identity based on appropriating and incorporating the diversity of the regional cuisines. Regional cuisine at the time was, however, quite diverse. Some of the regions of France were newly added to the country, such as Savoie and Nice, while others had been in contention for …

Jules Verne Constructs America: From Utopia To Dystopia, Dana L. Radu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I examine visions of the United States in Jules Verne’s (1828-1905) Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1905). Of the sixty-four novels that make up that series, twenty-three, over one-third, feature American characters or take place on American soil. I demonstrate that in his early novels (1863-1886), he presents the United States in an optimistic and utopian light, while in his later novels (1887-1905), his depictions of the United States take on a pessimistic and dystopian aspect. In also showing that Verne had been influenced by utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), I provide …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spirituality has been increasingly studied to determine the laity’s role within Church history in the Middle Ages. However, secular literature is often overlooked as a source of understanding lay spirituality, even though it is a crucial aspect of cultural and social history. I fill this gap by analyzing nine important vernacular texts to uncover several distinctive definitions of holiness, all of which blend the religious and the secular. Close reading of these texts reveals various paths to holiness, which undermine the Church’s attempts at sole control over spirituality. This study demonstrates that secular authors were concerned with exploring spiritual matters; …

The French Revolution In The French-Algerian War (1954-1962): Historical Analogy And The Limits Of French Historical Reason, Timothy Scott Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of the French Revolution as an explanatory device for discussing the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Anticolonial intellectuals in France invoked the French Revolution to explain their reasons for supporting colonial reform as well as their solidarity with Algerian nationalist aims. Through an examination of intellectuals’ public interventions alongside French and Algerian historical narratives, I examine the ways in which historical alignment signaled political and cultural distance between France and Algeria. Making an independent Algeria analogous to eighteenth-century revolutionary France lent political and conceptual legitimacy to Algerian claims to an independent national identity while also reinforcing the …

Crossing Boundaries: The Transnational Third Space Of Contemporary Chinese-Francophone Writers, Paula S. Delbonis-Platt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, a group of Chinese writers who pen their works in French, their adopted language, have garnered prizes in France and received international acclaim. The transnational voices of these writers have drawn attention to Chinese history, literature, and human-rights issues, as well as to their own diverse intersections with French culture. The four Francophone-Chinese writers studied—François Cheng (b. 1929), Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Dai Sijie (b. 1954), and Shan Sa (b. 1972)—constitute themselves as subjects at least partially through their Chinese birth and French citizenship or residency and through the production of literary works that range …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

Unidentified Verbal Objects: Contemporary French Poetry, Intermedia, And Narrative, Eric Lynch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the vital experimental French poetry of the 1980s to the present. Whereas earlier twentieth century poets often shunned common speech, poets today seek instead to appropriate, adapt, and reorganize a wide variety of contemporary discourses. Narrative also reemerges both in hybridized writing fusing prose and verse and in sequences of digressions and anecdotes. Poetic form becomes specific to a given text as poets adapt techniques from other fields, such as the visual arts, and integrate a wide array of media into literary works. In recent pieces, poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard and Olivier Cadiot incorporate new media …

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 …

Le Bâillonnement De La Révolution Haïtienne Dans L’Imaginaire Occidental À Travers Des Textes Fictionnels Des Dix-Neuvième Et Vingtième Siècles, Claudy Delné

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Inspired by the study of Western historiography and the processes by which silence enters into history in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, this dissertation demonstrates that fiction can be used both for silencing the past and for rewriting it. This study focuses on seven novels, one short story and two plays published between 1798 to 2007: Adonis ou le Bon Nègre by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, L’Habitation de Saint-Domingue ou L’Insurrection by Charles de Rémusat, Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Les Nuits chaudes du Cap-Français by Hugues Rebell, Drums at Dusk by Arna …

Global Wreckage And Consumer Illusions: Responses To The Human Effects Of Economic Globalization In Sub-Saharan African Francophone Novels And Films, 1973-2006, Sara C. Hanaburgh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My study examines a group of nine novels and films set in Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon and Gabon written and produced between 1973 and 2006 in which "the West" and its international finance network are depicted as the fundamental contemporary world power that wields a destructive dominance over African countries. These forms of control are in many ways similar, yet distinct, from the projects of European imperialism. I analyze consumerism as a major feature of globalization, and discuss the linkage of globalization and the consumer society by looking at various theoretical models, in particular that which Jean Baudrillard conceptualized …

Tanbou Lwen Tini Bon Son: L'Oral Comme Reconstitution Historique Dans L'Oeuvre De Simone Schwarz-Bart, Frances J. Santiago Torres

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In an effort to reconstruct a History that has been marked by discontinuity and displacement, Simone Schwarz-Bart–a woman writer from Guadeloupe–has written two novels that are infused by the oral tradition of the Caribbean. This dissertation studies the diverse manifestations of the oral genres (such as songs/chants, sayings, proverbs, riddles, etc.) within the novels Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle and Ti Jean L'horizon. This author has given a new dimension to the written French language, even though the Creole language is not transcribed into the texts, it is nevertheless the material out of which the texture of these novels …

The Role Of Memory In Stendhal: His Evolving Ideas, 1801-25, Pamela Park

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.