French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

Guillaume Dustan's Ethico-Politics Of The Body, Noah Mertz

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In this MA Thesis, I lay out a synthetic overview of polemical French writer Guillaume Dustan's (1965-2005) political philosophy. He is criticized first as irresponsible and dangerous for his defense of barebacking (sex without condoms) in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and then, after his death, as a neoliberal/anarcho-capitalist for his focus on individual liberty. My overview touches on Dustan's Freudian belief that repression is the root of all social ills, his functional ethics of self-responsibility, the revaluation of heteronormative Judeo-Christian morality towards 'virtusex,' and his social contract that minimizes repression. Dustan’s goal is for you to autonomously subjectify …

What Is A Nation? Colonial Legacies, Identity, And Reclaiming In Métisse Autobiographical Narratives – A Case Study Of Sugar And Slate And Garçon Manqué, Thaïs Maëlle Autin

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the question of national belonging in autobiographical narratives of second-generation immigrant métisse women. I study the similar aesthetic manner in which individuals with different regional and cultural influences grapple with concepts of identity, gender, racism, exile, and negotiation, and the way in which the authors anchor themselves in a broader familial and national heritage. I argue that such an enterprise can be understood as part of the alternative heritage wave, based on Andrew Higson’s theory. The texts put in question traditional understandings of nation. Doing so opens the possibility of engaging in a dialogue that expands the …

The Role Of The Church In The German Democratic Republic: Examining The Representation Of Christianity In The Novel Einer Trage Des Anderen Last Within Its Cultural And Historical Context, Arden Remnant Gewirtz Levine

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The attitude towards the Protestant Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) changed overtime and was not homogenous during the approximately forty years of the GDR’s existence. This thesis will use this established cultural and historical context in order to analyze the representation of Christianity in the novel Einer trage des anderen Last, written by Wolfgang Held. The premise of the novel is two men diagnosed with tuberculosis are forced to share a room in the Sanatorium, however, one is a protestant pastor and the other is a member of the Volkspolizei (the People’s police). Through their distinct ideologies …

Narratives Of Exile: Themes Of Displacement In Seghers, Duras, And Elio, Erin Consla

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines identity, memory, and displacement in the exile narratives of Anna Seghers, Marguerite Duras, and María Luisa Elío. I argue that identity post-exile can be conceptualized as a continuous process of becoming, marked by a kaleidoscope of past, present, and future. Several aesthetic maneuvers such as the use of elements of form, memories of childhood, and palimpsest are shared by the chosen narratives, resulting in similar negotiations with identity. Through analysis of the authors' aesthetic focalizations, it becomes clear that their binary subject positions are modulated by the liminality and contradictions inherent in identity creation after exile. The …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Tragic Fate And History In Thomas Hardy's "The Return Of The Native", Tristan Pageze

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis explores the operation of the tragic in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native by taking as a starting point the formalist approach to the genre of tragedy, before extending its definition to encompass the key concept of tragic conflict. This thesis argues that Hardy’s tragic vision takes for object human history, and especially the effects of new, unveiled knowledge on the human psyche, thus locating the root cause of tragedy in these contingencies. This continuum between individual action and the larger historical causes that shape it is expressed via the narrator’s discourse, and the discrepancy between his …

Polyscopic Spectatorship, Creative Cartography, And Post-Cinematic Refractions In The Age Of Neo-Liberal Travel: An Investigation Of Youtube Travel-Vloggers, Niko T. Doezema

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

One of the most popular forms of travel “literature” consumed today is the travel-vlog. YouTube is awash in these travelers, the most successful of which even make a career out of their travels through monetization of their content, allowing them to pay for traveling by traveling. My project is a three-fold investigation into the nature of this genre, the first two branches of which are genealogical and diagnostic, the third of which is speculative and potentially transformative. My first inquiry examines the historical and generic conditions at the crossroads of travel literature and empire that have led to the present …

Marie De France And The Wife Of Bisclavret: A New Understanding, Katie Despeaux

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

Marie de France’s werewolf lai, Bisclavret, was met with immediate and long-lasting fascination, replication, and criticism. As part of what Caroline Walker Bynum calls “the werewolf renaissance,” the story breaks with traditional understandings of werewolves: Bisclavret is not the villain of the story but presents instead as a sympathetic character, victimized by his wife’s collaboration with another man who steals his clothes and prevents him from regaining his human form.

Modern scholarship generally falls within two opposite camps: those for whom the wife is disloyal to her husband; and those for whom Marie herself was disloyal to her gender. …

Nelly Arcan, Langage De La Honte, Jordon B. Mcconnell

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the role that shame plays as a subversive tool in the works of Québécoise author Nelly Arcan. Dealing with themes such as sexuality, gender, suicide, and resentment, Arcan’s works deal with that which can be deemed “shameful,” and she deliberately speaks the unspeakable. First in constructing an understanding in how a shame-based vocabulary is employed throughout her works, we then study how this shame subverts expectations and adds weight to political questions relevant to the widespread use of electronic media. How does intentionally occupying a role that is shamed within society function …

Pushing At The Seams: French Zines & Bricolage As A Liberatory Act, Shayna M. Davidson

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the contemporary literary value posed by independently produced French fanzines. French fanzines represent a convergence of textual and graphic narratives, echoing la bande dessinée in many senses. I argue that the liberty of form and expression utilized by the fanzine creator permits a more nuanced iteration of life-writing. The circulation of texts amongst informal economies based in social networks suggests that creators are able to explore narratives of self-hood that do not conform to neoliberal market-oriented categories of identity. Furthermore, the influx of digitally stored and distributed French fanzines confounds their traditional categorization as ephemeral text-objects; as …

Intolerable Histories And Imperfect Narratives: Nationhood, Identity, And The Integrity Of Law In Post-Vichy France And Beyond, Kaela S. Holmen

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The principal aim of this thesis project is to examine the socio-legal context of the Vichy regime in World War II France, and to provide an understanding of how that context informed, and continues to inform, the integrity of French nationhood. With Ernest Renan’s oubli serving as a framework for the solidification of nationhood, I will demonstrate that the betrayals to French law and custom that were committed in an attempt to right the wrongs of the Vichy resulted in an imperfect forgetting, and ultimately, a more fragmented national sense of self. I contend that this imperfect oubli resulting from …

Bodies In Shame: Writing Trauma And Affective Unsettlement In Post-Genocide Rwanda Fiction, Cole A. Carvour

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis analyzes Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements and Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda. I argue that both authors write trauma by employing both a dominant realist style and the trauma aesthetic with attention to the embodied experiences of genocide victims and survivors in both styles. In doing so, each author contributes to impeding indifference surrounding the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Furthermore, I assert that one effect of writing trauma is that of affective unsettlement or affective travel, or the registering of psychic and physical shame and other related affective responses in the …

The Translator-Function: Translating Bande-Dessinée For The Anglophone Reader, Ryan C. Gomez

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis focuses on the question of translator roles in literary theory. I characterize these roles between positions that have traditionally been described by literary and philosophical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. By examining the products of translation (French-language bandes-dessinées and their English translations), and considering critical literary and translation theories, I demonstrate the unique position held by translators and their work through the proposal of what I call the translator-function (modeled after Foucault’s author-function). The principal aim of this thesis is to problematize preconceived ideas about translators and to examine the unique position of the …

Narrating Refugee Lives: Political Asylum In 21st Century France, Susmitha Udayan

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of refugees in legal and aesthetic texts. Using the notion of chronotope as a conceptual framework, it studies the use of time and space in various refugee narratives to argue that aesthetic texts about refugees foreground the concept of spatiality to materialize and historicize the refugee condition. These texts, I contend, provide a necessary counternarrative to the depersonalized, dehistoricized representations of refugees encountered in legal texts and media discourses. Comparative analysis of legal and literary texts shows that adventure-time, which dominates legal asylum narratives, contributes to produce coherent, linear, singularized legal asylum stories. Such a narration …

Camp De Thiaroye Ou La Déconstruction Du Mythe Colonial Par Le Truchement De La Langue Française, Maurice Tetne Mr.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The history between France and Africa has been peppered with numerous irregularities and crimes. Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s film Camp de Thiaroye (1988) returned to this painful story of the Thiaroye tragedy. That film chronicles the criminal massacre by the French of returning Senegalese soldiers. The latter, having sacrificed themselves for France during WWII, demanded treatment and compensation equal to their French counterparts. Interestingly, one of the significant details of this film is the multitude of languages and “patois” that the various African soldiers speak. At the same time, the lingua-franca, a kind of “pidgin” called Français-tirailleur, is simultaneously …

The Turkish Spy: A Peripatetic Novel, Alain M. Antoine

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

Beginning its published life in a short Italian version featuring 30 letters in 1684, Letters Writ by a Turkish Spygrew into 102 letters in a French version published in 1686, and between 1687 and 1694 turned into a monumental eight volumes English Edition featuring 632 letters. The hero of the novel, a Muslim Arab spying on Louis XIV’s France for the Ottoman sultan undergoes a transformation by his contact with the Christian world, and his reflections on man, society and God seized the imagination of the public. The novel’s popularity helped its rapid spread over European nations in the …

Parodic Archipelago: Friday, Or, The Other Island, Vendredi Ou La Vie Sauvage And Foe, Marie Bellec

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the concept of parody through three novels, Friday or the Other Island, Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage and Foe, rewriting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I focus more specifically on the character of the island as the metaphor of the process of rewriting, and I argue that the multiple rewrites shape an archipelago. I apply Linda Hutcheon’s critical work A Theory of Parody to show how the island’s paradoxical aspect illustrates the parody’s paradoxical aspect: it is constrained – the island is isolated and the parody is forced to follow a literary format or pattern, …

Cathartic Concentration: Meditation And Altered States In Apuleius' Metamorphoses, Benjamin L. John

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In this thesis, I offer my reading of Apuleius’ novel, the Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass. Modern scholars are divided on whether we should read the novel as a genuine expression of religio-philosophical sentiment or a satire of religious devotion. My goal is to show that these are not mutually exclusive readings, but two positions from which to consider the idea of spiritual transcendence.

The first chapter explores the way that Apuleius uses light imagery to characterize the religious experience of the novel’s protagonist, Lucius, by analyzing similar phenomena in contemporary and modern descriptions of altered states of …

Drama As Dream: Sophoclean Tragedy And The Cult Of Asclepius, Molly C. Mata

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis explores tragic drama as a corresponding ritual to the incubation ritual in the cult of Asclepius and theorizes that this ritual is psychologically cathartic and healing. I argue that in Ajax and Philoctetes, Sophocles marks this cathartic ritual through nosological language, setting, and social context. In my first chapter, I explore Sophocles’ use of the language of madness (mania) and illness (nosos) in Ajax to show the exacerbation of the audience’s psychological state. Next, I show that catharsis is achieved through the negotiation and subsequent burial of Ajax. In my second chapter, I argue that Sophocles uses both …

Negotiation And The Construction Of Intimacy In The Letters Between Fronto And Marcus Aurelius, Sarah C. Keith

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This project analyzes the letters between Marcus Cornelius Fronto and his student Marcus Aurelius as works of literature, rather than merely sites for historical mining. The letters, I argue, contain carefully constructed tropes of rhetoric and feature intentional polish that serve as opportunities for discussion about the virtues of philosophy and rhetoric during the Second Sophistic. Topics of discussions between both parties range between the imagery of sleep, and intimate spaces, like bedrooms, to substantive allusions to Plato’s philosophy and his dialogue Phaedrus. By looking beyond the identification of concrete names and dates to the literary, referential, and personal world …

Lucie Cousturier: The Female Voice And Travel Narratives In Colonial West Africa, Ashley Gushulak

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In this thesis, I analyze Lucie Cousturier’s two major works, Des Inconnus chez eux (1920) and Mes Inconnus chez moi (1925) in which she navigates the discourses of imperialism, viewed as masculine, and of femininity. Through strategies of intimacy, Cousturier establishes her authority as a female travel writer. In her first work, Cousturier sets up an intimate relationship with the tirailleurs sénégalais by teaching them French and becoming a mother-figure to them. At the same time, Cousturier plays a role in France’s colonial agenda by teaching the soldiers French. In her second work, she establishes intimacy by adopting the local …

Music, Politics, And Sociality: Ethnic Tensions And The Performance Of Gikuyu Nationalism, Peter Njagi Mwangi

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines how some selected Gikuyu popular music propagates ethnic tensions in Kenya by promoting Gikuyu nationalism at the expense of Kenyan nationalism. This music derives its themes from the historical period of the Mau Mau armed struggle against British colonists and connects this struggle with everyday experiences of the Gikuyu people. Memory and the performance of everyday life in this music solidifies the Gikuyu community as tied to a common destiny and distances other Kenyan communities from this destiny. The music consolidates Gikuyu ethnic nationalism and authenticates the position of the community as superior and a dominant force …

Medicine Through Comics: Wheels Are Turning On The Road To Healing. Native Americans Through The Lens Of Francophone Graphic Novels., Nathalie C. Bléser

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This work analyzes the evolution of the depiction of Native Americans in Francophone graphic novels from Belgium, Switzerland and France, from the 1930s to our present era. The axis around which the comics are organized is the Lakota Medicine Wheel, which, along with works by N.A. scholars, constitutes the basis of the theoretical framework. In this way, the work is guided by a truly multicultural and interethnic approach. The deliberate choice of a span of more than 80 years wishes to show how such depiction evolved and how its observation can bring healing from the mistreatment and misrepresentation experienced by …

Tierno Monénembo Et L'Écriture De La Saga Sandervalienne: Réhabilitation Mémorielle Et Fracture Coloniale, Stephanie Diane Tsakeu Mazan

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This work examines Olivier de Sanderval’s saga in Tierno Monénembo’s most studied novels Peuls and Le Roi de Kahel (The King of Kahel). The celebration of a colonialist within the novel leads us to argue that, in The King of Kahel by using literary forms and genres like the novel, the epic, the biography, the palimpsest, plagiarism, irony etc., to rehabilitate Olivier de Sanderval’s memory, the author offers the possibility to question the colonial fracture. In the first part we examine Olivier de Sanderval’s evolutionary representation in Monénembo’s texts. First disparaged in Peuls, where the author revisits …

Widerstandsidentitäten: Identitäts- Und Heimatsuche Der Nachfolgegenerationen Türkischer Migranten In Fatih Akins Gegen Die Wand, Feo Aladağs Die Fremde Und Feridun Zaimoğlus Kanak Sprak, Anja Ruxanda Barr

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Fatih Akin’s film Head-On/Gegen die Wand (2004), Feo Aladağ’s film When We Leave/Die Fremde (2010), and Feridun Zaimoğlu’s text Kanak Spraak construct a new Turkish-German identity that is established through resistance to a homogenously imagined culture. With the current influx of immigrants to Germany, the debate about integration, hybridity, and divergence has become more important than ever. The emergence of hybrid migrant identities that are being problematized in Turkish-German movies and texts has shown that issues of belonging and identity caused by multipositionality have become an integral part of Turkish-German narratives. Over time, representations …

Carian Greeks And Greek Scythians: The Hybridity Of Greek And Barbarian Identity In Herodotus’ Histories, Benjamin D. Leach

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In my thesis, I discuss how Herodotus characterizes the similarities and differences between Greek and non-Greek identity. Herodotus provides his readers with a plethora of details about both Greek and non-Greek peoples in his Histories, which has offered scholars plenty of material to use in this topic. I argue that Herodotus purposefully highlights certain aspects that are shared by certain Greek and non-Greek peoples in order to provide a commentary on his own times. The first chapter focuses on the characters Phanes and Artemisia and how uses the same vocabulary to describes these two individuals, despite one being a …

Those That Trespass Against Us: Childhood, Violence, And Memory In The White Ribbon, Joseph Kuster

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines aesthetic representations of childhood and violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I argue that Haneke’s film interrogates notions of the idealized child in the context of German history/the history of the Tätergeneration in order to question the possibility of affixing particular objective truth to historical or cultural narrative. First, I examine and deconstruct culturally accepted representations of the child as a symbol of innocence and purity, and explore how Haneke’s film manipulates and subverts these tropes. I then approach the film using three different theoretical structures: the gaze of the monstrous child in the horror …

Performance Of Gender Social Status: Social Identity Through Clothes, Fanny M. Hamon

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

I focus on the study of the role of the ball gowns in fairy tales, and I argue that Donkey Skin and Cinderella’s civilization process happens through their clothes. I demonstrate that the garments bear considerable historic values in the narratives. The performance they put in place is allowed by the wealth of their dresses.
I apply Butler’s performance theory to show that the performance of the two heroines is the inherent necessity to their social ascent and social recognition. For both heroines, the performance is a strategy to overcome the punitive aspects they underwent in their animal state. The …

The Ethics And Politics Of Love In Postwar France: The Case Of Beauvoir, Camus, And Sartre, Christian Wood

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The Ethics and Politics of Love focuses primarily upon Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre during the period 1935 to 1960, specifically the periods before and after the Second World War (1939 -- 1945), and the Franco-Algerian War (1954 -- 1962). I argue that inquiring into each thinker's theory of love yields crucial and hitherto unexplored insights into their ethical and political theories: "love" thus represents my particular Ariadne's thread to guide us into, and then back outside of their daunting oeuvres and singular lives. I use their documented thoughts on love as an analytical tool with which …

Mémoire Et Identité Dans Les Réécritures Caribéennes : Wide Sargasso Sea Et La Migration Des Coeurs, Camille Charlery

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis will study creole identity in Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), prequel of Jane Eyre, as well as in Maryse Condé's La Migration des Coeurs (1995), a rewriting of Wuthering Heights. I argue that both novels create a new creole identity by conversing with their original texts as well as by going beyond the official definition of creoleness. Using the concepts of obsessive memory and forced forgetfulness, I explore the tension betwee innate and constructed identity. First, I focus on the meaning of creoleness, then, I examine how memory plays a crucial role in the novels through topics …