Beyond Surrealism: The Developing Keyboard Style Of André Souris, Melanie T. Mallard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

André Souris (1899-1970) is perhaps best known as a musical contributor to the Belgian surrealist group founded by Paul Nougé, but he assumed many roles throughout his life, including composer, writer, director, and promoter of modern music. His various interests influenced the style of his compositions, which remain largely unpublished and have received little scholarly attention beyond researchers of surrealism. Through this survey of many of Souris’ works for keyboard, I attempt to lay the groundwork for further discussion about Souris’ musical contributions not only through the lens of surrealism but also throughout his compositional career. This descriptive analysis of …

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Gendered Violence And The Family: An Analysis Of The 14th-Century Epic "Lion De Bourges", Ashley Paige Holt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the first to focus on gender roles within the fourteenth-century French epic Lion de Bourges and the first work to feature extensive translations into English of this medieval text. Using the cyclical dismemberment and reunification of the Bourges family as a lens, it brings into focus the various members of the family, their relationships, and the larger thematic questions about family and society put forward by the poet. Chapter one interrogates the notion of the king as a national father figure as well as the spread of injury and violence from the father/king to the members of …

Writing Exclusionary Spaces: Myths, Tropes, And Stereotypes Surrounding The Roma In 19th- And 20th-Century French Literature, Jade Scottie Basford

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The “gypsy” figure has been popular in popular culture for hundreds of years – certainly since the 1600s. The figure can embody wanderlust, difference, bold sexuality, freedom, danger, and criminality. In 19th-century France, the figure’s trendiness was apparent in literature. Writers such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charles Nodier, and Prosper Mérimée profited from using these figures in writing. Most criticism of these works focuses on the origins of the tales or critical analyses of the narratives themselves. This research expands upon the extant scholarship to develop an overview of the usage of this figure as it moved throughout the …

Representations Of Female Agency In Medieval French Literature, Mathilde Pointiere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the different ways authors portray female agency in medieval French literature. In focusing on three medieval writers, Chrétien de Troyes, Heldris de Cornouailles and Christine de Pizan, I contend that female agency arises as a result of trauma or crisis. I define my terms as follows: agency is the capacity and intention of performing actions on one’s own behalf. For a fictional character to have agency, therefore, she must be portrayed as having a sense of control and of being the owner of the action she executes. Additionally, I argue that as women characters assume their agency, …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

La Poétique Du Dépassement Dans Les Littératures D'Expression Française Des Antilles Et De L'Océan Indien, Jeanne Jegousso

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project argues for a new critical approach to contemporary Caribbean and Oceanic literatures through a poetics of dépassement. A key concept to understanding the work of the Martinican theorist and author Édouard Glissant as a whole, dépassement generally designates, first, a dialectical process in literature that Glissant uses to analyze texts in order to portray a global and universal poetical knowledge. Secondly, dépassementimplies transcending literary genres and historical approaches to the point that formal and conventional constraints are no longer pertinent. Through a study dedicated to the original interpretations of literature in Glissant’s early work (1953-1969), which …

The Child Ethnographer In The Field: Examples From English, Spanish, And French Caribbean Literature, Emily Ann O'Dell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I consider the child to be an ethnographer in works of fiction and autofiction from the Caribbean islands. Through their liminality as culturally and developmentally betwixt or between, their cultural malleability, their linguistic fluidity, and their curiosity, the child becomes a "native" ethnographer who is capable of translating the culture (both linguistically and culturally) for the reader in order to establish understandings of Caribbean cultures. This is accomplished through the creation of hybridized or creolized texts that have many of the same characteristics as postmodern ethnographies.

In the English Caribbean Xuela provides an ethnographic perspective of Dominican …

"Votre Tres Humble & Obeissante Soeur Et Seruante" L'Usage Des Conventions Orthographiques Nouvelles Dans Les Éloges Funèbres Monastiques Écrits Par Les Ursulines De France Et De Nouvelle-France Entre Le Xviie Et Le Xixe Siècle, Natacha Amandine Jeudy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

In France, the 17^th century was a crucial period for the development of written French. New spelling rules were implemented but older ones were still in favor. When secular and religious elites established themselves in colonial Nouvelle France, (i.e., Canada and the United States), they brought in this set of old and more modern conventions.

Rare are the studies consecrated on hand-written French in the 17th century. Although a few researchers have looked at the literature produced by some famous French sisters, no one has ever studied their orthography. The originality of this dissertation arises from its …

Le Roman Policier Francophone : Entre Esthétique Et Politiques Du Genre En Afrique Et En Haïti, Lise Madeleine Mba Ekani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “Recasting Crime Fiction: The Francophone African and Haitian Crime Novel between Aesthetics and Politics”, investigates the social and literary meanings of the concept of politics as represented in African and Haitian crime novels. In this work, selected novels were examined considering their cultural, regional and linguistic particularities, as well as their perspectives on social criticism and politics. Drawing from fields such as sociocritical theory, philosophy, and history, this work allows for a more complex exploration of popular cultural productions while calling into question the literary genres. Consequently, it provides the opportunity to question cultural productions as an ideological …

In The Blood: Repressing Reproduction In The French Convent From Sanguinity To Sexuality, John Stanley Patin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines the French convent as a convergent point of evolving blood myths in the eighteenth century. According to Michel Foucault, as a society transitions from sovereign power to more liberal forms of government, the target of how power is enforced shifts as well: from the punishment of individuals who pose a threat to the crown to the regulation of perceived “deviants” who threaten the health and stability of the nation’s population. As the eighteenth century was a time of radical social change, the era encapsulates a prime moment for the study of continuities and discontinuities of these various …

Development Of A Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, And Cosmopolitan Lines Of Inquiry To Reveal The Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, And Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Ciamparella

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach …

Chambres Noires, Champ De Bataille : Analyse Des Rapports Interraciaux Dans La Chambre À Coucher Dans Les Romans Comment Faire L’Amour Avec Un Nègre Sans Se Fatiguer De Dany Laferrière, La Fin D’Un Primitif De Chester Himes, African Gigolo De Simon Njami, L’Impasse De Daniel Biyaoula Et Le Film Les Princes Noirs De Saint-Germain-Des-Près De Ben Diogaye Beye, Fabienne Marie-Dominique Kanor

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The slave ship’s hold is the only place Black people put in chains can appropriate. There is no other place they can claim as their own since they know nothing of the New World to which they are being deported by force. A space where the memory of the native land quickly deteriorates, the hold becomes the main “home” with which the uprooted captives can identify. Therefore, it becomes a “lieu de mémoire”, a place that keeps traumatizing the descendants of people enslaved, to the point that it poisons the most intimate space of all: the bedroom. This dissertation is …

She Must Be Crazy: Alternative Realities In Contemporary Francophone Literature, Emily Barclay Spriggs, Emily Barclay Spriggs

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Globally and historically, madness appears as a prominent socio-medical concern that also occupies a significant space in literary tradition. There has been an increase in the number of scholars who study madness and literature in postcolonial works. However, the predominant view and treatment of madness – both socially and medically – adheres to the European, white male construct that has informed a more or less universal regard of those who suffer from mental woes: they are deranged, sick, ill. This poses a problem for postcolonial works when we consider the sexist and racist implications in psychology that were enhanced through …

A Case Study: The Attitudes Of A Teaching Assistant Of French Toward Instructional Technology, Farida Emelia Ngandu Tshiebue

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Technology has shaped the personal experiences of Teaching Assistants (TAs) of French at the collegiate level in the United States (US), what they feel about the technology tools that are accessible in their work environment, and how they use these tools in their practice of teaching. Yet, there is limited research on the specific topic of the attitudes of TAs of French toward the instructional technologies that are available to them. This study sought to investigate the attitudes of a singular TA of French at a southern US university toward instructional technology (IT) by exploring the dynamics of IT use …

Folie Et Stratégies D'Évasion Dans Les Romans Postcoloniaux Au Maghreb (Maroc-Algérie) Et À L'Île Maurice, Fouzilla Saady

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation " Folie et stratégies d'évasion dans les romans postcoloniaux au Maghreb (Maroc-Algérie) et à l'Île Maurice." argues that madness is a universal theme in the postcolonial context by Maghrebian and Mauritian women authors such as Nadia Chafik, Leïla Marouane, Nina Bouraoui, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah, Marie-Thérèse Humbert. We include Tahar Ben Jelloun, Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio because of their approach to gender, feminine and masculine.

This research is not a question of making a psychoanalytic study of madness, but of a literary analysis of this theme in the texts of our corpus. We focus on …

Producing "Fabulous": Commodification And Ethnicity In Hair Braiding Salons, Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women wearing fabulous braids are a striking feature of the Afro-diasporic cultural landscape. However, the braiders and salon owners who enable this aesthetic engineering are seldom acknowledged. This dissertation investigates the experience and role of Caribbean and West and Central African women in the hair braiding industry, a rapidly growing business in the U.S. I address the complexity of these women’s multiple social roles and the multiple consciousness (King, 1988) associated with their demographic characteristics (color, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and immigrant status). The commonalities between the braiders and their mostly African American customers contrast vividly with their perception of …

Francolouisianais In The 21st Century: Redrawing Identity Lines In A Community Experiencing Language Shift, Marguerite L. Perkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The francophonie of south Louisiana today is characterized by a great deal of diversity - in terms of ethnicity, language practices, cultural practices, geography, and experience. The academic literature does not always reflect this diversity, however. Some ethnic groups are overshadowed by others in academic study, and the lines between them are often uncritically blurred. Discussions of language shift are regularly mired in assumptions of individuals’ complete linguistic and cultural assimilation based solely on their native use of English.

In this dissertation, I seek to problematize traditional accounts of assimilation and collective ethnic identity by highlighting the ways in which …

Nationalisme Et Littérature Francophone Au Maroc: Genèse D'Une Littérature Indépendante, Nadia Miskowiec

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Morocco was under French protectorate between 1912 and 1956 when it gained its independence. This colonization left traces in literature, notably the beginnings of a Moroccan literature written in French. However, while written in French these works include specifically Moroccan features that reflect the diversity and complexity of that nation. I argue that the works written by Moroccan authors such as Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Leftah, Ahmed Sefrioui and Tahar Ben Jelloun, post-independence, have significantly contributed to building a decolonized identity for Moroccans. By focusing on the literary tools deployed by these authors the research highlights aspects …

Colonial, Anticolonial, And Postcolonial Myth And Memory In The French-Algerian Narratives Of Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, And Assia Djebar 1942-1999, Gina Marie Breen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Algeria exemplifies a unique case of colonial domination, and of the problems that the colonial system generates. 132 years of colonial rule and settlement led to one of the bloodiest and most difficult battles of decolonization fought in the twentieth century. After eight years of war (1954-1962), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, Algeria became independent. As the postcolonial society abandoned the French language in an effort to promote Algerian nationalism and create and Arab-Algerian identity, Algeria entered another violent civil war in the 1990s. Thus today, more than fifty years after Algeria gained independence, and twenty years …

La Philosophie Poétique D'Édouard Glissant, Un Monisme Vitaliste, David Llorca

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) is a world famous poet and novelist from French Island Martinique who, following the footsteps of Aimé Césaire, tried to heal the traumatic disruption and resolve the identity crisis of Creole people after the abominations of slavery and colonization by poetic sublimation and engaged thoughts. How is Glissant a philosopher? How does he articu-late poetry and philosophy together? What does he understand by “Relation”, why is it central in his thought and how does the articulation of all his concepts around it make a philosophical en-semble? How original and cohesive is this ensemble? Also, as we know …

The Mnemonic Maid: Joan Of Arc In Public Memory, Tara Beth Smithson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between Joan of Arc, postcolonial identity, and public memory. Since her repopularization in the nineteenth century, Joan of Arc has become one of the most emblematic figures of French history. Commemorated in public statuary, celebrated by writers, and championed by politicians, la Pucelle’s story is tantamount to national myth. While Joan of Arc’s centrality to France’s iconic imagining of itself during the spread of its empire has received much critical attention, her postcolonial afterlife remains understudied. This project offers a counterpoint to the prevailing assumption that Joan of Arc has few implications for postcolonial studies …

The Plagues Of Colonialism: Representations Of Suffering In The Colonial And Postcolonial Francophone Algerian Novel From 1950-1966, Benjamin Jack Sparks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The indigenous Francophone Algerian novel dates from the early 1950s and since then has been a political manifestation of uneasiness. The anticolonial undertones of this literature demonstrate the sufferings and harsh realities of life under an oppressive colonial regime; meanwhile the postcolonial novel continues the representation of this suffering through the residual effects of colonialism and the impact of the bloody decolonization war. This dissertation contributes to the discourse regarding suffering as a result of French colonial oppression in light of François Hollande’s official recognition of the trauma of colonialism and the acceptance of the events from 1954-1962 as a …

Metamorphoses Of The Pygmalion Myth In French Literature 1771 – 1886, Carrie L. O'Connor

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Writers have long explored and attempted to portray the visual artist’s challenge of creating the ideal in the real world through art. My thesis asserts that the Pygmalion myth, originally told in written form in Ovid’s 8 A.D. Metamorphoses, is the quintessential model to explore the changing, and sometimes problematic, relationships between the artist, the creation, and the creative process. The three main characters in the Pygmalion myth – the sculptor, the sculpture, and the divine intervention – each appear, albeit in different manifestations, in its later adaptations. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in French literature, authors explored …

L'Essentiel Ou Lagniappe: The Ideology Of French Revitalization In Louisiana, Albert Camp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Louisiana’s French revitalization movement has received millions of dollars in taxpayer funding through its various initiatives such as music and cultural festivals, public school French immersion programs, and academic exchange programs, among others. Over forty years ago, the state of Louisiana created CODOFIL, a government agency dedicated to the promotion of Francophone language and culture in Louisiana, yet the number of Francophones in the state has continued to decline at an alarming rate according to the most reliable data available. My study investigates the ideology and demographics of those involved in French education programs in Louisiana’s public schools. Who decides …

Avis De Recherche : Valentine Penrose, Œuvre Et Vie D'Une Artiste Surréaliste, Séverine Aline Orban

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

"Avis de Recherche: Valentine Penrose, vie et œuvre d’une artiste surréaliste" presents a new appreciation of the work of French artist, poet and novelist Valentine Penrose associated with the Surrealist Movement. This research offers the first detailed and accurate version of Valentine Penrose’s biography, which shows her relationship with artists and writers of her time, and her engagement during the Spanish Civil War and WWII. It compiles and publishes for the first time all her unpublished and ‘forgotten’ works with accompanying analyses for each piece. It demonstrates through the recording of her life and the exploration of her poetry how …

Bande Dessinée Récit De Voyage: Shifting History, Semiotics, Authorship, And Representation In Autobiographical Francophone Comics Travel Narratives, Brandon Matthew Thomas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This work classifies and critiques several aspects of Francophone travel narratives in the comics medium according to four parameters. First, this analysis identifies a history of the usage of 'travel' as a theme, as an integral character, and as a narrative construct. Second, this project addresses the history of semiotic approaches to Francophone comics to the present day as well as demonstrates a few semiotic approaches that have had considerable attention and some that critics have not as yet exploited sufficiently. I use the poetic term of 'allusion' in comics travel narratives in the creation of another semiotic layer that …

Melancholic Epistolarity : Letters And Traumatic Exile In The Novels Of Three Francophone Women, Rosemary Harrington Courville

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In her 1982 groundbreaking work on the epistolary form in novels, Janet Gurkin Altman gives a working definition of epistolarity which will be a guiding concept for this project; she defines it simply as: “the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning…” (Altman 4). Of course, to create meaning is a complicated endeavor. How does one create meaning from the letter’s formal properties? The contemporary authors who engage with epistolarity do so on several levels from the thematic to the structural. From novels that have several characters engaging in letter dialogues to one-sided exchanges that bear more resemblance …

Un Cadjin Qui Dzit Bon Dieu! : Assibilation And Affrication In Three Generations Of Cajun Male Speakers, Aaron Emmitte

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

More often than not, the linguistic research of Cajun French rests primarily at the morphological and syntactic level or focuses on aspects of culture and identity. It was thus my goal here to examine Cajun French at the phonological level. More specifically, I examined two phonological phenomena in Cajun French: assibilation and affrication. Both of these features may result when the dental consonants /t/ and /d/ precede either of the high vowels /i/ and /y/. Under these constraints, therefore, words such as petit (“small”) and dire (“to say”) are pronounced as [pitsi] and [dzir] when assibilated and [pitʃi] and [dʒir] …

The Common Struggle: Locating The International Connections Of National Spaces Of Conflict In The Francophone World, Mark Huntsman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In their 2007 manifesto, Quand les murs tombent: l’identit&236; nationale hors-la-loi, &200;douard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau propose that the nation-state is a stumbling block to global solidarity as it emphasizes cultural division. In order to achieve international community across borders, people must find common bonds that link them across traditional lines of conflict. My thesis applies this notion within the context of la Francophonie, an organization that has struggled with its goal of cultural rapprochement as its member nations continue to perceive each other as foreign entities rather than as like components of a larger community. I assert that la …