French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons^™

Fan Art, Jacob Lay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the work of artists like Vincent van Gogh, Donald Baechelor, and Cezanne in their relationship to my work and contemporary painting. Drawing from personal letters, interviews, and essays on these artists, the paper places painting and drawing from the thesis exhibition in a history as well as relates them to current pop culture relics. The paper also includes a process-based analyses of how each painting is made and with what materials.

Édouard Manet’S Defense Of Modernity: Recontextualizing The Cat In Olympia, Rebecca Schiffman

Theses and Dissertations

The black cat in Édouard Manet’s seminal painting, Olympia, has often been relegated as a crude joke or symbol of reprehensible sexuality. This thesis argues that the cat plays a larger role in Manet’s representation of modernism, and functioned as a defense mechanism by the artist against his critics.

Doctors And Saints: Preparing Albert Camus’S The Plague To Address The Dangers Of Christian Nationalism, Christopher J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

My project is focused on identifying and responding to Christian nationalism in United States politics by utilizing Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. The Plague found heightened popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting legacy points to what should be long-term prominence in the public eye. With its popularity and anti-fascist content, The Plague is an appropriate text to utilize for addressing America’s Christian nationalism. My paper functions with a foundation on the work of Kenneth Burke, particularly his focus on literature’s utility as equipment for living.

I use my project to suggest that The Plague is not in an …

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …

L'Impuissance De La Représentation : Sur La Possibilité De La Représentation Du Terrorisme, Youtian Sun

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I attempt to explore the possibility of representing terrorism in literature by analyzing four literary works: Paris (1898), La Condition Humaine (1933), Nada (1973), and Khalil (2018). These four works depict four different stages of the development of terrorism from the late 19th century to the 21st century. I will use these literary works to analyze the relationship between terrorism and capitalist modernity.

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Pratiquer Ou Incarner La Vertu? L'Agentivité Des Femmes Chez Marie De France Et Christine De Pizan, Kathe Blydenburgh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the treatment of women in Medieval literature as active agents in their roles of upholding the virtues of the societies in which they live. This study focuses on works written by the female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan.

The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris

Theses and Dissertations

Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …

Translating Slavery As Told To My Daughter, Victoria L.A. Carvelli

Theses and Dissertations

I am translating an excerpt of the work L’esclavage raconté à ma fille, by the French Guianese politician Christiane Taubira. A former Minister of Justice of France, Taubira is famous for her legislative work in recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity and instituting national educational efforts on the subject. The book is an exposition of the history of slavery, set in a storytelling, question-and-answer style, which has the merit of bringing a conversational and accessible aspect to a difficult topic.

I chose this work at the recommendation of one of my professors, and when I was unable to find …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

De La Captivité À La Mobilité : Représentations Littéraires De La Migration Féminine De L’Afrique Francophone Vers La France, Rokhaya Aballa Dieng

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the differences between works by and about francophone women migrants at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century as compared to the treatment of migration by women from francophone Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, in order to analyze how slavery is connected to migration by women. The thesis also looks at what the differences are in the literary representations of women migrants by writers from francophone Africa and the perspective on migration presented by a French woman writer, Claire de …

Violence, Transcendence And Spectacle In The Age Of Social Media: #Jesuischarlie Demonstrations And Hollande's Speech After The 2015 Terrorist Attacks, Barbara Luisa Desoto

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the reactions — both in real life and on social media — to two terrorist attacks in Paris: satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the Bataclan shooting in November 2015. Using Richard Sennett's Fall of Public Man and Antonin Artaud's Le théâtre et son double to explore these reactions as theater, this approach reveals the religious nature of supposedly secular reactions to religious extremism.

The Emergence, Forgetting And Re-Writing Of May ’68, Allison Dorman

Theses and Dissertations

The time period of May 1968 in France has become an important cultural moment in French history and is often present in current political debates. I propose that the critiques of French society expressed during the events of May and June 1968 were present before that time and can be seen in literature and creative expression of the time period, as in the film Week-end, by Jean-Luc Godard, and the play Yes, peut-être, by Marguerite Duras. Godard and Duras express a deep discontent with the society in which they live and their creations imagine the consequences of Western ideals taken …

Laurent Binet's Hhhh: Historiographic Metafiction In Contemporary French Literature About World War Ii, Cailee S. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

In the last two decades, a considerable number of contemporary French authors have employed metafiction—a narrative mode in which texts themselves purposefully call attention to the fact that they are fiction—when writing novels which attempt to grapple with traumatic events, namely World War II and the Holocaust. In attempting to understand this popular, but controversial literary phenomenon—called historiographic metafiction—, this thesis contextually analyzes Laurent Binet's Himmler's Him heisst Heydrich (2010), a contemporary French novel about the assassination of real-life Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. This thesis also compares Binet's text to two other contemporary French historiographic metafictional novels about World War …

Redefining Place Through The Mazarinades: The Pont-Neuf And The Place Royale, Nathan Kent Jellen

Theses and Dissertations

In 1649, during the Fronde Parlementaire (1648-1650), Paris was teetering between opposing political camps that were trying to seize control of the city. The city's bourgeois parliament, in open rebellion to the political policies of King Louis XIV's Chief Minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, was raising an army and threatening to oust the Italian imposter. With the rise in violence within the city limits, Parisian printers and booksellers began circulating political propaganda in the form of booklets, mini-plays, brochures, and pamphlets that came to be known as mazarinades. Because these mazarinades—which took their name from the very man they were either …

La Littérature Fantastique Contemporaine : Une Quête Identitaire, Jared Scott Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Habituellement, quand on pense à la littérature fantastique, on pense à un genre limité au dix-neuvième siècle. Néanmoins, certaines œuvres contemporaines semblent également correspondre à ce genre, et ceci malgré les théories traditionnelles des critiques littéraires qui excluraient cette possibilité. En soutenant les appels récents pour une définition du genre plus inclusive, on peut aborder la question d’un fantastique contemporain dans la littérature française. Pour trouver ce nouveau fantastique, il suffit de regarder les œuvres d’Éric Fottorino et Didier Van Cauwelaert. Leurs romans montrent une continuité du genre traditionnel, ce qui est évident quand on étudie les similarités de thèmes …

Heteroglossia And Polyphony In Le Chat Du Rabbin By Joann Sfar, Brian Boomhower

Theses and Dissertations

According to Will Eisner, “comics communicate in a ‘language’ that relies on a visual experience common to both creator and audience. Modern readers can be expected to have an easy understanding of the image-word mix and the traditional deciphering of text. Comics can be ‘read’ in a wider sense than that term is commonly applied” (Eisner, 1). In this research, I examine Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia and polyphony within Joann Sfar’s Le Chat du Rabbin (2002-2006). By taking a closer look at ‘language’ in Le Chat du Rabbin, both textually and visually, I apply Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia and visual …

Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the utility of the novels, short stories, critical writing, and generically indistinct work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Ligotti in developing a critique of the contemporary manifestations of liberal humanist social, economic, and political subjectivities. To this end, the concurrence of formal fragmentation and sublime aesthetics in early Gothic fiction models the manner in which narrative structures can appropriate structural tropes of dominant institutions, critically reflecting ideological fracture. Read according to the assemblative approach outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, these authors serve as a productive and incisive response to the hegemony of capitalist territorialization with …

Marriage And The City: Fatal Displacement In La Maison Du Chat-Qui-Pelote, Laurel Cummins

Theses and Dissertations

The following is a meta-commentary of the article, “Marriage and the City: Fatal Displacement in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote,” co-authored by Dr. Anca Mitroi Sprenger and myself, Laurel Cummins. The article will soon be submitted for publication, and this commentary contains an annotated bibliography of all our primary and secondary sources as well as an account of the origin of the argument and the process of writing the article. Our article is based upon an analysis of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, a story authored by Honoré de Balzac within his seminal collection La Comédie humaine. In the …

The Multidimensional Quality Metric (Mqm) Framework: A New Framework For Translation Quality Assessment, Valerie Ruth Mariana

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a supplement to the article entitled “The Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) Framework: A New Framework for Translation Quality Assessment”, which has been acepted for publication in the upcoming January volume of JoSTrans, the Journal of Specialized Translation. The article is a coauthored project between Dr. Alan K. Melby, Dr. Troy Cox and myself. In this document you will find a preface describing the process of writing the article, an annotated bibliography of sources consulted in my research, a summary of what I learned, and a conclusion that considers the future avenues opened up by this research. Our …

Decanting The Rabelaisian Casks: Democratizing Neoplatonic Poetic Fury In Baudelaire's “L’Âme Du Vin”, Kristen Ballieu

Theses and Dissertations

The following document is a meta-commentary on the article "Decanting the Rabelaisian Casks: Democratizing Neoplatonic Poetic Fury in Baudelaire's 'L’âme du vin'," co-authored by Dr. Robert J. Hudson and myself, which will soon be submitted for publication. It contains an annotated bibliography of all our primary and secondary sources and an account of the genesis of the argument and the writing of the article. Our article is based upon an analysis of "‘L’âme du vin," the threshold poem of "Le Vin," the central section of Charles Baudelaire's celebrated volume Les Fleurs du Mal. As we demonstrate, previous scholarship on this …

Remembering The Haitian Revolution Through French Texts: Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal And Alphonse De Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture, Irene Joyce Kim Stone

Theses and Dissertations

The Haitian Revolution was the first successful slave revolt in history. And even though Haiti declared independence from France in 1804, most French civilization textbooks do not include this important event. From an economic standpoint, France depended on its imports from Saint-Domingue (Haiti's pre-revolutionary name); and from a philosophical standpoint, the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue originated from ideas that came from French philosophers preaching the Rights of Man. Studying the Haitian Revolution within the context of the French Revolution provides a perspective that highlights the complex relationship between France and its colonies as well as religion's displaced role after 1789. …

From Theory To Practice: Translating Ying Chen's Les Lettres Chinoises, Sunny Ann Hendry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Ying Chen's Les Lettres Chinoises through the lenses of literary translation, migrant writing and epistolary genres, as well as through critical theory of Chen's poetics in order to inform a translation of said novel from French into English. This theoretical groundwork is accompanied by analysis of the process of the translation, including specifications, methods used, and justifications for translation decisions. Les Lettres Chinoises is Ying Chen's second novel, written in French rather than her native Chinese language. Spanning a fifty-seven letter exchange between Shanghai and Montreal, Chen's choice to write in language other than her first, as …

"Une Transformation Profonde": Decay And Beauty In Cléo From 5 To 7, Susan J. Garver

Theses and Dissertations

Cléo from 5 to 7 is perhaps the most famous work of influential French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who is often called the "Grande Dame of the New Wave". The depth of symbolism, the richness of imagery, the beginnings of cinécriture (a Varda-ism describing cinema as a form of writing that uses all the tools available to a filmmaker, not just words), and the charm of the story have guaranteed Cléo's popularity with scholars and audiences alike. Current scholarship has tended to focus on a few aspects of Cléo, including her role as a flâneuse, the use of …

Governing Gorée: France In West Africa Following The Seven Years' War, Andrew G. Skabelund

Theses and Dissertations

In 1763, France had just suffered a devastating loss to the British in the Seven Years' War. In almost an instant, France's claims to West Africa shrank to the tiny island of Gorée off the coast of Senegal and a few trading posts on the mainland. This drastic reversal of fortunes forced France to reevaluate its place in the world and rethink its overall imperial objectives and colonial strategies, and in an effort to regroup, the French Empire sent a new governor, Pierre François Guillaume Poncet de la Rivière, on a mission to regain its foothold in West Africa. From …

Knightly Bird Vows: A Case Study In Late Medieval Courtly Culture, Liel Y. Boyce

Theses and Dissertations

In the late Middle Ages, there was a series of instances wherein knights vowed upon birds. Two of these, the first and the last, are historical events: The Feast of the Swans with Edward I in England on 22 May 1306 and the Feast of the Pheasant with Philip the Good in the duchy of Burgundy on 17 February 1454. Edward I held the Feast of the Swans as part of his son's dubbing ceremony, including the entire court taking vows on two swans. The Feast of the Pheasant was an elaborate banquet that Philip the Good used to gather …

Redemption In The Life And Work Of Camille Claudel, Haleigh Heaps Burgon

Theses and Dissertations

Camille Claudel is a sculptor who has traditionally been approached in terms of her relationship to Rodin and his influence on her work. Indeed, the two shared a passionate relationship and there are certainly similarities between the two sculptors' work which provide for fascinating analyses. However, one of the acknowledged but previously unexplored speculations on Claudel's art suggests that it involves a measure of veiled spirituality sealed within its stone. It is precisely this sacred element within her sculptures that offers viewers an opportunity to experience transcendence while identifying with fundamental themes. Furthermore, Claudel created her figures as a method …

A Comparative Analysis Of Text Usage And Composition In Goscinny's Le Petit Nicolas, Goscinny's Astérix, And Albert Uderzo's Astérix, Dennis Scott Meyer

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the textual composition of René Goscinny’s Astérix and Le petit Nicolas, demonstrating how they differ and why. Taking a statistical look at the comparative qualities of each series of works, the structural differences and similarities in language use in these two series and their respective media are highlighted and compared. Though one might expect more complicated language use in traditional text by virtue of its format, analysis of average word length, average sentence length, lexical diversity, the prevalence of specific forms (the passé composé, possessive pronouns, etc.), and preferred collocations …

Maurice Scève, Lyonnais: Identité Régionale, Topographie Urbaine Et Lyrisme Dans La Délie, Elise Agathe Alice Danguy

Theses and Dissertations

Ce document est une méta-narration de l‘article « Maurice Scève, Lyonnais: Identité régionale, topographie urbaine et lyrisme dans la Délie » écrit par Professeur Robert J. Hudson et moi-même, et que nous espérons voir publier d‘ici peu. Il contient une bibliographie annotée de toutes les sources primaires et secondaires consultées, d‘un compte rendu du processus d‘écriture de l‘article ainsi que l‘analyse de plusieurs dizains nécessaires pour soutenir l‘argument principal de l‘article. Notre article traite la façon dont Maurice Scève, un poète lyonnais du 16e siècle, utilise la topographie lyonnaise afin de se définir comme Lyon mais aussi comme auteur …

The War Without A Name: The Use Of Propaganda In The Decolonization War Of Algeria, Benjamin J. Sparks

Theses and Dissertations

The Algerian war for independence, 1954-1962, also known as the War Without a Name due to its lack of recognition as a war by the French government, remains an indelible scar on the face of France. The Algerian war represents one of the most critical moments in modern French history since the French Revolution (Le Sueur 256), putting into question the motto of the French republic, "liberté, égalité, fraternité". This thesis will show that although the French won the war militarily they lost the war of ideas, that of propaganda and persuasion. Thus, this thesis will demonstrate that propaganda by …