French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

A Comparative Critique Of Masculine Domination In Madame Bovary (1856) And Gemma Bovery (1999), Aqeela Hamarthya Czecheska Humayra, Diah Kartini Lasman

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how social construction influences the representation of female autonomy through the transition of medium and temporal context. Its primary focus is to compare the mechanisms of masculine domination in Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary (1856) with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel adaptation Gemma Bovery (1999). Utilizing Hutcheon’s adaptation theory (2013) and de Beauvoir’s existential feminism (1949), complemented by Freytag’s dramatic structure analysis (1900) as the main framework, this research proceeds from the premise that the transposition from text to visual medium has significant implications for changes in narrative strategies and plot. This study highlights the differing manifestations …

Performance Arteries: From The Street To The Salon, Zoella Lin

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis concerns itself with navigating what it means to build community during a time of uncertainty. Specifically, it is an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry in Les Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris alongside his figure of the flâneur as a way to understand the aporia of the modern world (modernity) as a way to inform how instances of connection can occur. The first chapter suggests that a close reading of Baudelaire's poetry gives us insight into what it means to live in this present moment by looking at how Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur navigated the rapidly changing world of …

An Absolute Manner Of Seeing: Flaubert, 1848, And The Development Of Modernist Style, Nicholas Olson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as a key work in the emergence of literary Modernism from the tradition of Realism. I begin by exploring the intellectual background of Realism in the works of Honoré de Balzac and the ties between this aesthetic theory and the theory of representative government: here I discuss the work of François Guizot, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, J.W. Goethe, and Walter Scott as well as later thinkers like György Lukács, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. From this, I demonstrate a commonly held theory of the social as a discreet totality, which makes …

On Translating Jean Giono’S “Possession Des Richesses”, Christopher J. Monier

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

Japanese-English Translation:「翻訳について」、岸田國士著、一九三五年一月作 The Question Concerning Translation, By Kishida Kunio (Penned January 1935), Translated By Christopher Southward, November 2024, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Japanese translator, essayist and dramatist Kishida Kunio (1890-1954) on the craft of translation with an emphasis on French literature and French - Japanese translation

Introduction To The Special Issue On "J.R.R. Tolkien And Medieval Poets", Jane Beal Phd

Journal of Tolkien Research

This is an “Introduction” by Dr. Jane Beal to the Special Issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research on the theme of “J.R.R. Tolkien and Medieval Poets” in honor of Richard C. West.

It begins with an overview of previous scholarly work on the intersections of medieval poetry with Tolkien’s literary corpus. It explains the process of creating this special issue, which is a festschrift in West’s honor, and it gives an overview of the contents of each of the seven academic articles included in it by contributors Dr. Anna Smol, Dr. Christopher Vaccaro, Dr. Kristine Larsen, Dr. Deidre Dawson, …

Desire As A Framework For Adaptation: Examining Aku No Hana As An Unconventional Adaptation Of Les Fleurs Du Mal, Zoe Dalley

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

In this project, I began by arguing that the 2009 to 2014 manga series Aku No Hana by author and artist Shūzō Oshimi should be considered an unconventional adaptation of the 19th century collection of poems Les Fleurs Du Mal by French poet Charles Baudelaire. I then turned my analysis to the practice of adaptation more broadly, using desire, a central theme to both of my chosen primary texts, as my lens through which I examined some of the central complexities and paradoxes inherent to adaptation, such as the simultaneous expectation of textual faith and a new authorial vision. I …

When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

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 …

Beauvoir, “French” Feminisms, And “Translation Work:” A Roundtable Conversation, Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book …

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 …

Figures Of Radical Absence: Blanks And Voids In Theory, Literature, And The Arts, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

Discussing Yasmina Khadra’S Novel The Sirens Of Baghdad In The Upper Secondary Classroom To Promote Intercultural Learning, Karl Ågerup

Essays in Education

Based on interviews with four teachers who engaged in discussions about Yasmina Khadra's novel The Sirens of Baghdad with a total of 92 students, this article explores the potential of using fictional narratives to achieve Global Citizenship-related goals in upper secondary education. The novel, which portrays the journey of a young aspiring Al Qaeda terrorist in Iraq, emerged as a response to the increasing need in the Western world to mitigate intercultural tensions following the September 11 attacks. The article addresses the novel's capacity to promote intercultural understanding while acknowledging practical challenges such as intense emotions in the classroom, potential …

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 …

Re-Presenting The Un-Presentable: Annie Ernaux’S "L’Évènement" And Cristian Mungiu’S "4 Months, 3 Weeks, And Two Days", Victoria Tomasulo

Publications and Research

Situating Annie Ernaux’s L’évènement and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in a reproductive justice framework, I argue that both the memoir and the film contribute to working-class historiographies by documenting backstreet abortion in times and places where it was heavily criminalized: 1960s France and Communist Romania. Committed to a working-class aesthetic with roots in neorealism, Ernaux and Mungiu focus singularly on an event once deemed unrepresentable in literature and cinema. Drawing upon the distinction made between empathy and “rational compassion” made by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy (2016), as well as from Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond …

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …

Sin Without Absolution: A Critical And Comparative Analysis Of Select Works By Albert Camus, Will Hodges

Honors College Theses

The Fall by Albert Camus, published in 1956, is cryptic and easily misunderstood. On first reading, it can appear to be a condemnation of modern man, a declaration that all have sinned and there is no divine absolution. However, this bleak misreading is deceptive because The Fall is not a condemnation; it is a warning. It does not condemn modern man as he is, but rather as what he could become if he succumbs to living in bad faith, a cautionary tale that resonates today. Camus presents the same message through his philosophy of revolt in The Plague and The …

“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay identifies an early modern aesthetic that mobilizes the mundane to make a point about the world or the grandiose. Through a close reading of the poetry in the travelogues of the 17th-century Ottoman Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), this essay identifies, theorizes, and historicizes early modern Arabic circumstantial verse—what the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé calls vers de circonstance. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” this essay shows how the poetry in Nābulusī’s travelogues fits within, and sometimes advances, their linear narrative. If poetry is expected to transcend the chronotope in which …

Pour Une Littérature Critique, Warren Motte

Zea E-Books Collection

Ce livre prend comme objet la littérature critique, c'est-à-dire, des ouvrages conçus dans un esprit critique, qui invitent leurs lectrices et lecteurs—soit de façon ouverte, soit de façon couverte, subtile et nuancée—à s'engager avec la textualité de manière critique. Cette dynamique, suspendue entre production et réception, est hypothétique et fragile; elle est difficile à théoriser de façon satisfaisante; elle est ardue à tracer en se servant d'une stratégie lectorale conventionnelle. Pourtant, c'est précisément ce phénomène articulé et réciproque qui fournit à cette sorte de textualité une mobilité tout à fait rafraîchissante, mobilité qui rend possible la signification littéraire sur un …

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 …

Translatio Materiae: Spenser, The Humanists, And A Poetics Of Matter, Victoria Florio Pipas

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In this paper, I propose that sixteenth-century humanist descriptions of Rome’s decay, together with paradigms of translatio imperii and studii, shaped Edmund Spenser’s poetic conceptualization of matter. I identify a new translatio in Spenser’s corpus, translatio materiae—matter’s movement or change—born from Spenser’s contact with Joachim du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1553). Translatio materiae runs through Spenser’s corpus as depicted matter’s resurrection from states of decay into material afterlives as narrative object or poetic device. Where early humanists, with recourse to the division between earthly mutability and heavenly permanence, lament Rome, Spenser favors matter’s potential for …

Lydie Salvayre, Maintenant Même, Warren Motte, Lydie Salvayre, Bernard Wallet, David Lopez, Marie Cosnay, Mahir Guven, Stéphane Bikialo

Zea E-Books Collection

Warren Motte, «Dans le vif du vivant»

Lydie Salvayre et Warren Motte, «Une conversation avec Lydie Salvayre»

Lydie Salvayre, «Deux artistes»

Lydie Salvayre, «Projet en cours»

Lydie Salvayre, «Quatre photos»

Bernard Wallet, «Lydie Salvayre, écrivain baroque’n’roll»

David Lopez, «Almuerz»

Marie Cosnay, «Diamant brut»

Mahir Guven, «À propos de Lydie Salvayre»

Stéphane Bikialo, «Éloge de la fuite»

«Ouvrages de Lydie Salvayre»

Banal/Queer/Spectacular: Reframing Blue Is The Warmest Color, Sophie Frank

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In this essay, I interrogate visual representations of a lesbian love story in Jul’ Maroh’s graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude and its film adaptation by director Abdellatif Kechiche, La vie d’Adèle : Chapitres 1 et 2. By studying the diegesis of each work’s opening scene, I reveal that the graphic novel embodies Barthes’s concept of a writerly text, or one that requires its reader to produce its meaning, while the film, as a readerly work, constructs a passive viewing experience for its audience. I argue that each author’s narratological approach exemplifies the particular manner in which they …

Cambodian Family Albums: Tian's "L'Année Du Lièvre", Angelica P. So

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article explores how Franco-Cambodian cartoonist Tian’s graphic novel, L’année du lièvre [Year of the Rabbit], represents second-generation postmemory in the form of, what I call, a “Cambodian family album,” or a personal-collective archive. The album serves to convey to subsequent generations: 1) the history of the Cambodian genocide, 2) the collective memories of pre-1975 Cambodia preceding the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, and 3) the Cambodian humanitarian crisis and exodus of the 1970s-1990s. The conceptualization of the family album is derived from the literal translation, from Khmer into English, of the term “photo album” – “book designated for …

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 …

Writing After The Human: Marie Darrieussecq’S And Anne Garréta’S Posthumanisms, Annabel L. Kim

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

In our current moment of climate catastrophe and impending planetary doom, the posthuman seems like a harbinger of an all too imminent reality (felt especially keenly in the age of COVID-19). In the twenty-first century, the humanities, grappling with the multifarious failures and excesses of traditional humanism, are attempting to abandon the anthropocentric epistemologies and practices that have characterized Western thought and culture and to create new models for thinking the world—models that are able to accommodate the nonhuman and welcome other forms of life and matter as objects of focus, moving thus from an imperialist vertical mode of conquering …