French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

The Observer In The Picture: Surface And Depth In A Passage From Proust, Noam Scheindlin

Publications and Research

In the orthodox version of externally-narrated fiction, the questions, “who speaks,” “who writes,” and “who sees,” when directed toward the narrator or narrating agency, are non-productive ones from the perspective of the world that is narrated. To ask these questions would require moving from the world of the story and into the world of the author; or, at the very least, one would be required to make use of a critical construct such as that of the “implied author,” in order to transgress—albeit in fiction—the fictional frame.¹ The purely external narrator speaks or writes from a perspective that is …

Partir Marron: Un Parcours Sémantique À Travers Les Trous De La Mémoire Collective Haïtienne, Lucie Carmel Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word "marron " represents both a totality, and a specificity. Totalizing, the term refers to the slave who fled from the plantation, against the colonial order, that is, the fugitive slave. Specific, in the Haitian lexicography, it stands for a shifty and cunning individual, particularily a " Woule m debò "1. One has to recognize that there is a double meaning associated with the word, and at the same time, the syntagmatic locution "partir marron " reflects the individual's dependency on phenomenology. The moment of crisis is one of an explosion, through which one can only be …

Reading The Restaurant: Social Class, Identity, And The Culture Of Consumption In The Nineteenth Century French Novel, Joseph J.B. Rienti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The restaurant, like so many of the institutions of French modern society, developed at a very particular moment in history. In this project, I tell the story of the maturation of the restaurant and study its unique role in the social history of Paris during the nineteenth century. By examining the restaurant as a site of modernity, I illuminate its important role in precipitating class distinctions, locating the emerging consumer culture, highlighting gender differentiation, challenging prevailing views of domesticity, and revealing a debate over public and private space.

Through a close reading of the realist novel as a discourse on …

Nancy Huston's Danse Noire, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Translations From Allada And Experience D'Edward Lee, Versailles By Gérard Gavarry, Gérard Gavarry, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

At the heart of Gérard Gavarry’s writing are the questions of what power language holds, and what remains beyond the reach of expression. The two translations included here, excerpts from Allada (P.O.L, 1993) and Expérience d’Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L, 2009), share little with each other in terms of setting or structure, but explore similar questions of the role and limits of language in relation to defamiliarization, power, and fear. The inventive reflection on the nature of language, identity, and power that, woven into the fabric of the novel, makes Gavarry’s work some of the most compelling fiction coming out of …

Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This is a biographical overview of the life and principle works of the French author Rachilde, a.k.a. Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women writers working in the masculinist field of fin-de-siecle or decadent fiction.

Review Of Zazie Dans Le Metro, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Review of Louis Malle's 1960 French New Wave film.

Trauma And The Representation Of The Unsayable In Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

This dissertation explores the ways in which several fiction writers from France, the U.S., and Latin America experiment with the form of their works in writing about traumatic experience, as they navigate the tension between a propulsion toward expression and toward silence. Some of these traumas are vast, as in Edmond Jabès’ Le livre des questions (1963-1973), which addresses not only the Holocaust, but also questions of exile and identity. Others are on a smaller scale, such as Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir (1986), Julio Cortázar's Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983), and Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de …

Rousseau, The Anticosmopolitan?, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Rousseau's repeated criticisms of the Enlightenment's ideal of cosmopolitanism has led to his thought being characterized as 'anticosmopolitan'. His work abounds in denunciations of the ideals of equality of treatment and universal rights supported by his contemporaries. Moreover, his liking of solitude, introspection and socialization in small circles and his preference for patriotism over equity among all men seem to set him up as the counterpoint of the universalism his contemporaries defended. However, a deeper insight into the work of the author of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker shows that, far from being incompatible with true cosmopolitanism, the moral …

Composition Pour Le Grain De Riz, Valerie Thiers-Thiam

Publications and Research

This is a written assignment related to the short story Le grain de riz (Gaussel, Alain).

The Race For Globalization: Modernity, Resistance And The Unspeakable In Three African Francophone Texts, Francesca Sautman

Publications and Research

The "global village" that media pundits and politicians evoke as general currency might well be visualized, in this onset of the twenty-first century, as a village beset by fires, riot, and rampage, where hunger reigns unopposed. The paradox of the term poorly conceals the untold violence that the violence of rhetoric seeks to erase. Yet, contemporary African Francophone texts have been tearing off this mask for decades, locating themselves less often in idyllic villages, and more frequently, on the cable lines of suffering between dying villages and indigent cities. In the literature of the 1980s, the focus of this essay, …

On The ‘‘Misogyny’’ Of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Letter To D’Alembert In Historical Context, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Evidence suggests that the feminist consensus on Jean-Jacques Rousseau “misogyny” is breaking down.New studies are emerging that bring to light the many sympathetic portrayals of women in Rousseau’s works and the important role he ascribed to women within the family. Some modern feminists are even finding ways of reading Rousseau that speak to women’s concerns today. Overturning the notion that Rousseau was an arch-misogynist will be an uphill battle, however, given how very widespread it has become. Moreover, before we can arrive at a coherent and convincing appraisal of Rousseau’s views on women, a curious paradox needs to be addressed: …

Nouvelles Perspectives Sur De La Religion: Benjamin Constant Et La Franc-Maçonnerie, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Dès la fin du Directoire, pendant le Consulat, puis sous l'Empire, la maçonnerie française connait une période d'expansion. Les historiens s'accordent à dire qu'elle devient alors "le conservatoire des idées de 1789", "l'officine du libéralisme politique et social". Ainsi n'est-il pas surprenant de constater que plusieurs des amis, collègues et alliés de Constant sont franc-maçons.La franc-maçonnerie de 1789 est fortement anti-"ultra", ce qui explique pourquoi, dès 1820, des "ultras" s'adressent à la justice ou à la Chambre des Pairs pour obtenir l'interdiction de l'ordre. Cela étant, et vu que De la religion est un ouvrage anti-"ultra" écrit par un libéral …

The Pursuit Of Virtue: A Study Of Order In "La Nouvelle Heloise", Jeanne Thomas Fuchs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.