L’Identité De Groupe Chez Les Écrivains Francophones : Postures Institutionnelles Et Pratiques Littéraires, El Hadji Camara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Résumé

Cette thèse explore la problématique de l’identité de groupe dans la pratique esthétique et discursive des écrivains francophones. En effet, parmi les questions majeures posées par la littérature francophone contemporaine, on peut noter celle de l’identité et de sa problématisation. L’écrivain francophone étant pris dans une sorte de négociation identitaire, j’ai étudié les manifestations de cette identité groupale en analysant d’une part le contexte institutionnel de la littérature francophone et, d’autre part, la configuration de cette identité telle qu’elle transparaît dans les œuvres littéraires. En fait, on a toujours parlé de générations littéraires ou d’écrivains « francophones » sans …

Les Écrivains Vietnamiens Francophones Aux Frontières Incertaines, Pham Van Quang

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The Vietnamese Francophone literature began to take shape so early in the late nineteenth century. It develops later in the periods that followed. However, we wonder if this literature is currently in autonomous fi eld. Using the sociology of literature as a point of departure, we would like to dedicate this study to take into account the world of Vietnamese writers, in particular examining how they enter the literary field. Also, before highlighting the concepts of geographic and literary boundaries directly related to Vietnamese writers, we focus our attention on the educational and professional category they occupy. These elements affect …

La Poétique Romanesque De Joris-Karl Huysmans (Book Review), Juliana Starr

Juliana Starr

No abstract provided.

Carol J. Harvey, Medieval French Miracle Plays: Seven Falsely Accused Women., Vicki L. Hamblin

Modern & Classical Languages

The miracle plays of the fourteenth century brought sacred and secular narratives to the stages of medieval France. These relatively short performances present an episode in the life of a model Christian who faces a particularly difficult conflict or threat from within the social hierarchy of the medieval era or from among the dark forces emanating from hell. Predictably, divine intervention sustains the protagonist’s righteousness, remorse, steadfastness, or courage so that s/he triumphs against these threats. Given their proclivity for this authoritative and moralistic backdrop, miracle plays tend to share a number of thematic and dramatic conventions. Alongside divine mediation …

La Poétique Romanesque De Joris-Karl Huysmans (Book Review), Juliana Starr

Foreign Languages Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Securing Populations: Foucault And The Cartography Of Natural Bodies, Andrew A.T. Grant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The concept of biopolitics tends towards universal applicability and thus analytical impotency. By examining Foucault’s lecture seminars that address this concept directly and indirectly, this project aims to delimit its coordinates for future use. To do so, I begin by looking at the way biopolitical discourses on the population constituted liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century. This analysis will be supplemented by a cartography of the surfaces on which biopolitics emerges before and within liberalism, affecting its formation. I will therefore map out the formation of two objects that characterize modern biopower: the ‘natural’ body of the individual and the …

Human Automata, Identity And Creativity In George Du Maurier's Trilby And Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, Adrienne M. Orr

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1895) and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) feature a unique figure, the human automaton, a human being who has been transformed into a machine. Rather than becoming objectified and dehumanized, thus transformed they produce great music and art defined by the single quality supposedly irreproducible by machines—variability. Drawing multiplicity from the sameness of exact repetition in their art, the human automata’s identities are equally capable of embodying otherness and oppositions in a plural identity that remains uniquely singular. This challenges contemporary attitudes towards automation as a fixative, deterministic and reductive, and ultimately dehumanizing transformation. Linking automatism, …

In Appreciation Of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate Of Négritude, Winston E. Langley

Winston E. Langley

The closing weeks of the last decade brought with them the death of three distinguished world figures: Samuel Beckett, the Irish-French playwright, novelist, and poet; Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, human rights advocate, and leader in the international disarmament movement; and Birago I. Diop, the Senegalese poet, storyteller, and statesman. In the case of the former two, leading U.S. newspapers and other media paid merited tribute in the amplest of proportions; in case of the last, however, it was as if he had either never lived or had gained no standing of importance worthy of much attention. Diop …

Pas De Deux: Stepping Out Of The Mind-Body Prison, Alexa Palmer

Alexa Palmer

No abstract provided.

Virtual Representations Of The American Far West In 20th Century French Theater, Sarah Christine Lloyd

Doctoral Dissertations

The American Far West is, perhaps, one of the foremost images of the United States, one that has influenced many authors, especially during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a place of vast, empty spaces, of adventure and danger, of heroes and villains. It is a space that excites the imagination in its grandeur and possibility. Writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco have written of this grandeur, of the space of the American Dream. There they find the hyperreality of America, the constant drive to re-create aspects of European history and culture to fill the cultural void. …

Alterite, Performance, Hybridite: Une Esthetique De La Troisieme Vague Feministe, Michèle A. Schaal

Michèle A. Schaal

France has recently experienced a renewed interest in feminist and gender-related issues. Both in academia and society at large, a younger generation of theorists, authors and activists, influenced by American third-wave feminism and gender studies, has reasserted the necessity to fight for equal rights. My research reveals that as early as the mid-nineties, French writers Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes and Nina Bouraoui anticipated these feminist discourses in their early novels. In particular, they mirrored the concepts of alterity, gender performance, and hybridity currently at stake in this third wave of French feminism. My dissertation investigates the literary manifestations of these …

Reviving The Surrealist Revolt: A Retracing Of Surrealism’S History And A Reimagining Of Its Future In Translation, Kyle Young

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Although Surrealist writing has literary merit, Surrealist texts were written as revolutionary tracts meant to undermine the social order. Yet the politically radical aspects of the movement are no longer taken very seriously. At least one contributing factor to the current impotence of Surrealism is the approach taken in the translation of Surrealist texts. Many translators have presented Surrealist texts as they would traditionally present any literary document. However, Walter Benjamin’s writings on translation, in particular his essay “The Task of the Translator,” provide a novel conception of translation, one which can produce linguistically radical texts. I will argue that …

Giraudoux At The Gates, Samantha Walker

Undergraduate Research Conference

An in-depth look at the original production of Jean Giraudoux's play Tiger at the Gates, how it had become such a famous performance, and how some of the intents of the playwright were not easily translated from French to English.

Is The Plague An Existential Novel?, Ethan Jacobs '12

2012 Spring Semester

Existentialism refers to a broad range of philosophical beliefs and related cultural phenomena. While its origins can be traced to the latter half of the 19th century, existentialism as a unified movement only gained serious traction, especially among literary circles, by the close of World Wars I and II, as writers contemplated the sheer man-made destruction and loss of life of these two wars. Though often confused with nihilism and absurdism, existentialism is a distinct philosophical movement that presents man as fundamentally unknowable through science, logic, or morality. Albert Camus, a French Algerian “Pied-Noir” settler, epitomized the sudden turn toward …

The Spinning Plague, Sean Yamakawa '13

2012 Spring Semester

In her piece, “The Centripetal Structure of Camus’s La Peste,” Jennifer Waelti-Walters explains her idea that the narrative and plot of The Plague form a circular movement. There is a centripetal force that pulls all predominant characters and images to the center. Waelti-Walters determines that Rieux, the protagonist doctor, is this central figure. Though an apt analysis, her argument has a single flaw: her placement of Cottard within this circle does not accurately reflect his place in the novel. Though Waelti-Walters acknowledges Cottard as Rieux’s counterpart, she places Cottard next to other characters such as Tarrou, Rambert, and …

L’Écriture Migrante Comme Pratique Signifiante: L’Exemple De L’Hétérolinguisme Et De L’Écriture Fragmentaire Chez Abla Farhoud Et Ying Chen, Simona Pruteanu

Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications

Cet article récupère le concept d’écriture en tant que pratique signifi ante (Kristeva) en parlant de deux romans migrants québécois, L’Ingratitude de Ying Chen et Le Bonheur a la queue glissante d’Abla Farhoud, afi n de montrer comment les indices d’hétérolinguisme dans ces deux textes, en conjonction avec une poétique du fragment, créent une esthétique propre à l’expression de l’identité migrante, ou ce que nous appelons une signifi ance migrante. Nous espérons confi rmer que refuser l’ancrage dans une appartenance culturelle ou langagière unique joue un rôle capital dans l’esthétique de l’écriture migrante, car la fragilité identitaire créée par la …

Les Curiosités : L'Analyse De La Fonction De L’Anomalie Dans Les Musées Français Du Dix-Neuvième Siècle, Alexandra A. Powell

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Review Of "La Blessure La Vraie" By F. Bégaudeau, Véronique Olivier

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

A review of François Bégaudeau's La blessure la vraie, published by Verticales in 2011. In French.

"Madame Ma Chère Fille": The Performance Of Motherhood In The Correspondence Of Madame De Sévigné, Marie-Thérèse Of Austria, And Joséphine Bonaparte To Their Daughters, Meagen E. Moreland

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This paper conducts a critical comparison of the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, Empress Marie-Thérèse of Austria and Joséphine Bonaparte. These women instruct their daughters through a writerly exchange that implements a remarkably similar use of language that indicates a “performance” of her maternal role, meant to implement a personal or political agenda that requires the daughter’s acknowledgement and reciprocation. This project explores theories of speech acts and subjectivity to conduct a literary analysis of the construction of the maternal figure in a historical context, its representation in the letters of each woman with their daughters, the motivations for a …

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.

New Visions And Re-Visions In 20th And 21st Century French Literature, Eileen Angelini

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the twentieth century, the “death of the author” was proclaimed by literary critics. Since then, there has been a shift in focus from text to reader. This reorientation called forth changing critical paradigms, taking us from modernism to postmodernism and beyond...

Les Particules Élémentaires: Self–Portrait, Gerald Prince

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps no French novel in the past fifteen years has received more critical attention than Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and perhaps none has evoked stronger reactions with regard to the (literary) values it espouses and represents. This (self-)portrait, like any portrait, accents certain features more than others. It concentrates on refuting charges of nihilism, reactionaryism, sexism, and racism; it stresses Houellebecq’s novel’s attention to form and its thematic clarity as well as its determination to say something rather than nothing; and, through a consideration of its references to various media, arts, and texts, of its pet peeves and true …

Moving Forward With The Past: History And Identity In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara, Kennedy M. Schultz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Francophone writers and theorists have long worked to establish a cultural identity true to their collective past and free of Western authority and influence. They reflect in their works the need to find their own voice and validate their own perspective in the face of a history fraught with colonial influence and domination. Marie-Célie Agnant, a Francophone writer of Haitian descent living in Montreal, addresses this search for history and identity through the lens of Haitian immigrant characters in her works, namely La Dot de Sara (1995), Le Livre d’Emma (2001), and Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007). Agnant’s works treat …

The Mother Figure In Contemporary Women’S Theater, Sanda Golopentia

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Five French plays written by women playwrights between the years 1976–88 attest to significant changes in the dramatic presentation of the mother figure. The innovations occur at the general thematic level (with plays centered on the mother–daughter initiating encounter at the moment of giving birth/being born, the reversal of the mother–daughter roles later on in life, trial maternity, willful maternal eclipse, etc.) as well as at the level of the characters’ speech, the setting, and so on. While some of the plays (such as Chantal Chawaf’s Chair chaude, Denise Chalem’s A cinquante ans elle découvrait la mer and Loleh …

French As A Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise Of Antoine Volodine, David Bellos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Volodine’s fictions all resemble each other save for names and settings. They expose a world where the Revolution has failed and its protagonists are either dead, incarcerated, or holed up in the putrefying carcass of an abandoned building. Protagonists keep the memory of their political dreams alive by telling the stories of lost comrades, in works tapped out in code on the drainage pipes of a high-security prison or the asylum where they are held without charge, or else circulated, samizdat-style, among sympathizers. The authors of these narratives are themselves the subjects of others. So the characters created by Volodine …

Tristan Tzara’S Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic, Ruth Caldwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tristan Tzara is most often associated with Dada, a movement whose influence has often been overlooked. However, Tzara stands out among his peers because of his extensive production of poetical works associated not only with Dada but surrealism and beyond. In all of these texts we see a constant refusal to be complacent about artistic endeavor or the world around us. His Dada texts launch an attack on language by the use of irony and a tension of the text against itself. This internal tension becomes the struggle depicted in his surrealistic epic, L’Homme approximatif, an unfulfilled search for …

Béatrix Beck: The “Barny Cycle”: Writing To Inform And Heal The Self, Myrna Bell Rochester, Mary Lawrence Test

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

To cope with the traumatic reality of World War II, French society repressed its memories, resulting in a false collective memory. Today, a more truthful history can be restored with the study of wartime and post-war texts. We examine the first six books (1948-67) of Belgian-French writer Béatrix Beck (1914-2008), alongside the theories of psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote that “traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail.” Beck’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Barny, goes through Herman’s stages of forgetting and remembering, healing and recovery. Her emergence as a writer also follows that trajectory: Barny, like Occupied France, was isolated. …

Contemporary French Fiction In And Out Of Screens, Eliane Dalmolin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the ways in which the widespread craze for reality TV has now extended its contamination to the comparatively more traditional discipline of literature. Today, there is no use denying that, acknowledging, and internalizing, the American domination in the creation of reality shows, French television has followed suit and, as a result of the cultural flooding of such a model, recent French literature has also been swayed by the empire of television in general, and the power of reality TV in particular. The author delineates the increasingly porous frontier separating and conjoining reality TV and literary representation, questions …

Review Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Christine Daigle. Jean-Paul Sartre by Candice Nicolas

Anna Marie Sandoval. Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature by Yajaira M. Padilla

Ruth Cruickshank. Fin de millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis by Martine Motard-Noar

Sanna Turoma. Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia by Galya Diment

Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl: the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Teresa Polowy

Leslie Raymond Williams. A Companion to Gabriel García Márquez by David William Foster

Au Berceau De L’Appropriation: Rousseau, Locke Et L’Enfance Du Propriétaire, Rudy Le Menthéour

French Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.