French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam

Artl@s Bulletin

From antiquity to the Third Republic, this article follows visual and literary representations that measured space, time and ideological oppositions that spawned an image of the Mediterranean as an area of transmission and cultural tension. It focuses on three theorists: the head of Action Française, Charles Maurras; the novelist Louis Bertrand; and critic and cultural impresario Joachim Gasquet. Each contributed to the formation of an image of the Mediterranean basin as the birthplace of European heritage and a battlefield in a struggle against the forces of democracy and cultural hybridization.

Le Lyrisme Chrétien Chez Anne De Marquets : Étude Et Édition De Ses Divines Poesies De Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, Chez Nicholas Chesneau, 1568/1569), Annick Macaskill

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes an analysis of the theorization and practice of “Christian lyricism” in Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius, the second independently published collection by (and clearly attributed to) Anne de Marquets (1533?-1588), a French Dominican nun. Published in 1568 (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau) and reissued in a second edition in 1569 (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau), this volume includes not only translations of the Italian Neo-Latin poet Marcantonio Flaminio (1497/8-1550), some of whose works had already, by 1568, been put on the Vatican Index, but other translations by the Dominican nun, as well as original spiritual songs and sonnets. …

Morgane Cadieu. Marcher Au Hasard : Clinamen Et Création Dans La Prose Du Xxe Siècle. Classiques Garnier, 2019., Jason C. Grant

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Morgane Cadieu. Marcher au hasard : Clinamen et création dans la prose du XX^e siècle. Classiques Garnier, 2019. 214 pp.

Learning To Eat French, John Westbrook

Faculty Journal Articles

Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste reveals a gap in our understanding: How did French culinary discourse move beyond the bourgeois sphere in which it emerged in the nineteenth century? Picking up on her comparison of the Proustian synthesis of regional and national culinary culture in the Recherche to the project of national identity creation in the Third Republic’s best-selling textbook, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, this essay argues that the culinary model Ferguson describes was in fact widely disseminated through mass primary education under the Third Republic. Examining an overlooked corpus of primary school readers and textbooks, I …

Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.

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 …

Olga Beloborodova, Editor. The Making Of Samuel Beckett’S Play/Comédie And Film. Bloomsbury, 2019., S. E. Gontarski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Olga Beloborodova, editor. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Comédie and Film. Bloomsbury, 2019. 352 pp.

Stitching The Fragmented: 360° Videos For Language And Culture Learning, Melanie Peron, Victoria Karasic

Frameless

Emerging technologies present new opportunities for students to bridge the distance of space and time, allowing them to relate to a difficult period in history: the Shoah. Over the last few years, students in a French history and culture course have participated in a series of digital projects ranging in nature from mapping to 3D modeling, with the latest being student-created 360° videos in order to fill in the blanks left by time in memory. These digital humanities projects allow students to walk the footsteps of survivors, vanished victims, and period writers in modern-day Paris by visiting physical places studied …

L’Importance De La Compréhension Du Texte Ecrit En Classe De Français Langue Etrangère, Samer Hamouri

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

La lecture reste toujours une façon de se faire plaisir et de se cultiver mais aussi une compétence nécessaire et fondamentale pour apprendre une langue étrangère. Les textes écrits sont par ailleurs un moyen de communication dans la langue cible.

Nous essayons de définir les notions de base comme la lecture, les principes didactiques de la compréhension des langues et la compréhension écrite. Nous montrons dans notre article les objectifs à atteindre pour enseigner la compréhension des textes; en définir les objectifs linguistiques, formatifs, culturels et interculturels.

Notre article s’articule autour de l’importance de la compréhension des textes écrits dans …

Écrire À Partir (Des Traces) Du Passé. Annie Ernaux, Anny Duperey, Camille Laurens, Jia Bao Huang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette thèse examine la façon dont Annie Ernaux, Anny Duperey et Camille Laurens exploitent des papiers privés, des documents publics ou des rapports officiels pour écrire à partir de leur vécu de femme ou de fille. Le postulat qui se trouve au cœur de notre étude est le suivant. Les écrits de femmes qui nous préoccupent ici — et notamment les trois récits qui forment notre corpus principal (parce qu’ils se font dans l’absence de souvenirs ou ont comme point de départ une insuffisance d’informations) — croisent nécessairement la littérature et d’autres disciplines. Ce sont des écrits nés, du point …

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 …

Perspectives Religieuses Et Séculaires De La Nature Dans Les Pensées Philosophiques De Denis Diderot, Aleksandra Gieralt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Diderot écrit sa première œuvre, les Pensées philosophiques, pour déclencher une conversation à propos de la manière dont Dieu – ou l’idée de Dieu – peut servir aux êtres humains. À cause de la déclaration avec laquelle il commence ce texte – « J’écris de Dieu » – et à cause de la forme dialogique qui présente un discours entre un déiste, un athée et un sceptique, plusieurs chercheurs se demandent quel est l’avis de Diderot à propos de l’existence (ou la non-existence) de Dieu. Cependant, nous proposons que Dieu n’est qu’un point de départ pour commencer une conversation …

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 …

Maria Stehle And Beverly Weber. Precarious Intimacies: The Politics Of Touch In Contemporary Western European Cinema. Northwestern Up, 2020., Paul Ardoin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber. Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema. Northwestern UP, 2020. 197 pp.

A Translation Of Some Works Of Louise Michel, Early French Feminist, Militant Anarchist, And Socialist Visionary, Julianna Kramer

Honors Theses

The socialist progressive Louise Michel infused her beliefs of equality and liberty from repressive governments into her daily life and career. Michel was a major leader of the Paris Commune, a revolutionary socialist government that controlled the city of Paris for roughly two months in 1871. She deployed militant tactics to defend the poor and demand legal and economic equality of the sexes.

She was a prolific writer, using writing as a revolutionary tool to disseminate socialist ideas to children and adults alike. A short story for children, titled Les dix sous de Marthe (Marthe’s Ten Coins), shows the ripple …

The Stylistic Development Of Jean Despujols (1886-1965), Kelly M. Ward

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the life and most extant works by Jean Despujols. The French and later naturalized American painter, writer, poet, philosopher, deep-thinker, and mystic was best known for his Neoclassical and academic style. This thesis briefly discusses the artist’s beginnings as a young painter at the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux and in Paris, his sketches in the trenches of the First World War, his time at the Villa Medicis after winning the distinguished Rome Prize, and his paintings and thoughts as a philosopher and political writer throughout his life. An outstanding …

Systemic Complicity: Police Brutality And National Identity In Ladj Ly's Les Misérables, Lucia Hainline

Senior Theses and Projects

Inspired by his youth in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, Ladj Ly’s first feature film explores the presence of the police in the banlieue from the point of view of a special crime unit. Released in 2019, after the murder of Adama Traoré and increased debate on police surveillance, Les Misérables portrays the contemporary reality of life in the suburbs through a shocking act of police brutality caught on camera and the events that follow for the policemen. This thesis explores the systems of the banlieue and their representation in the film and discusses how the shortfalls of the French …

Act Naturally: Francis Ponge's Morals And Measures Of Human Nature, Hugh Hochman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores how a poetics of the nonhuman in the work of Francis Ponge underwrites a humanism wherein we no longer have to take sides in the conflict between the linguistic projects that tend toward subordination or comprehension of the nonhuman and the resistance that the nonhuman endlessly opposes to these projects. Close readings of texts that figure the defeat of reason in its linguistic expression of the nonhuman, as well as texts that figure human comportment in nonhuman tropes, reveal an ethical project of human well-being acting in agreement with its nature.

The Case Of The Dream Maker: Perec, Pontalis, And Dream Writing, Aubrey Gabel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article considers Georges Perec’s La Boutique obscure as a literary experiment in dream writing, by putting it in dialogue with French Freudianism, notably the clinical papers of J.-B. Pontalis, Perec’s long-time psychoanalyst. Pontalis describes a patient type, the "dream maker,” who provokes an extreme case of counter-transference and requires new methods in dream therapy. Pontalis, like many of Perec’s literary critics, was suspicious of the authenticity of Perec's dream journal and denied it both therapeutic and literary status. This article reinserts La Boutique obscure into Perec’s literary program. Through a discussion of the text's formal attributes and its sociological …

Translating Nonsense: An Analysis Of The Poem “Jabberwocky” And Two French Translations, Kylie R. Deer

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Is it possible to translate nonsense? If yes, then how?

Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem in which many of the words are invented out of the author’s imagination. As a result, readers depend on Carroll to explain the meanings of such words. The first stanza of “Jabberwocky,” chosen since it contains the largest number of nonsense words in the poem, was analyzed and compared to the first stanza of two French translations (“Le Jaseroque” by Frank L. Warrin and “Bredoulocheux” by Henri Parisot). A word-by-word, and to an extent, syllable-by-syllable close reading of the three texts was performed …

Béâtrice Picon-Vallin. Le Théâtre Du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years. Translated By Judith G. Miller. Routledge, 2021., Deborah Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Béâtrice Picon-Vallin. Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-five Years. Translated by Judith G. Miller. Routledge, 2021. xi + 453 pp.

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»

Une Exploration Du Style Et Du Message Dans Une Sélection D’Œuvres D’Annie Ernaux : L’Écriture « Qui Ne Ment Pas », Maya Benson

Honors Scholar Theses

Author Annie Ernaux comes from a humble background, but throughout her career she has proven to be on par with any member of the French literary elite. She has dominated the literary field in France for decades, publishing more than twenty books with Gallimard since 1974.

Annie Ernaux centers her writing around her own experiences. Some of her works are presented in the form of personal diaries. Journal du dehors(1993), for example, serves as a private diary bringing together moments from Ernaux’s life in the urban city of Cergy-Pontoise between 1985 and 1992, and Regarde les lumières mon amour …

Setting The Stage: The Phantom Of The Opera And Gothic Space, Zitaanne Reno

Honors Theses

First published from 1909 to 1910, Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera tells the story of Erik, the titular deformed composer, and his dark love for a beautiful soprano. Similar to Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, another French story involving a deformed man in love with a beautiful woman, the setting is a crucial aspect of the novel. Examining the Palais Garnier, a labyrinthine building composed of staircases, passageways, trapdoors, and a subterranean lake, in conjunction with Notre Dame, a cathedral utilizing traditionally gothic architecture, reveals how the opera house functions as a gothic space. Rather …

Les Esprits Vodou, L’Oncle Sam, Et Le Crucifix : Les Relations Endommagées Entre Le Monde Occidental Et Haïti Dans Bain De Lune, Catherine S. Freeman

Senior Theses and Projects

In her novel Bain de Lune, Haitian writer Yanick Lahens opens the doors of her native country to a Western readership that may be unfamiliar with its culture and history, in part because it has been mistreated by Western powers ever since gaining its independence in 1804. Readers are transported to the heart of a culture rich in Haitian Vodou traditions through the interwoven stories of the villagers of Anse Bleue, who struggle to survive the political instability of their country. Vodou is foregrounded through the narrative of the spirit of Cétoute, a young woman who is found dead on …

Un Étranger En Exil: L’Expropriation Des Terres Et La Lutte Identitaire Dans L’Étranger, Suyang Wu

Senior Theses and Projects

While the pied noir writer Albert Camus has usually been depicted as either a “French writer” or an “anticolonial critic,” there are few more nuanced readings of his ambivalent standpoint toward the colonized population and territory of French Algeria. This thesis explores one of his most famous novels, L’Étranger (The Stranger, 1942), in order to elucidate the ways in which the colonial regime affects the material features of the land and the mental state of its inhabitants. In particular, this thesis examines the alienation of Meursault, the pied noir protagonist, by exploring how the pied noir experience is impacted by …

L’Universalité De La Voix Féminine : Interprétations Genrées De La Poésie Romantique Française Et Allemande, Mimi Mackilligan

Senior Theses and Projects

Contemporary French feminist literary critics have debated whether the category of woman is an empowering or limiting paradigm through which to analyze women writers. Hélène Cixous coined the term "feminine writing [écriture féminine]" in order to link femininity to a radical particularity, whereas Monique Wittig has asserted that this concept confines women writers to their minority identity rather than allowing them to be read universally. Such discussions serve as a useful lens through which to analyze women writers who grappled with their gendered position far before the advent of 20^th-century feminism.

Despite the abundance of woman …

Andrew Hodgson. The Post-War Experimental Novel: British And French Fiction, 1945-75. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020., Kathryn Van Wert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Andrew Hodgson. The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xi + 208 pp.

Scarlett Baron. The Birth Of Intertextuality: The Riddle Of Creativity. Routledge, 2020., Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Scarlett Baron. The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity. Routledge, 2020. 381 pp.