French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Le Proto-Féminisme De George Sand, Jasmine Harrison

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

George Sand, the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, was a radical and revolutionary writer. Through her writing, she challenged social norms and incorporated gender equality into her novels. This presentation examines Sand's four works: Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, and La Mare au diable. The question of Sand's status as a feminist writer, or even as an early feminist writer, is explored through women's roles in society through the analysis of nineteenth-century literature.

Le Dix-Neuvième Siècle : Les Mouvements Littéraires Français Et La Classe Ouvrière, Grace Horton

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

This presentation is an analysis of the connections between the different literary movements of 19th century France, such as romanticism, realism, and modernism, and how they were initiated by the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It covers the impacts of these revolutions on different prolific 19th century French writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, and how each writer prompted their respective movements.

L’Évolution Du Libéralisme Dans La Littérature Au Xixe Siècle, Sophie Hardy

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

This presentation is a dissection of a quote made by Victor Hugo during the preface of his work Hernani (1830), where he wrote that, “romanticism is just liberalism in literature". This presentation strives to contradict this statement by analyzing Hugo’s early works before the revolution of 1830 to prove that not all of his works discussed liberalism. This presentation will also analyze the works of Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset during this romantic era and compares Hugo’s earlier statement to their works.

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.

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire, Printemps 2024, Pascale-Anne Brault

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

No abstract provided.

Tuning Out: Intersections Of Music And Literature In The Contemporary French-Language Novel, Alexander James Claussen

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The past thirty years have seen a shift in French-language novels as authors move from the self-reflexive formal experimentation of the nouveau roman and its successors toward a literature that is again concerned with plot, character, and above all, the problems of the contemporary world. This “retour au récit” is accompanied by a resurgence of interest in writing the self (through experiments in autofiction), the past (through explorations of collective memory and collective guilt), and the present (through novels that challenge existing social structures and seek to define and develop new collective or national identities).

This dissertation examines the (re)turn …

Doris Provencher-Faucher Research Library Bibliography, Usm Franco-American Collection

Collection Aids

Doris Provencher-Faucher Research Library Bibliography

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 …

Heroes, Victims, And Future Citizens: Representations Of French Children During World War I, Megan R. Outtrim

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The effects of total war society in France during WWI dramatically altered the daily lives of both adults and children, witnessing increasing levels of patriotic rhetoric, wartime propaganda, and anti-German sentiment. Children were often made the focal point of this propaganda, as they represented the future of the nation. As such, three specific representations of children emerge from WWI propaganda in France: the heroic child, the victimized child, and the malleable future citizen. Some of these representations were depicted in propaganda meant for children specifically, while others were depicted in propaganda meant to mobilize adults in the name of children. …

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 …

Ceci N’Est Pas Une Autobiographie : «  Je N’Est Plus (Seulement) Moi  » Pour Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis Et Ivan Jablonka, Annie Jouan-Westlund Dr.

World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Cet article porte sur brouillage générique entre l’essai et l’écriture de soi, la littérature et la sociologie dans les récits hybrides de Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis et Ivan Jablonka. Il étudie la mise en perspective de l’expérience singulière au sein d’un groupe et l’approfondissement de la matière autobiographique dans un questionnement plus vaste sur la société. Alliant réflexion théorique et démarche auto/biographique, Didier Eribon considère sa propre trajectoire de transclasse en fonction des verdicts sociaux. Édouard Louis expose les langages et conditions d’existence de son milieu d’origine dans une perspective critique sur la violence résultant des conjonctures sociales et économiques …

Autoportrait D’Un Auteur En Exil : Une Magie Ordinaire De Kossi Efoui, Morgan Faulkner

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Kossi Efoui’s sixth novel, Une magie ordinaire, constitutes his intellectual autobiography in that it follows the reconstruction of an “intellectual development” (Paul Ricoeur, 1995) by retracing his own trajectory as a writer in exile, born and raised in a dictatorship, forced to live the last days of his mother’s life away from her. This study explores the role played by private life, history, and literature in the reconstruction of the writer’s trajectory that unfolds in this novel. How do these three themes, and the discourses that accompany them, interact with each other to build the self portrait of an …

Présence Francophone, Numéro 101

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Le Goût Du Transfert. Dany Laferrière Depuis Sa Vieille Ford Des Années 80, Bernadette Desorbay

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Dany Laferrière’s chronicles which make up Les années 80 dans ma vieille Ford (2005), are presented in the form of snapshots around situations and personalities that marked him in Haiti, and in North America where he took refuge in June 1976 (Montreal followed by stays in New York and Miami). He talks about colleagues from Le Petit Samedi Soir or intellectuals he portrayed in New York for Haïti-Observateur, with whom he crossed swords on more than one occasion. Throughout his work and up to the Petit traité du racisme en Amérique (2023), he participates in the genre of intellectual autobiography …

Parties Annexes (N° 101)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Front Matter And Table Of Contents (N° 101)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

L’Autobiographie Intellectuelle De V. Y. Mudimbe Et Les Enjeux De La Différence, Justin Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Based on Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres. Esquisse d’un jardin africain à la bénédictine, this text would like to analyze, at the confluence of sociology and rhetoric, the modalities (with their variations and their extensions) by which V. Y. Mudimbe broadens intellectual autobiography to other modes of writing and functions as a dialogic space between poetry and prose, experience and fantasy, reality and imagination. Retracing his pathway, Mudimbe makes his text a journey within oneself, a quest for the “absolute elsewhere” or a quest for the total Self. A feeling of lack emerges which explains this …

Une Autobiographie Intellectuelle De Maryse Condé : Vivre Et Écrire, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In this study of autobiography by French-speaking writers, we propose to construct a syntax for the genre, after recalling the great difficulty of tackling such a vast subject for so long. From then on, any study of autobiography implies confronting it with other related forms, such as essays, memoirs, autofiction, testimonies or diaries, all characterised by the assumed subjectivity of the “I” narrator, who recounts a life journey as well as a personal reflection on world events. The general idea defended here is that the grammar of intellectual autobiography presents itself as a narrative posture that needs to be thought …

V.Y. Mudimbe Et La Recherche D’Une Parole Pour-Soi : L’Essai Philosophique Aux Prises Avec L’Autobiographie : Vivre Et Écrire, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article aims at two closely linked objectives : on the one hand, to show how the philosophical essays of V. Y. Mudimbe carry autobiographical sequences which complete or explain certain passages of his intellectual autobiography (The glorious bodies of words and beings) and, on the other hand, to question the stakes of such a rather singular practice in African philosophy. The basic hypothesis is that this practice is to be understood from an important moment in his intellectual development, namely May 68 and what has been called “La pensée 68” within which two antagonistic tendencies oppose each …

Présentation, Olga Hel-Bongo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Discours Des Autres Et Récit De Soi : L’Autofiction Intellectuelle Chez Ananda Devi, Nina Bouraoui Et Shumona Sinha, Florian Alix

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Some autofictional texts tend to refer to a socio-historical context through the exploration of a specific subjectivity. On the first hand, telling the self enables to show a singularity which puts in perspective a collective situation by revealing its intersectional complexity. On the other hand, appears the burden of collective normative discourses, which literary writing try to interrogate and distance through valorization of body and affects.

Gisèle Pineau, Pour Une Auto-Gyno-Biographie Littéraire Et Intellectuelle Guadeloupéenne, Françoise Simasotchi-Bronès

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Unlike other authors in her literary field (P. Chamoiseau, R. Confiant, M. Condé, D. Maximin, etc.), Gisèle Pineau did not write an “intellectual or literary” autobiography strictly speaking ; we can nevertheless reconstruct it from the various interviews she has given or other writings in which she reflects on creative practice. The author draws her scriptural inspiration from empirical models, listening to the life stories (often involving violence) that West Indian women whisper to each other in the privacy of the kitchen. Discreetly disqualifying the scholarly literate library, it favors the female oral library, an illiterate memorial motherhood heritage which …

Les Écritures De Soi Entre Identité Éclatée Et Identité Réconciliée. Une Herméneutique De La Pratique Autobiographique Intellectuelle Chez Maryse Condé Et Henri Lopes, Gervais Désiré Yamb

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article aims at analyzing the heuristic status of self-writing through the articulation of shattered and reconciled identity in La vie sans fards (2012) of Maryse Condé and Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois (2003) by Henri Lopes. In fact, we argue that the articulation in question, here, appears as writing for oneself and for others, which is based on a hermeneutical perspective of the self and the sociality of texts proposed by Paul Ricoeur and Claude Duchet. The main objective of this investigation is to understand, in Condé and Lopes writings, the practice of intellectual autobiography as …

Index (N° 101)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Abstracts (N° 101)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

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 …

Le Diable Au Coeur : Bonjour Tristesse Et La Valeur Littéraire Dans Les Années 1950, Lauren E. Mccouch

Senior Honors and Award-Winning Theses

No abstract provided.

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 …

Spiritual And Material Boundaries In Old French Verse: Contemplating The Walls Of The Earthly Paradise, Jacob Abell

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose. By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each …