Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "French literature"
Now showing items 1-17 of 17
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A “Moraliste Moment”?: Ethics in Eighteenth-Century French Moralist Writing from Vauvenargues to Joubert
(2022-05-13)“A Moraliste Moment” examines eighteenth-century French moraliste writing: aphoristic texts studying human nature and social and political behavior. While scholars have usually treated the late seventeenth century as the ... -
Dreaming in the Age of Reason: Sacred and Secular Visions in Eighteenth-Century French Architecture
(2023-05-15)This dissertation examines three case studies–a natural grotto, a church, and a book–that catalyzed discussions surrounding the interplay of space, architecture, and the oneiric in the Enlightenment. Each case foregrounds ... -
Enduring Images: Mourning and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert)
(2021-07-12)This dissertation studies the intersection of writing, mourning, and aesthetics in twentieth-century French literature. I examine how the act of beholding aesthetic objects is represented in writing as a way to suspend the ... -
Forgetting to Remember: An Approach to Proust's Recherche
(2020-11-19)Since Walter Benjamin’s observation that “remembrance is the woof, and forgetting the warp” in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, critics have observed the importance of oubli, as a “réserve” of memories, for the return of ... -
(Hi)story-telling and Holy War: Narrating the Crusades from Medieval to Early Modern France
(2023-05-11)“(Hi)story-telling and Holy War: Narrating the Crusades from Medieval to Early Modern France” traces how, and to what effect, stories of crusade were written across medieval and early modern French literature to create ... -
Maps, Migrants, Markets: International Economic Law and the Structural Violence of Borders
(2022-05-12)International migration is a defining issue of our time, and central to this problem are the causal stories and ethical intuitions that underpin its governance. This dissertation challenges existing approaches to one ... -
Monet and Other People
(2021-05-07)Beginning in the 1850s, French theorists explained the subjectivity of art with a parable. Two painters paint the same landscape, each copying exactly what he sees. When they compare their works, they are astonished to ... -
Performance Anxiety: Hysteria and the Actress in French Literature 1880-1910
(2012-12-19)My dissertation uses close readings of four texts dealing with the actress, spanning the naturalist novel (Zola’s Nana, 1880, and Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin, 1882), autobiography (Sarah Bernhardt’s Ma double vie, 1907) ... -
Porte Planète; Ville Canale --parisian knobs /visually/ turned to \textual\ currents
(2021-03-05)Focusing on the works of Guy Debord, Chris Marker and Georges Perec, this dissertation is a study of interdisciplinary practices as they transform the art of writing and everyday experiences of the city. With a major ... -
Reading Over the Referent in Duras, Djebar, and Louis: Autofiction, Universalism, and Excentric Reading
(2023-09-06)This dissertation explores the construction of identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century autofictions of Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, and Édouard Louis—that is, novels in which the central character ... -
Resounding Fantasies: Music as a Tool of Social Critique in the 20th-21st-century French Novel
(2023-01-18)This project presents an ensemble of case studies in the French and Francophone novel where music and musicality of various types continues to be evoked throughout literary modernity as a figura, as a force through which ... -
“A Scandalous Woman”? Beauvoir in Paris, January 2008
(The Modern Language Association of America, 2009) -
Subject to Adaptation: Race and French Atlantic Narratives (Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries)
(2021-05-19)“Subject to Adaptation: Race and French Atlantic Narratives (Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries)” considers literature’s role in shaping understandings of “race.” I trace how representations of Blackness in particular shift ... -
The Age of Self Discovery: Inventing France in the Early Modern Americas
(2023-05-11)Debates about migration and cultural contact have sparked controversy in France, as elsewhere, in recent years, but the issues at the heart of such debates—displacement, identity, and contact with the unfamiliar—are far ... -
The Crux of Luxury: Manufacturing Dreams under the Sun King
(2022-06-06)France is the world leader in luxury goods, and, according to the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry, more than half of the world’s 270 prestige brands are French. French luxury has become a global marker of “Frenchness,” ... -
The Noise of the Text: Writing Dissonance and Disruption in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
(2021-05-14)This dissertation examines the role of noise—both figurative and literal acoustic noise—in selected French narratives and poems written between the 1830s and 1880s. The nineteenth century marked a time of great interest ... -
Towards a Theory of Middles: Suspension and the Genre of Middle English Romance
(2023-06-01)To date, a clear and generally agreed-upon definition for the generic category of “romance” has continued to evade the field of medieval English literary studies. In seeking to answer the question, “what precisely do we ...