Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785
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Item Fictions of Hybridity in the Anthropocene: Literature and Science in the Works of Rétif de la Bretonne(2021) Bezilla, Charlee Myranda; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the “nature/culture” divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the “Internal Great Divide.”These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of “hybridity” as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects of the “hybrid” text and its paratexts in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, I examine how the novel incorporates, interrogates, and extends contemporary theories about the nature of humans and animals. Chapter 3 explores the manipulation of hybrid creatures and proto-eugenicist politics in La Découverte australe alongside key texts from the period to trace how the novel engages contemporary discourses of perfectibility and degeneration. Chapter 4 shows how the novel promotes mechanical technology, along with biological hybridization, as tools of imperialism and societal improvement at a pivotal moment leading up to the industrial revolution.Item IN SEARCH OF THE CITY: POWER, IDENTITY, AND NARRATIVES OF URBANIZATION FROM STENDHAL TO ZOLA(2018) Wegmann, Hannah; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies urbanization in nineteenth-century French novels, exploring the ways that this demographic phenomenon structures plot, describes inner transformations, and most importantly becomes a catalyst for confronting and challenging established power structures. Characters who transition from rural to urban states, either geographic and actual, or interior and moral, force confrontations between a whole series of power constructs embodied by the country and city. Their evolution, mapped in conjunction with demographic studies and the writings of urban theorists, allows us to explore questions of authority, reality, language, and gender in nineteenth-century France. An analysis of the concrete urbanization of Julien Sorel in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir is followed by a study of the abstract urbanization of Emma in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, who refashions her identity and morals in line with urban ideals. Chapter three employs Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames to study the urbanization reshaping the economic power structures of Paris. Chapter four uses Zola's L'Assommoir to question the nineteenth-century idealism behind many urban reforms. Using works by Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Pierre Loti, George Sand, Claire de Duras, and numerous visual artists, the final chapter explores the relationship between urbanization and Orientalism by transposing the rural-urban binary onto the relationship between Occident and Orient. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that actual rural and urban geographies become cartographies of power wherein the country and city communicate an entire set of forces competing for agency. Each narrative of urbanization exhibits different manifestations of the city and the country and different types of evolution between the two. Yet each narrative reveals a fundamental transformation precipitated by the clashing of rural and urban ideas, powers, and identities. This transformation shapes and defines nineteenth-century France.Item BRILLER SUR SCÈNE : L'ASTRONOMIE DANS LE THÉÂTRE DU GRAND SIÈCLE(2014) Arnaud, Cybele; Campangne, Hervé Thomas; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)January 5th, 1634, the news of Galileo's condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for his heretical belief in heliocentric theories -theories that postulate that the Earth orbits the Sun- reach France. As the professors of the Sorbonne condemn Galileo, as René Descartes, ever-cautious, chooses to forgo publishing his Treatise on the World, an ever increasing number of French writers turn to fiction to prove, attack, or simply present astronomical and cosmological theories to their audience. While much has been written about the new astronomy's relationship to poetry, proto-science fiction and vulgarization through novelization of scientific knowledge, its presence on the French stage, in comedies and ballets, has been mostly ignored by the scholarship. This thesis constructs a timeline of "natural philosophy theatre", tracking the movement of the sun and the earth and the representation of the theories elaborated by Copernicus, Tycho Brahé and Descartes through plays and ballets published in the 17th century and beyond, in order to analyze the function of laughter in the context of the scientific revolution. The following questions will be answered: How is the new astronomy presented on stage, both in comedies and ballets? What role does laughter play in the representation of science? Is it simply used to challenge the audience's beliefs? Is dance's only purpose to mimic the orbits of the planets, or does it hold a deeper meaning? What, if any, is the greater purpose of including scientific knowledge in theater?Item Myth and the Maternal Voice: Mediation in the Poetry of Vénus Khoury-Ghata(2009) Braswell, Margaret Anne; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Born under the French Mandate in Lebanon, Paris-based Francophone poet and novelist Vénus Khoury-Ghata represents a generation of Lebanese writers who have witnessed Lebanon's evolution from a newly independent state to a twenty-first century nation struggling to survive the devastation of civil war and regional conflict. Like many of her compatriots who have chosen exile and whose mother tongue is Arabic, Khoury-Ghata's negotiation between two languages and cultures nurtures an oeuvre that reflects the tensions and provocations of a dual Franco-Lebanese identity. An examination of her poetry represents an opportunity to direct more attention to a poet whose passionate representation of her native country and the pathos of the human figure memorializes in verse personal and collective tragedy. Khoury-Ghata's narrative-driven poems reveal the dynamics of accommodating differences by promoting encounter and integration, while recognizing that confrontation is not entirely unavoidable. Seeking to reconcile the distance and the passage of time that separate the poet from her origins, as well as linguistic and cultural differences that divide self and society, her approach evokes the contemporary poet's quest for a rapprochement, however ephemeral, with the Other, often in the context of an autobiographical project that merges History and myth. Her consistent evocation in writing and interviews of her dual identity invites an examination of her verse in the framework of theoretical notions based on binary structures. Informed by surrealist and magical realist strategies, as well as French and Arab poetic legacies, Khoury-Ghata's verse expresses a paradigm of inversion that renders the common narrative fantastic, transforms the ordinary housewife into a supernatural heroine, and sanctifies the abject. Evocations of language and myth affiliated with this subversive dynamic encourage the investigation of their significance in the framework of binary structures that privilege the negative and the nocturnal. Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language provides one method for the analysis of Khoury-Ghata's portrayal of the maternal figure and maternal language as negative and subversive feminine forces. This study will underscore how the poet's integration into her text of signifiers of Arabic, orality, and pre-verbal impulses, weaves the maternal voice and gestures into a mythical narrative. In addition, French myth critics such as Gilbert Durand and Pierre Brunel propose various reflections on the development of mythical structures, archetypes, and themes, whose evocations in Khoury-Ghata's verse underscore a poetic strategy of the recovery and revival of her Lebanese origins linked to a broader Mediterranean culture. Durand's isotopic classification of images according to a dichotomous paradigm of the diurnal and nocturnal throws into relief the archetype of the nocturnal Grande déesse whose enigmatic (re)productive power suggests correspondences with the maternal dynamic in Kristeva's semiotic theory, as well as the surrealist médiatrice, and Wendy Faris' conception of the mystical feminine in magical realist strategies. The theme of mediation persists in the poet's mythico-poetic approach that promotes the contact and fusion of contrary forces in diverse "narratives in verse" representing cosmogonic myth, the myth of the primitive Other, biomythography, folktale and fable, and the interaction of myth and memoir. This inquiry demonstrates the durability and plasticity of binary structures of myth and language that mediate personal and collective identities challenged by the potential polarization of languages, cultures, and genders.