Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Her Gaze, Their Voice: an analysis of three documentaries by Yamina Benguigui, Alice Diop and Agnès Varda(2024) Adle, Richard James; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A stylistic analysis of three documentaries by Yamina Benguigui, Agnès Varda and Alice Diop: Mémoires d’immigrés : l’héritage maghrébin (Benguigui, 1997), Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Varda, 2000), and Nous (Diop, 2021).Item What's Playing? Immediacy, Authenticity, and Playfulness in the Work of Christophe Honoré, Ahmed Madani, and Faustine Noguès(2024) Muravchik, Madeline; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Christophe Honoré’s Le Ciel de Nantes (2021), Ahmed Madani’s Incandescences (2021), and Faustine Noguès’ Surprise parti (2019) represent a new wave of French playwrights who have rejected postmodern aesthetics and have intentionally returned to traditional classic French theater techniques - immediacy, authenticity, and playfulness - in order to create compelling theater for contemporary French audiences despite being confronted with the development of film and social media. These works rely specifically on the synchronous co-presence of performer and spectator. They create intimate portraits of different aspects of French life, drawing on material from both auto/biography and fiction. At their core, these elements are used to explore liveness, whether thematically by looking at an array of human connections (self to family, self to community, self to society), or artistically by exploring the nature of representation and play on stage.Item Gynocolonial Legacies: Lasting Influences of the French Founding Mothers in North America(2023) Robinson, Elizabeth W; Baillargeon, Mercédès; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the annals of history, women have begun to emerge as silent architects and resilient figures who have navigated the labyrinthine constructs of patriarchal systems. Their stories are finding their way to the light of day and taking up more space than they have previously. Such is the case with the historical figures of les filles du roi in New France, and the Casket Girls in Louisiana. In this dissertation, I embark on a comprehensive analysis of literary works from Quebec and Louisiana and the representation of these historical figures within them. Through the stories about the women transported to the French colonies in the late 17th century and early 18th century to serve the patriarchy as wives and mothers, this study extends beyond mere literary and historical analysis and explores the influence of these women in shaping cultural identity reinforced by patriarchal norms.Item QUELLES RELATIONS EXISTENT LES PRÉNOMS ET L’IDENTITÉ FRANÇAISE, ET COMMENT CETTE RELATION A-T-ELLE EVOLUÉ DEPUIS 1803 ?(2023) Laverdiere, Marie; Campangne, Hervé-Thomas; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis analyzes the connection between prénoms (first names) and l’identité française (French identity). Today, l’identité française is a term that can be used to create a negative view of immigrants, favoring a homogenous national identity. This paper analyzes the history and evolution of l’identité française to better understand how and why the term can be negatively associated. Simultaneously, this paper tries to connect the evolution of l’identité française with analyses of the changing prénoms in France.Item La "malgachisation" du théâtre: au croisement des traditions autochtones et des expérimentations théâtrales entre les années 1950 et 1990(2023) Cormier, Leandra; Orlando, Valerie K.; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on Malagasy experimental theater written and performed from the 1950s to the 1990s. This timeframe is important because it draws a parallel between the 1947 political revolution, leading to the independence of Madagascar in 1960 and, at the same time, the rebirth of classical (traditional) theatrical production; theatre silenced by the colonizer because it was in the Malagasy language. Ironically, the Malagasy Cultural Revolution also led to the rebirth of literary and theatrical production in the French language, thus establishing the sociocultural and linguistic multivalent qualities of Malagasy society’s collective memory denied by the colonizer and betrayed by the revolution of 1972. During this time, the theatrical oeuvre produced fostered thinking about Malagasy history as a braid of different sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic pasts.Item HIDDEN SPIRITUALITY: MARGINALIZED DESIRE IN THE WORKS OF ALBERT COHEN(2023) Blank, Samuel Galen; Frisch, Andrea; Mahalel, Adi; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the role of marginalized desire in the works of Swiss-French author Albert Cohen; specifically, marginalized desire within same-sex and Jewish-Christian interfaith relationships, which have historically been deemed socially and religiously corrupt and therefore have been seen to constitute boundaries to spiritual legitimacy. Therefore, this study seeks to understand why Cohen grants such marginalized desires the same spiritual legitimacy as mainstream desire in his novels, and what can be learned from the effects of this decision. Albert Cohen’s relationship to marginalization is explored across the various chapters, which address immigration, oscillations between tradition and modernity, and curiosity towards same-sex and interfaith couplehood. The final chapter of this dissertation presents a pedagogical implementation of this material. Initially perceived as an outsider, Albert Cohen used imaginative literature to compensate for this supposed errant state, as he actively sought to conquer French culture and forge his place in the Francophone Europe of the 20th century. The result is a novel that creates a refraction of pluralistic Judaism with an affirming spirituality, one that showcases the common righteousness in all of humanity. For Cohen, this righteousness exists beyond cultural constructions such as nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Inspired by his own life experiences, the author depicts same-sex attraction as just beyond his complete ability to conquer, in essence just beyond his world, which is synonymous with the Eternal. Ultimately, this spiritual elevation of marginalized desire conducted by the author reflects a proximity to God that is possible regardless of social and cultural boundaries to spirituality.Item Féminisme sur Instagram : un bilan mitigé(2022) Danos, Clara Clémentine Alice; Orlando, Valérie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online feminism was birthed alongside the Internet in its infant stages. With the years, it evolved into a virtual fight on social media and especially on Instagram. The goal of this thesis is to analyze content created by French feminists on Instagram and decide if it could be identified as a fourth wave of feminism in which women would rule the virtual world emancipating themselves from patriarchy in virtual life, in hopes of a more equitable society offline. Presently, alterations in combat against this ubiquitous foe are becoming more accessible, pedagogical, and aesthetic. However, these adaptations corrupt the core of feminism itself; lost consistence in the process with a lack of references, novelty, and anti-capitalist spirit. These inhibitors actively preventing the progression of a fourth wave. Consequently, feminists currently navigate the parameters of male engineered social media and experiencing an Instagram that is complicit in masculinist abuse through internal politics and outside actors.Item Women’s Voices in a Fourteenth-Century Chansonnier: Representation and Performance in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308(2021) Ruisard, Rachel Anne; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The chansonnier, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, contains over 500 Old French lyrics, many unica, and numerous chansons de femme. Scholars of medieval lyric have associated the female voice with repetition and simplicity, but I demonstrate that representations of women in the Douce 308 lyrics instead bend formal conventions and subvert genres. Using case studies from the chansonnier’s pastourelles, ballettes, motets, rondeaux, jeux-partis, and grands chants, I examine the representations of women as shepherdesses, nuns, beguines, malmariées, maidens, and debate participants, and demonstrate how their voices resist genre norms while reinforcing courtly behaviors and female stereotypes. In the pastourelles, shepherdesses’ refrains express resistance within male-framed narratives; when refrains are absent, the shepherdess is subject to violence. The contrast of registers and social relationships in the pastourelles is mirrored by the poem preceding them, Jacques Bretel’s Le Tournoi de Chauvency, where women act as arbiters of chivalry during the day, and at night act in scenes that juxtapose courtly and popular culture through characters and intertextual references. Chansons de malmariée and chansons de nonne show religious women desiring love in higher and lower registers and borrowing refrains from the fabliau, grand chant, pastourelle, chanson d’ami, romance narrative, and Biblical texts. Unmarried women’s voices in the ballettes resist stereotypes of the female voice by manipulating narrative expectations and citing ambiguous refrains. In jeux-partis, women rewrite discourses of chivalry by expressing desire. My case studies, here within the courtly contexts of Bretel’s Tournoi, contribute to our understanding of the woman’s voice in Old French lyric and demonstrate that female-voiced lyrics participated in the late-thirteenth-century shift from courtly to popular genres in French song through the manipulation of refrains and juxtapositions of register, genre, and gender by their poets. I show how the texts of Douce 308 also contribute feminine fantasies of pleasure and power in love within a lyric tradition that privileged male pleasure and perspectives.Item FEMINIZING THE “BANLIEUE”, AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE COMING OF AGE STORIES IN GIRLHOOD, DIVINES AND CUTIES(2021) Bichon, Clara; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Girlhood (2014) by Céline Sciamma, Divines (2016) by Houda Benyamina and Cuties (2020) by Maïmouna Doucouré denounce the multiple oppressions young women undergo in the French “banlieue” through coming of age stories. My goal is to investigate how the reappropriation of the traditional Bildungsroman structures allow a better denunciation of social seclusions. I also focus on the different representations of an intersectional “banlieue” shedding light on multiple axes of oppression. Finally, I study the alternatives offered by the three women directors for their characters as well as for their audience thanks to feminine solidarity as well as to the reappropriation of the traditional male gaze on female bodies. The consequences of these representations translate a French societal mirror to better denounce and fight against the exclusions that young women living in the “banlieue” undergo.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.