Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Les (En)jeux de la femme: conflits et (ré)solutions dans la littérature vietnamienne et sénégalaise d'expression française(2010) Hoang, Phuong; Orlando, Valerie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I analyze the female conflicts and resolutions that are represented in two Francophone Vietnamese novels - En s'écartant des ancêtres and La Réponse de l'Occident by Trinh Thuc Oanh - and two Francophone Senegalese novels - Une si longue lettre and Un Chant écarlate by Mariama Bâ. I begin with an exploration of the patriarchal constraints of Vietnamese and Senegalese societies in order to demonstrate that female oppression results in the competition between women for men and their resources. Additionally, since women are considered the bearers of culture due to their role as mothers, the introduction of Western culture through colonization creates a cultural conflict between traditional and `modern' or `Westernized' women in these societies. Despite these conflicts, I also address the authors' proposal of education and careers for women as channels through which the socio-cultural and personal liberation of Vietnamese and Senegalese women will be possible.Item Chaotic Topography in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature(2010) Wittrock, Mary Cobb; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chaos theory proposed by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers illuminates new conclusions about narrative structures in contemporary French and Francophone literature. Espousing an order-out-of-chaos paradigm, my tutor texts by Annie Ernaux, Frankétienne, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint demonstrate how the contemporary notions of identity, gender and genre are innately chaotic but simultaneously offer innovative insights into how these entities are being (re)conceived and (re)presented. Scientific, philosophical, and cultural models of chaos described by Prigogine, Deleuze and Glissant respectively, offer a means to understand the world in order to frame a contemporary cultural topography. Liberated limits of the novel, poetry, and diary genre, viewed through the concept of chaotic "noise", represent richness of information rather than a dearth in order. With Prigogine's Arrow of Time, identity is found in the future not in the past suggesting a non-linear development that is plagued with uncertainty but possibilities. Consequently, identity in contemporary literature is located in others and not in the self challenging traditional notions of this concept. Bifurcation points serve as nodes of "textual instability" revealing themes and trends questioning the function of language, identity and generic transitions in contemporary literature. Through the concept of strange attractors, women, men, language and places within these chaotic tutor texts serve as points of order to which chaotic narratives consistently return advocating the creative force of non-gendered chaos. Accordingly not only can the notion of identity, love and language be viewed as fractal within their own textual space, but the texts themselves transcend generic boundaries. Finally, the contemporary cultural topography is expanding to include electronic literature as an area of critical study. Due to the medium of transmission, i.e., the computer code, electronic literature presents chaotic form and content and challenges traditional notions of `reading' a text. Consequently, the reader interacts with the computer code causing the `narrative' to bifurcate resulting in multiple, unpredictable reading experiences. Chaos theory thus offers a pertinent tool through which to read and interpret this genre. Electronic literature's literariness, viewed through chaos theory, is defined as what changes instead of what remains constant.Item LA THEATRALITE ET LA CRITIQUE DE LA DROITE DANS LES MANDARINS DE SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR(2009) Bayliss, Ann; Verdaguer, Pierre; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the use of theatrical forms to illustrate social criticism in Les Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir draws from works of classic theater and literature to depict the confluence of art, politics, and money in a capital city. Henri, editor of a political newspaper and a writer, is a contemporary Alceste whose desire to live in a better world seems at odds with his impulse to abandon it. Anne, wife of the leader of a left-wing movement, and a psychologist, is a modern Marion, loving, practical, and idealistic. As they and their friends search for meaning and solvency, they struggle against pessimism, fatalism, complacency, artistic escapism, the national interest argument among nations, the military-industrial power complex, and paranoia. Their tragic missteps recall Hamlet, while their everyday life invites comparison to a medieval farce, and the lovers take their cues from Beaumarchais. For the protagonists, as for the author herself, art and writing become a reason and a vision of human solidarity, putting into question the necessity of a world order dominated by capital.Item Feigned Histories: Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Spanish Chivalric Romance(2009) Crowley, Timothy D.; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study re-evaluates Sidney's method and purpose for inventing Arcadia, through analyzing his fiction in tandem with the Spanish genre of chivalric "feigned history." It introduces the new perspective that Arcadia exploits structural and thematic focus on clandestine marriage in Feliciano de Silva's feigned Chronicle of Florisel de Niquea, Part Three (1535), as rendered in translation by Jacques Gohory as "Book" Eleven in the French Amadis cycle (1554). Old Arcadia follows that chivalric paradigm in Books One through Three; then it employs motifs from ancient prose fiction by Apuleius and Heliodorus in Books Four and Five to amplify plot conflict tied to the protagonist lovers' secret marriages. Imitation of Spanish pastoral romances by Montemayor and Gil Polo in Old Arcadia's Eclogues supplements the work's primary narrative plane and also facilitates Protestant aesthetic impressions of marriage and affective individual piety. Shifts in literary source material occur as means to extend and enrich thematic focus and narrative poetics of those first three Books. Sidney's narrative establishes admiratio for its protagonist lovers and reader complicity with them, while imposing comic and tragic distance from other main characters. These observations revise dominant critical assumptions about Old Arcadia. Building upon its chivalric source material, Sidney's fiction increases verisimilitude and invents its own rhetorical focus on dynastic union through clandestine marriage. This study observes for the first time that political tension and legal debate in Old Arcadia's conclusion revolve around that issue. Sidney's fiction figures forth a succession crisis contingent upon legal complications with the issue of clandestine marriage in Arcadia, in a manner congruous with Genevan, French, and Tridentine legal reform on that matter, as well as with England's unique legal situation regarding secret marriage. The story's intellectual focus on justice and equity complements its author's concern with the case of his uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While Sidney composed Arcadia, his own political and economic prospects remained largely contingent upon Leicester's secret marriage. This study opens new avenues for research on continuity in Sidney's oeuvre and on New Arcadia's influence in English prose fiction and drama of the 1590s and the seventeenth century.Item Entre lettres et portraits: Madame Du Deffand, auteur?(2009) Zaghdoun, Eva; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My subject is about a famous woman who lived during the eighteenth century, Marie Du Deffand (1696-1780). During the eighteenth century, Madame Du Deffand was well known mostly because she was an important "salonnière". Her "salon" was one of the most frequented by the philosophers, and the scholars who wanted to be well seen in society. Also, during this century, letters were very important in the `'salon'' because they were both a way of social communication and a way for literary creation. In my thesis, I will show how Madam Du Deffand was a remarquable woman of the eighteenth century whose story needs to be told. In fact, even though she always refused to publish, her perceptive portraits of her contemporaries and her correspondence with Voltaire and Horace Walpole could be considered as work which distinguish her and give her the status of an author.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.Item LES CARAFES DANS LA VIVONNE : L'EMPLOI INTERTEXTUEL DES GENRES LITTÉRAIRES FIN-DE-SIÈCLE DANS A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU(2008-12-01) Lozinsky, Elena; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the use of fin-de-siècle literary genres in A la recherche du temps perdu with four questions in mind: where, how, and to what degree do the literary genres associated with symbolism and decadence appear? What is their relationship to earlier Proustian texts? What role do they play in the overall construction of the novel? What is their relationship to earlier literary genres present in the work? In answering these questions, I argue that the complex layers and fragments that the fin-de-siècle genres represent are essential to the very existence of the novel. The reading that emerges shows how Proust's intertextual echoes, references, quotes, and allusions work within its primary subject, the literary vocation of the narrator, in whose voice many of the references are made. Intertextuality becomes, in this view, the literary foundation of the work. Along the way, I uncover a fundamental element of Proust's writing process, showing how his work on seemingly disparate fragments from his reading and writing past led to the creation of a single, integrated work. We see how the self-referential intertextuality so particular to La recherche foreshadows the discoveries literary theory would make throughout the second half of the 20th century. I begin with a discussion of Proust's view of the literary world of the period 1873-1913, especially symbolism and decadence. I then establish a typology of genres typical of this period and present the specific intertextual relations between this literature and La recherche. I go on to analyze in detail the role of fin-de-siècle theater , especially symbolist drama, in the work. A second in-depth analysis uncovers the genesis and function of Proust's use of the prose poem. Finally, I take a close look at the mythological elements in the novel -- proposing a new interpretation of the title Within a Budding Grove, -- analyzing their roots and raising Proustian points of departure from symbolist and decadent aesthetics. In truth, the use of fin-de-siècle literary genres must be seen as a point of departure writ large, as it gave rise to a new genre, that of the Proustian novel itself.Item Dans le fleuve de l'oubli: Journal de Catherine de Charrière de Sévery(2008-05-02) Lanz, Anne-Marie; Letzter, Jacqueline; Frisch, Andrea; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The diary, as a first person literary genre, remains difficult to differentiate from its counterparts. The earliest diaries written in French date from the mid-eighteenth century when the concept of expression of the self was just emerging. Six diaries of Catherine de Sévery (1741-1796), an eighteenth century aristocrat living in Lausanne, not yet part of Switzerland, allow the readers to discover this emergence of the self while in the same time get a picture of the society in which she lived. Spread over forty years of her life, these diaries cover a variety of topics including health, political events, customs, and family relationships. Related to Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant, Catherine de Sévery likewise had close ties with British historian Edward Gibbon and physician Samuel Tissot . Containing numerous references to literary works, these diaries provide a rich source of information on the influence of the Enlightenment in the Pays de Vaud.Item Imaginarios de la resistencia antifascista española: memoria, literatura, cine(2008-04-25) Linville, Rachel Ann; Naharro Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the memory of the Spanish antifascist resistance movement that opposed the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1936-1975) through an analysis of literary and visual texts that depict the struggle. Soon after the military uprising in 1936 (that toppled the elected government in 1939), a resistance movement began to form as many Spaniards fled to the mountains. Although the rural movement had mostly died out by 1952, the last resistor was not killed until 1965. My analysis of several aspects of memory contributes to a better understanding of the literary and filmic representations of this movement. The extensive bibliography, including novels, short stories, autobiographies, transcribed interviews, documentaries, and fiction films, is united by Pierre Nora's conception of artistic creations as lieux de mémoire. I examine the evolution of these works (published in Spanish, Catalán, Gallego, Portuguese, French, and English) and classify them in five periods that extend from 1936 to 2006. Through a consideration of these periods, memory's complex relationship with identity and power is visible in the changing image of the resistors, their fight, and the fascist forces and the fluctuating level of interest in the resistance. By focusing on a few representative works from the prolific final period (1997-2006), including Maquis (1997) by Alfons Cervera and Soldados de Salamina (2003) by David Trueba, I study several aspects of collective and traumatic memory. Dominik LaCapra's ideas on loss and absence enable me to explain why the protagonist of Maquis continues to act out his traumatic memories instead of work through them. The fact that the fascist regime prohibits him from mourning the death of his father, a resistance fighter, causes him to experience this death as an absence instead of as a loss which prevents him from achieving closure. Likewise, his tarnished fingernails constantly provoke him to remember his traumatic memories that include the torture inflicted on him. Nevertheless, it seems that this extensive and recent imaginary, so removed from the struggle, is slowly decaying. The future representations of the Spanish antifascista guerrilla resistance are unpredictable since memory, forms, and history endlessly change through the passing of time.Item Regards français sur l'Amerique: de l'entre-deux-guerres a la Guerre froide(2007-08-02) Dawley, Edward A; Verdaguer, Pierre M; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Regards français sur l'Amérique : de l'Entre-deux-guerres à la Guerre froide (French Perceptions of America: From the Roaring Twenties to the Cold War) examines the reactions of French intellectuals to various aspects of American culture and politics. Based principally on the writings of contributors to Les Temps modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945, this work will examine in great detail the aforementioned co-founders' impressions of the United States as well as the observations of many of Les Temps modernes' contributing writers. Moreover, this dissertation will compare and contrast the views espoused by the Les Temps modernes group with the depictions of the United States exhibited by French thinkers such as André Siegfried, Georges Duhamel, Vladimir Pozner, Frantz Fanon and Bernard-Henri Lévy. This work analyzes these writers' pronouncements on American cultural and political phenomena, including Puritanism, literature, music, race relations, and anticommunism. In light of the above, this dissertation may be considered a study in transcultural perception and the epistemological pitfalls said perception poses. In this regard, people generally judge foreign cultures through the prism of preconceived notions derived in large part from their native culture. This prism, in fact, is a metaphor for the "barriers of otherness" that come into play whenever the act of transcultural perception takes place. This study will examine the effects of these barriers of otherness on the French observers' appreciation of the United States by placing their findings somewhere along a sliding scale ranging from the most objective to the most subjective. The articles by Philippe Soupault and Claude Roy are examples of a relatively objective appraisal of the checks and balances inherent in the way the so-called puritanical moral code is maintained in American society (Chapter 1). At the other end of the scale is the Temps modernes group's totally subjective conjecture on the Rosenberg affair, sparked in large part by the group's Communist sympathies and its stance against the American government (Chapter 5). This study will conclude with a discussion on the varying degrees of certitude associated with various modes of transcultural perception.