Browsing by Author "Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Borrowed tongues: Djebar and Roy and the colonizer's language
    (2001) Talcott, L. Christina; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; Allen, Elizabeth
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    Imagining Africa: Négritude and Primitivism in Corps perdu
    (2020) Kerper, Alyssa; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; McKee, C. C.
    My thesis explores the way Pablo Picasso and Aimé Césaire claim Africa as a source of inspiration in their jointly-published book Corps perdu , an illustrated volume of poetry released in Paris in 1950. I look at the way Négritude, Césaire's guiding philosophy, and primitivism, an art movement popularized by Picasso, rely on a vision of Africa as both the romanticized home of "primitive," pre-colonized culture and as the site of horrific violence and exploitation. Using both text and image as evidence, I argue that the book mobilizes this conception of Africa in order to amplify the black voice in twentieth-century European culture
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    Le démon, le démiurgique et le commerce dans l’art: La double lecture de L'Œuvre de Zola
    (2015) Wolberg, Sarah; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    This thesis is a study of the sociological approach to the notion of artistic success and the complication of that vision of success in Émile Zola’s L'Œuvre (1886), a roman à clef that reproduces the development of impressionism in nineteenth-century France. L'Œuvre focuses on Claude Lantier, a painter whose characterization and avant-gardism recall Zola’s friends Cézanne and Manet. The sociology of art proposed by Hippolyte Taine, Pierre Bourdieu, and Arnold Hauser analyzes the artist’s relation to art-world institutions—including the Salon de peinture et sculpture, l’École des beaux-arts, and the art market—and concludes that the idealistic avant-gardist rejects those institutions’ influence to instead produce a revolutionary art, an art whose success is defined by the bourgeois and academic opposition it faces—a mark of innovation and avant-gardism. Claude’s paintings face this institutional rejection and he further distances himself from these commercial and academic institutions by rejecting their approval. The sociological reading of L'Œuvre concludes that Claude’s artistic success—separate from his commercial failure—is a product of his pure, idealistic rejection of the institutions that maintain the hierarchies of the art world. A deeper study of L'Œuvre reveals other factors influencing artistic production and success, including the artist’s demiurgic compulsion—the desire to reproduce the whole of the world in a single masterpiece. The demiurgic compulsion affects Zola as well as Claude and leads to inevitable failure because of the impossibility of this synthesis of the world in a single work. Another factor complicating artistic success is genius. Claude cannot materialize his genius in his paintings, which always fall short of their conception in his mind. Zola pathologizes Claude’s genius and his anguish at not being able to consummate his artistic vision, leading to monomania and the artist’s eventual suicide in front of his unfinished masterpiece. Finally, Zola complicates Claude’s absolutist condemnation of the intersection of art and commerce when he advises young artists not to eschew commercial art. Zola exemplifies this compromise in his own career, where literary innovation was accompanied by popularity and monetary success. I argue that L'Œuvre’s portrait of artistic production does not reflect a purely idealistic struggle against commercialism, but acknowledges the complexity of the artist’s struggle with his own psychology and his concept of pure art.
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    Locating Belonging in Postcolonial Space Homeland Narratives in René Philoctète’s Le Peuple des terres mêlées and Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies
    (2017) Hwang-Carlos, Miriam Soo Young; Roberts, Deborah H.; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    This thesis explores the construction of homelands through space, movement, and time in Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies (1990) and René Philoctète’s Le Peuple des terres mêlées (1989). Retour à la saison des pluies is an autobiographical novel of Lefèvre, who grew up marginalized in Vietnam for her mixed French and Vietnamese ethnicity. In the text, she returns to Vietnam for the first time after thirty years in France. Le Peuple des terres mêlées is a magical realist novel that takes place during the 1937 massacre of Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. In the text, Adèle, a Haitian woman, and Pedro, her Dominican husband, attempt to flee their deaths and reconstruct a borderland community. Racialized, nationalist, and (post)colonial forces complicate the concept of homeland for Lefèvre, Adèle, and Pedro. As they search for homeland and are excluded from communal homelands, they travel through time and space. Retour à la saison des pluies and Le Peuple des terres mêlées warp relationships between space, time, and body to explore the meaning of human movement and location.
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    «Paisible sauvagerie» : Les enfants et la mort dans la littérature et le film français modernes
    (2012) Serpico, Allison M.; Higginson, Pim; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    I examine the intersection of childhood and death in four works of modern French literature and film: La Maison de Claudine (Colette), W… (Perec), Les Mots ( Sartre), and Jeux interdits (Clément). Drawing on the French tradition of psychoanalysis and Freud’s theory of the “death instinct,” I examine these young characters and argue that their concretization of death is far more courageous and cathartic than society’s tendency to deny it. I also apply the image of the child exploring death as a metaphor for the modern French author, whose creative power stems from his appraisal and acceptance of personal loss.
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    Performance of "Apnée ou le Dernier des militants"
    (2019) Medansky, Kevin; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; Swanson, Laila
    For my thesis, I researched the history and development of Yves Reynaud’s monologue, Apnée ou le Dernier des militants, translated the script French to English, and performed the play in the original French, with English surtitles, on April 27, 2019. The text explores the life of Paul Kleinmann, who attempts to woo his neighbor by quitting smoking and staging an anti-tobacco presidential campaign, all from the confines of his apartment. Amid serious dope sickness, he must reconcile his profound hope for political change with the dangerous manifestations of power he witnesses in the news, before undergoing what he conceives of as a biological transformation into a natural leader. Although Apnée remains a comical critique of contemporary French politics, it ultimately focuses on Paul Kleinmann’s lifelong search for social connection and meaning.
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    Post-mémoire dans l'Algérie post-coloniale : Représentations du traumatisme intergénérationnel et de l'identité chez Samir Toumi et Leïla Sebbar
    (2019) Soto-Canetti, Gabriela; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    L’histoire violente de l’Algérie a toujours été une source de traumatisme chez les générations qui ont vu le jour après l’indépendance du pays en 1962. On peut en trouver l'évidence dans les textes publiés après cette date aussi bien en Algérie qu'en France. Les représentations du traumatisme dans ces textes dépendent de la manière dont les protagonistes ont gardé la mémoire de cette histoire. Cette thèse offre une étude détaillée de deux textes, L’Effacement de Samir Toumi et Parle mon fils parle à ta mère de Leïla Sebbar, pour explorer les effets du traumatisme chez la deuxième génération de l’Algérie post-coloniale. Ces représentations révèlent que c’est à travers les récits des parents, qui ont vécu les événements traumatiques, que le traumatisme est transféré aux enfants qui vont, à leur tour, le porter en eux. C'est ce que j'appelle post-mémoire à la suite de Marianne Hirsch.
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    Reshaping the Past: Configuring the coexistence of differing historical visions in La Lezarde and Clotel
    (2003) Lapp, Alison; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; Castillo Sandoval, Roberto
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    The Fragmentation of Central Authority in Pleurer-rire and Shame
    (1993) Goldman, Jennifer; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; Roberts, Deborah H.; Bernstein, Carol