French

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Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    Au fond de l'inconnu : le monstre et le héros des deux cultures fantaisistes
    (2014) Kahn, Nicholas A. B.; Sedley, David Louis, 1968-
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    De l’autre côté de la nuit : Les mémoires de Céleste Mogador
    (2013) Alexis, Ralph; Armstrong, Grace
    Elisabeth‐Céleste Vénard née le 27 Décembre 1824 à Paris, fût la grande et fameuse courtisane Parisienne du XIXème. Ce siècle ne connut aucune autre courtisane aussi audacieuse que Céleste Mogador—nom dont la notoriété la suivra dans les quartiers de Paris. Publié en 1854, les cinq volumes de ses mémoires, relatant de manière à la fois intime et puissante la vie d’une femme prostituée, provoquèrent grande drame et scandale à travers la capitale. Ces mémoires montrent la vraie vie des prostituées et le passé difficile qu’elles ont enduré.
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    Écrire l'immortalité : La nature et la transcendance chez Colette et Hannah Arendt
    (2021) Coleman, Jacob; Corbin, Kathryne; Brust, Imke
    In my thesis (text in French), I work primarily with Hannah Arendt's conception of immortality and eternity as proposed in The Human Condition (1958) to widely interpret depictions of "time" and "nature" in two works by Colette, Les Heures longues (1917) and Le blé en herbe (1923). I propose a definition of a "natural time" inspired by Arendt's immortal cycle, and extend this definition to the homeostatic processes within the human body, simultaneously speculating on the relationship between literature and immortality. In the final chapter, I examine Julia Kristeva's commentary of Colette, critiquing Kristeva's use of the Freudian "death drive" as not wholly applicable to Colette. I suggest an alternative view of a creative death, inspired by Simone Weil's mystic theology.
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    Hésiter: Une analyse structurelle du réel et du merveilleux dans les Lais de Marie de France
    (2013) Harris, Arielle Simone; Armstrong, Grace; Sedley, David Louis, 1968-
    The Breton lay is a form of oral poetry from the medieval period. In this essay I compare the functions of ʺle merveilleuxʺ and ʺle réelʺ in the Lais of Marie de France, a group of lays written in anglo‐normand for King Henry II of England. Using the theories of Barthes, Propp, and Brémond, I am able to analyze the Lais from a structural perspective. Ultimately, these theories highlight how the plots of the lais either depend on interpersonal relationships or the types of elements in the lay, and in particular, whether or not they contain ʺmerveilleuxʺ objects or characters.
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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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    La Relation entre Mission Terminée et Afrique Noire, Littérature Rose
    (2013) Gant, Samuel E.; Higginson, Pim
    In my essay I explore the relationship between Mongo Beti's polemical essay Afrique Noire, Littérature Rose and his book Mission Terminée. In the essay Beti assumes a strictly anticolonial stance and insists, perhaps paradoxically, that African authors must be unequivocally anticolonial in their books but also must be published and widely read by a metropolitan French audience. I use the criteria he establishes for good, authentic African literature in his essay and apply it to his novel to see if the book can be classified as anticolonial. I conclude that the novel is a polemical text like the essay, but it is far more nuanced and accessible to a wide variety of audiences.
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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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    Le paradoxe de la mécanisation : l'héritage de Descartes dans la culture française du XVIIe siècle
    (2024) Castellón, Alexandra Miranda; Sedley, David Louis, 1968-
    This senior essay examines a paradox that emerges from René Descartes' conceptualization of "the method" in relation to the development of classical mechanics in the 17th century.
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    Le Régent à Ispahan: mises en fiction allégoriques de Philippe d’Orléans et la Régence (1721-1745)
    (2012) Jones, Harrison; Le Menthéour, Rudy
    The Regency period of early modern France (1715-1723) represents an eight-year overture between the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV's reign and the development of the Enlightenment movement over the course of the century. After the death of the Sun King, the heir to the throne was his eight-year-old grandson, the future Louis XV. The regency was granted to the late king's nephew, the bon vivant Philippe d'Orleans, a more liberal influence at court who sought to introduce political and economic reform such as John Law's attempt at a state bank. While the courtly nobility and the parliaments (judicial bodies with limited legislative input) initially saw increased involvement in the affairs of the state, the later half of the Regent's reign would see the return of absolutist tendencies and the concentration of power in the hands of a few powerful ministers. As contemporaries struggled to make sense of the sometimes chaotic political and economic changes of the period, they increasingly turned to a body of literature, allegorical novels, to make sense of events and express their apprehension and anxiety over developments at the Palais Royal. The period saw the development of a form of literature in which contemporary events, especially matters of the court and the influences of ministers, were incorporated into fiction, often under the guise of oriental or ancient Greek stories. While this transposition was designed to fool the censor, in many ways it was designed to be transparent enough to the reader that they could recognize the stories for what they were--fascinating glimpses into the life of the king and the workings of royal government. Increasingly, such literary sites became centers for exposure to a multitude of opinions and the development of a debate on royal policies that the reader could participate in. Authors refused to participate in a univocal propaganda effort, either in favor of or against the Regent, and instead sought to incorporate a number of different view points. In fact, the very nature of the relationship between readers and the act of reading was in the process of changing. The vision of reading as a form of obedience to royal policy was increasingly replaced with a desacralized one in which readers formed their own opinion of the monarch after being presented with multiple points of view. While much scholarship has focused on the descralization of the monarchy in the later half of the century, the Regency era represents a critical first step in the shift towards Enlightenment values amongst readers.
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    Mobilité et [post-]modernité
    (2004) Korbage, Aiham; Mahuzier, Brigitte
    This French paper looks at the paradoxical nature of modern progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. It deals with the works of Charles Baudelaire and those of Céline, especially focusing on Voyage to the end of the night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). The paper will examine modern means of transportation and communication, and the negative and violent images associated with them. The fast modernization in the last half of the nineteenth century ends with WWI. From this point, Modernity becomes post-modernity, but the contradictory aspects of the former persist. The more we communicate, the further we are separated. Modern mobility and progress do not succeed in uniting humanity. On the contrary, they increase the distance between people. Progress becomes all the more rapid, absurd and even dangerous. Having lost control, Man is driven to his dehumanization.
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    Mutatis mutandis: La perspective et les transformations spatiales dans Gargantua et Pantagruel
    (2015) Mueller, Whitney; Le Menthéour, Rudy
    Au XVIe siècle, François Rabelais publie les livres Gargantua et Pantagruel, dont les héros éponymes sont des géants. Or ces géants sont de taille fluctuante : Pantagruel, par exemple, voyage de Valence à Angiers en "troys pas et un sault" et fait l'amour à une femme avignonnaise dans le même chapitre. Je m'appuie sur le dispositif de la perspective (nouvellement venu de l'Italie) afin de pénétrer dans la représentation spatiale chez Rabelais. La thèse se divise en trois parties principales. Dans la première partie, il s'agit d'analyser les confrontations entre les deux géants et plusieurs interlocuteurs de taille normale par rapport aux notions du point de vue et du point de fuite. La deuxième partie entreprend une analyse des métaphores spatiales qui confondent les corps représentés avec l'espace de représentation. Enfin, la troisième partie considère la création spatiale et architecturale et ses évocations de thèmes sociales et politiques, en suivant des notions avancées par Alberti, architecte et figure fondatrice de la perspective.
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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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    Policer la prostitution parisienne au XVIIIème siècle
    (2015) Lellman, Charlotte; Le Menthéour, Rudy
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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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