Browsing by Subject "French"

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Baroque and post/colonial Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa: The aesthetic embodiment of unreason.
(2010-07) Joslin, Isaac V.
My dissertation approaches postcolonial African literature and political culture through the lens of a baroque aesthetic of spectacle and subversion. The basic premise is that the baroque, identified by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses (1966) as that pivotal transition between the Renaissance and classical episteme, is characterized by representational and rhetorical strategies that draw on the morbid-erotic and corporeal imagination to represent "reality" as an irrational, chaotic encounter of conflictive forces. From the notion of a "modern baroque" proposed by Christine Buci-Glucksmann in La Raison Baroque (1984), I develop a broad theory of the baroque that encompasses both art and critical theory, as well as material socio-economic realities of late or high modernity. Then, drawing from Édouard Glissant's discussion of a contemporary global baroque phenomenon in his work Poétique de la Relation (1990), my dissertation looks specifically at the baroque in postcolonial Africa, as a literary aesthetic, and as a political style of power and related subversive practices identified by Achille Mbembe in his work De la Postcolonie (2000). Through concerted analyses of select African novels by Yambo Ouologuem, Henri Lopes, Sony Labou Tansi, Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and others, I explicate the different characteristics of a baroque aesthetic practice in postcolonial francophone African literature.
Beyond Stereotypes: Imagining Other Histories, Politics, and Identities in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Comedy of Stage and Screen
(2023-12) Ice, Christopher
This dissertation project investigates the ways in which ethnic minority comedy functions as a space where historically marginalized humorists talk and laugh back at dominant discourses, stereotypes, and status quos regarding immigrant and visible ethnic minority populations in contemporary France. Through analyses of themes of history, politics, and identities, this work demonstrates not only how these comedians subvert racist and xenophobic preconceived notions and rhetoric that have been deeply engrained in the French collective consciousness, but also how they negotiate and imagine alternative narratives. Consideration of a wide range of mainstream comedic genres including stand-up, one-person shows, television sitcom, film comedy, and sketch comedy, traces the career paths of these increasingly popular performers and shows how they establish relationships with audiences and fan bases in order to communicate their messages. The first chapter is a history of ethnic minority comedy in France and is driven by the question of how a complete lack of mainstream representation for visible ethnic minority comedians in the 1970s evolved to the point today where some of the most popular and influential French humorists are of immigrant background. The following chapters of the dissertation focus on the comedic performers, Fellag and Jamel Debbouze, who respectively represent first- and second-generation immigrants in France. The second chapter presents and probes the work of the Franco-Algerian humorist, Fellag in his one-man shows, Djurdjurassique Bled (2000) and Le dernier chameau (2005) in order to show how he imagines a more inclusive concept of Algerian identity on both sides of the Mediterranean. The third chapter explores Jamel Debbouze’s political and social engagement in the film Le ciel, les oiseaux et…ta mère! (1999); the television sitcom, H (Canal +, 1998-2002); a collection of sketches entitled Made in Jamel (2010); and his one-man show, Tout sur Jamel (2011); and highlights Debbouze’s promotion of a multicultural France as well as his defense of marginalized populations in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
Data for Evaluation of Subcategorization Frames
(dataset self-published online, 2006) Chesley, Paula; Salmon-Alt, Suzanne
Data for evaluation of subcategorization frames as detailed in the paper "Automatic extraction of subcategorization frames for French", available at http://pages.cs.brandeis.edu/~marc/misc/proceedings/lrec-2006/pdf/101_pdf.pdf
Dataset for Research on Lexical Borrowings in French
(dataset self-published online, 2010) Chesley, Paula; Baayen, R. Harald
Dataset of lexical borrowings obtained from a corpus of newspaper French (Le Monde; Abeille et al. 2003) as described in "Lexical Borrowings in French: Anglicisms as a separate phenomenon" and "Predicting new words from newer words: Lexical borrowings in French"
Ego Vox Clamantis in Deserto: the lyricization of human authority in 13th-Century French dits
(2014-12) Grant, Adam Tyler
In this work, I consider a theoretical foundation based on the treatment of literary auctores in the 13th-century latinate literary culture as a useful tool in discerning the development of lyrical self-expression in contemporary Old French dits. I first approach the surviving corpus of works attributed to the writer Rutebeuf in order to determine how scribal treatment of this vernacular author interacted with erudite Latinate literary theory. Critically, how did scribes manipulate the space in which Rutebeuf existed as a writer? How are the varied forms of transmission - from large swaths of unified sections to the inclusion of one single dit within a manuscript of a few hundred folia - to be understood within the framework of an active literary culture? I argue that the lively manipulation and appropriation of Rutbeuf's works within various textual and thematic environments attest to a wider discursive reception of the author as a true source of experiential knowledge. Moreover, the self-portrayal that Rutebeuf effected through the construction of his persona is further proof that the vernacular writer himself was a part of this evolving discursive process. In order to justify the claim that this reception was allowed by a wider re-evaluation of the function of vernacular writers, I apply the same approach with a near contemporary of Rutebeuf, Adam de la Halle. As melodic composition and oral performativity risk eroding the existence of the lyrical writer within the work, how did Adam operate within his formative literary sphere as an author? What was the nature of the connection between the writer and his work that communicated ownership over sense and interpretation by the creator of the text? The game of monophony and polyphony in mediating the voices that constitute a work is equally as critical - how did Adam reflect himself from the chansons onto his jeux?
Exhibit Catalog for, "SEM, GiGi, and Caricature," February 3 - April 19, 2015
(2015) Boudewyns, Deborah K. Ultan; Keating, Lindsay; Otten, Nikki
The exhibition, "Sem, GiGi, and caricature," celebrates the new thirty-foot long acquisition, "Sem au Bois," accompanied by other special collection materials contextualizing caricature during la Belle Epoque in France, and as expressed in the comedic novella, "GiGi," written by the French author Colette. On display are late 19th and early 20th century illustrated journals, books, prints, and newspapers from the University of Minnesota Special Collections, in particular, the Francis V. Gorman Rare Art Book Collection.
Family Remains: the politics of legacy in eighteenth-century France
(2014) Rutler, Tracy LeAnne
This dissertation accounts for the persistent occurrence of outsider figures (orphans, bastards, and exotic Others) in eighteenth-century French literature, and analyzes how these figures interrogate traditional and patriarchal models of family. As Michel Foucault argues in the first volume of History of Sexuality, the family unit serves as a generative site of power in early modern European societies. While Foucault focuses primarily on the marital and parents-children axes and their relevance to the formation of the individual political body, this dissertation analyzes how such power is also generated in the absence of these relationships. I argue that in their portrayal of figures that remain on the fringes of the family unit, the authors studied in this dissertation participate in a utopian experiment - one intended to create a better society through a discourse on evolved family relations. "Family Remains" combines structuralism with political and psychoanalytic theory to propose a new way of reading non-domestic fictional literature through the lens of the family. In so doing, it suggests that by arranging characters into non-heteronormative intimate communities, these authors create a new language of family politics, and in the process they propose new forms of power that are not necessarily passed from fathers to sons.
Gisèle Pineau
(Voices from the Gaps, 2005) Adamson, April; Koerpel, Michael; Majewski, Maggie
L'Alzire de Voltaire et Racine
(1920-06) Guinotte, Marguerite
Lieux d’être: l’identité en chantier dans les romans algériens d’expression française.
(2012-08) Calas, Marina
Abstract summary not available
L’enfant-peuple: Rimbaud,Vallès, literary, politics, and the legacy of the commune
(2011-06) St. Clair, Robert A.
This thesis proposes a model of reading Arthur Rimbaud's early poems in verse and Jules Vallès's novels at the intersections of cultural historiography and contemporary continental political theory and philosophy, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Rancière, in order to argue that they represent and deploy a revolutionary literary politics capable of giving voice to a subject theorized as the "infans".
Memory, monarchy and identity on the `Scepter'd Isle': constructing identity through historical fiction in Renaissance England and France.
(2009-05) Ketner, Elizabeth
This dissertation examines the ways in which early modern English and French fiction writers revise history by writing new, imaginative texts that allow them to recover events and figures that are at times poorly documented in historical record. These writers use fiction's forms and conventions to present rivaling images of nationhood to those of the historical sources they are drawn from. By moving away from historical sources, such as chronicle histories, these fictional texts also move away from the moralizing purposes of Renaissance histories, which are supposed to offer ideal, patriotic models, usually in the great kings and queens of the past. Instead these texts destabilize historical kings and queens as didactic models, figuratively dethroning them. For they elevate different heroes and different voices, often individuals of little or dubious importance, men and women from all ranks who would be forgotten or denied in historical genres. In so doing, they allow new voices and figures to emerge to play a role in constructing national identity through literature. This project contrasts the aristocratic images of French identity proposed by the sixteenth-century French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre, and the seventeenth-century French aristocrat, Mme de Lafayette, to the bourgeois models of English identity depicted in late Elizabethan literature by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Deloney. In analyzing these fictions, this dissertation reveals fiction's important role in revising and challenging written history as well as the possibilities and constraints that fiction writers imagine for themselves and their countrywomen and countrymen in shaping themselves and their emerging nations, past, present, and future.
Modernity and ethics: the ghost of terror in French thought.
(2010-08) Reinberg, Mira
"Modernity and Ethics" examines the different incarnations of terror in literary and philosophical works, as well as in film, in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I follow texts engaged in thinking the dialectic between Enlightenment and violence and which had critical influence on French and Francophone thought in particular and contemporary global thought in general. Three principal questions emerge from my reading of these works: First, in light of the turbulent post-colonial reality in North Africa and France, as well as the Middle East, are there unique historical moments that call for a state of exception in which the law is suspended for raison d'Etat, or does ethics demand a rethinking of insurrection? Second, how do the positions which these writers take toward the understanding of violence shift the ideological frameworks that articulate or contest the conceptualization of terror? And third, what are the ethical stakes in the intersection of art and resistance? In works by Genet and films by Godard which confront the question of revolution I trace an ethics of resistance that is grounded more in the artistic interpretation of lived conflicts than in political endorsement or condemnation of violence. I analyze the notion of the gaze in Genet's work, and of time in films by Godard. I examine the continuing dialogue of modern thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, Benjamin, and Lyotard with the ethics of universalism founded by Enlightenment thought. The tension of this dialogue is exemplified in Hegel's conceptualization of the Reign of Terror as the logical consequence of an ideological philosophy. Modernity is haunted by the relationship between two seemingly incompatible phenomena: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and terror. The philosophical debate illuminates crucial questions that indicate the difficulty in articulating a viable understanding of modern conflicts. With a reading of Lacan's essay "Kant avec Sade," in which psychoanalysis confronts (Kant's) moral categories with Sade's literary formulation of "happiness in evil," I analyze the discourse of evil in a 19th-century short story by Villiers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary text provides important insights into the understanding of categorical ethical formulations.
Nouvelles dramaturgies africaines francophones du chaos
(2014-12) Ngilla, Sylvie Ndome
A new type of African Francophone theater has emerged since the 1990s, which announced a breaking point within the African literary landscape. This generation of contemporary writers from the African diaspora engages with notions of fragmentation, displacement, and instability that suggest a reconfiguration of chaos in Francophone African literary production since the Independences. The history of African literatures since 1960, when a large majority of former African colonies became independent, is marked by the theme of chaos with significant differences. Indeed, between 1960 and 1970, writers of the « disenchantment » denounce social and political chaos in Africa following the emergence of new dictatorships in the post-independence period. African theatrical aesthetics by the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s, on the contrary, work on an exit out of the African chaos from the perspective of revalorization, providing modern contextualizations for African myths and traditions. Since the early 1990s a rupture is established within new African theater that creates a performative space of « chaos-monde », which manifests the hybrid reality of the African diaspora at local and global levels. By reading across theatrical works by this generation that include Caya Makélé (Congo), Koffi Kwahulé (Ivory Coast), Marcel Zang (Cameroon), José Pliya (Benin), Kossi Efoui (Togo), and Dieudonné Niangouna (Congo), I shed light on the new techniques and aesthetics of an energetic chaos. A close examination of these new settings of chaos allows for a better understanding of the diasporic nature and transnational perspective from contemporary African theater.
On Bipartite Negation
(2019-07) Tilleson, Paul
Bipartite negation is the phenomenon in which two negators output to one instance of semantic negation. In this thesis I present an analysis of bipartite negation in Sgaw Karen, Ojibwe, and French, using original data from the former two languages and data from existing sources for French. I show that the negators in these languages differ with respect to clausal position, internal structure, meaning, and how the negators relate to each other. I argue that bipartite negation derives from either syntactic agreement or what I term NegP splitting, whereby two constituents in an extended projection of negation are merged in separate locations in the clause, similar to Poletto (2008) and de Clercq (2013). Sgaw Karen and French exhibit distinct variants of syntactic agreement. In Sgaw Karen, one negator is semantically uninterpretable and undergoes AGREE with the structurally lower interpretable negator, while in French both negators are interpretable goals for a structurally higher silent head responsible for imparting sentential negation. Ojibwe exhibits NegP splitting such that the sentential negator and a structurally higher negator are derived from a single extended projection of negation and are merged in two clausal positions. Both negators are interpretable for negation and cannot be in a syntactic agreement relation as I assume that only uninterpretable constituents initiate the AGREE operation. I present a framework of negation to explicate the functions of the negators in each language and to motivate why AGREE and NegP splitting are necessary to account for the range of facts on bipartite negation in these languages. Building on the work of de Clercq (2013), I argue that there are three classes of negators imparting contrary, contradictory, and focus negation respectively, each class having different internal structure. Each class of negator may merge in up to two distinct locations in the clausal spine, sentential negation being imparted by a contradictory negator merged in the TP domain. I show that dividing negators into classes based on meaning, internal structure, and clausal position has implications for the syntax of negative polarity emphasis, negative replies, and syntactic doubling outside of the domain of negation.
Post-pastoral possibilities: nature and the literary imaginary in Early Modern France.
(2011-12) Wellman, Sara
My dissertation argues for a new approach to early modern pastoral literature, reading representations of bucolic life not as escapist fantasies or political allegories, but as working models capable of transforming culture. I consider how pastoral texts from this period can inform ecocriticism, a growing field that studies the relationship between literature and the environment. As a corrective to the view that all pastoral literature romanticizes and masks the reality of the people and places it represents, ecocritic Terry Gifford has articulated a theory of the post-pastoral. The "post" is conceptual rather than temporal; it refers to texts that move beyond the idealizing "traps" of pastoral convention, texts that defy the stereotypes associated with this literary mode. I use this critical tool to explore the work of three early modern authors for whom the pastoral is a resolutely forward-looking mode that offers alternatives to existing social structures: Anne-Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, who imagines a "pastoral republic" in which the institution of marriage is abolished and women control their own destiny; Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, who uses pastoral to introduce new scientific theories of nature; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who understands literary representations of nature and natural subjects to be powerful catalysts of social transformation.
Pouvoir, violence et resistance en postcolonie : une lecture de en attendant le vote des betes Sauvages E’Ahmadou Kourouma
(2008-12) Ngong, Benjamin
This dissertation examines violence as portrayed in African literature, with particular attention to Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, to show that African fiction seems to absorb tragic facts cathartically and subsequently operates as acts of resistance against the after-effects of colonialism and abuses of power by dictatorial African regimes since independence. I argue that violence in Francophone post-colonial societies arises from two sources. Europe is the first source, as a consequence of its policies of imperialism, ethnocentrism, and racism against people who did not correspond to the required criteria of the “superior race.” This idea of a "perfect race" has survived to the present, but in a less radical form. The second source is from within Africa, and stems from the aftermath of the era of colonization. In studying the links between these two sources, I demonstrate that the responsibility for today’s political violence and abuses in postcolonial societies must be shared by both France and the corrupt regimes it imposed on its former colonies. On the one hand, survivors of independence recall how France eliminated any popular nationalist leaders, installing corrupt, bureaucratic regimes; on the other hand, those bureaucratic regimes’ continued pillaging replicates colonial exploitation of the past. Two forms of civilian resistance and cultural subversion particular to literature enable Francophone authors to maneuver across and through the official discourses that attempt to speak for the people, ultimately challenging the bases of single-ruler tyrannies that masquerade as democracies. I build on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of “habitus” to illustrate how social agents develop strategies adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious, and act at times with violence on the level of a bodily logic. I borrow Cameroon political theorist Achille Mbembe’s theory of “banality of power” and his notion of “Postcolony” to endorse his stance that “Francophone Africa has a specifically given historical trajectory - that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and violence that the colonial and postcolonial relationship involves,” that launched Africa into the “never-ending process of brutalization.
Review of Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood by Maryse Condé
(Voices from the Gaps, 2005) Ryan, Grace
Sound Moves: displacement and modernity in French and Senegalese cinemas
(2010-07) Dima, Vlad
My dissertation, "Sound Moves: Displacement and Modernity in French and Senegalese Cinemas," explores the relation between film, film sound, modernity, and the cultural politics of gender. Analyzing specific works by French and Senegalese directors, I demonstrate how Senegalese cinema constitutes an original artistic movement unto itself, which can be compared to an established school of expression such as the French New Wave. Both cinemas challenge the primacy of the visual by foregrounding how aural planes affect and alter the economy of visual planes. As a result, I determine that new (aural) narrative plateaus surface from the plurality and plasticity of sound, which displaces and complicates filmic images. These planes reshape the current paradigm of the relationship between spectator and film. In other words, the diverse sound manipulation techniques encountered in these cinemas generate a space continuum in which the audience becomes intimately involved with the projection on screen. I have identified and explored in depth two such prevalent techniques, the sonic jump-cut and the sonic rack-focus, which unfold aural planes in a way that suspends the visual-focused narration. Furthermore, I expose how sound displacement generates the displacement of the film subjects, who, in French and Senegalese films, constantly shift their identity because of their unique position as both products and counterpoints of modernity. I demonstrate that the re-appropriation of the discourse of female identity takes place through voice and sounds, disrupting the gendered relation that classical cinema established primarily through the scopic regime.
Le théâtre comme processus d’humanisation.
(2009-02) Crépon, Pascale
In my thesis, I examine the role and interrelation of the body and language in modern cultures and study the often problematic interaction between the individual and the collective. I use various interdisciplinary approaches such as Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology and phenomenology of theatre to discuss the challenges of constructing identity while facing dehumanizing elements of our everyday life. I define theatre as a paradigm of analysis of human interactions and thus a process of humanization. Theatre acts to negotiate between language and body, while addressing and confronting the self in its inscription within language, culture, and environment. I first study the mirror effect in psychoanalysis as well as in cinema and theatre in order to define the human subject as a spectactor. I then study the problematic of violence as a revealing tool for defining identity using the work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès. I continue with a discussion of identity as a fluctuating concept and question the role of psychological and physical violence in the construction of identities with the work of the francophone playwright Marie N'diaye. My dissertation moves toward a new discourse on the relationship between identity and violence, by articulating that the necessary condition for cognition is embodiment. In doing so, I situate my research between the phenomenology of the subject and that of theatre, which reaffirm together the place and responsibility of the self in relation to himself/herself and to the others.

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