Into the Woods: Motif-Based Fairy Tale Analysis and the Gendered Aesthetics of French 17th and 18th-Century Women Writers
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Francesca Canade-Sautman
TEST
The Art of Transformation: Motif, Metamorphosis and Adornment in Fairy Tales by French Women Writers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Francesca Canade-Sautman
For such beautiful and often times short stories, fairy tales have inspired diverse analyses from multiple scholars. The studies are as varied as the tales they discuss. There are historical and sociological viewpoints that study both the local culture and mannerisms displayed by the protagonists and the people whom they meet along their journey. The feminist approach looks at the role of women in these tales and how they interact as a group with each other as well as with the female protagonists in their fictional lives. Those who are intrigued by the psychological aspect of fairy tales look to Jung and Freud to fuel their dissection of tale elements.
Émergences du 17 octobre 1961 dans le texte contemporain
Author:
Chadia Chambers-Samadi
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Francesca Canadé-Sautman
On October 17th 1961, a crowd of North-Africans demonstrates against a racist curfew. A decree from The Paris Chief of Police, Maurice Papon forbids the free circulation of North Africans or Arabs at dawn, at the pinnacle of the Algerian struggle for independence. Children, women and men are urged to leave their suburban ghettos and gather in Paris Intra-Muro by the the FLN (National Liberal Front), a political group claiming independence for the French Departments we now know as Algeria. The night of October 1961 is deadly and many bodies of Algerians are thrown in the "Seine" River in Paris. More than 10 000 North African civilians are arrested and gathered in suburban stadiums for days. It is unclear today how many people lost their lives to the French police brutality; the estimation varies between 6 and 300.
The World Errant and the Creolization of Africa
Author:
Katherine Galvagni
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Abstract
Growing Old With Dignity: Women in Francophone Literature of the Caribbean
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation proposes to study the role of older women in the literature emanating from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique during the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. The focus is on how the older woman attains the status of Dignity as a result of the strength and fortitude she displays in resisting the assaults inflicted upon her mental and physical persona. She is able to rise above her contemporaries in spite of the struggles which she had to endure before attaining that esteemed goal. Few literary accounts disclose the continuing recital of humiliation and degradation suffered by older women in the era of slavery and the periods of colonization and postcolonialism. Authorship was male-dominated among the few who had literary skills. The women's voices were muffled; they could neither read nor write in the language of the Other. They depended on oral history and collective memory to tell their descendents the stories of pain and subjugation they suffered. The Emancipation Proclamation, described by Professor Glissant as une cérémonie vide , resulted in spite of its short-comings, to encourage some women to take the initiative and loosen the fetters of silence. They became the voice for their less vocal sisters.
La Creolisation et l'Africanite dans la litterature francophone: Afrique et les Antilles.
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Creolization and Africanité in Francophone literature:
Henri-Gabriel Ibels: Fanfare for the Working Man
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Francesca Sautman
This dissertation concerns the work of the artist Henry-Gabriel Ibels (1867-1936), and examines why, having been a founding member of the Nabis, an avant-garde group of painters active in the nineteenth century in Paris, having made major inroads in developing the relationship between art and text in modern terms, and having attained significant acclaim in his day, Ibels became, in subsequent decades, a virtual unknown. This neglect was so patent that contemporaries with whom he worked, like André Antoine, completely erased his role from the record and even attributed his work to others. I examine his important contribution to the artistic culture of his time in relation to the twists and turns of his public fame, and argue that it was largely because of his consistently leftist politics, that marked many of his artistic choices, that he was thus isolated from his original affinity group, the Nabis, and almost cut out of their history.
The Obscene Bachelor: Humor and Horror in Guy de Maupassant's Writings
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Guy de Maupassant's fictional works present a caravan of characters of a rare eclecticism: unhappily married women, privileged single men, hardy peasants, urban prostitutes and some indomitable free spirits. Such a range of characters distinguishes his fiction from that of his contemporaries, including the naturalists. Yet Maupassant's social and professional life was also different. A lifelong bachelor, he eschewed notions of marriage and family, reveling in a bachelor milieu that was parts bourgeois, bohemian and libertine. This dissertation seeks to approach Maupassant's own bachelor milieu as an important factor -- and marker -- in his fictional imaginary. His bachelor cosmos, with its many erotic and worldly aspects, will also be explored and analyzed.
Global Wreckage and Consumer Illusions: Responses to the Human Effects of Economic Globalization in Sub-Saharan African Francophone Novels and Films, 1973-2006
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Francesca Sautman
My study examines a group of nine novels and films set in Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon and Gabon written and produced between 1973 and 2006 in which "the West" and its international finance network are depicted as the fundamental contemporary world power that wields a destructive dominance over African countries. These forms of control are in many ways similar, yet distinct, from the projects of European imperialism. I analyze consumerism as a major feature of globalization, and discuss the linkage of globalization and the consumer society by looking at various theoretical models, in particular that which Jean Baudrillard conceptualized as a stand-in for democracy. I also consider the connection between globalization and imposed cultural uniformity, which African novels and films denounce as promoting a system of cultural superiority and submission. Further, the most extreme effects of globalization reinforce notions of a sexualized, racialized or ethnicized other. In response authors and filmmakers bring out themes such as migration/immigration, the objectification of the body--particularly of women--and the eruption of communal violence. Visual imagery in the novel and silence and voice in film are exemplary of how the two media create a common response that resists contemporary globalization. The dissertation thus examines what has emerged as one set of issues with which writers and filmmakers engage in their reflections on and responses to globalization.
TRIALS BY DEVIANCE: SEXUAL SLANDER DURING THE WARS OF RELIGION, THE FRONDE, AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This interdisciplinary dissertation in the fields of history, religion, mythology, politics, literature, cultural studies, art, gender, and sexuality examines how sexually slanderous texts against persons at or near the top of the French monarchy of the Ancien Régime assaulted both the reputation of its targets and contributed to regicides and to the eventual revolution. And, while the foremost aim of sexual slander, which increased significantly with each reign, was to harm the target, paradoxically it also helped to recreate and solidify gender and sexual norms.