Maternités et Identités: Representations of Motherhood and National Identity in Literary Texts of Quebec
Year of Dissertation:
2013
In this dissertation, I analyze the depiction of the mother figure in a selection of Québécois texts spanning from 1916 (Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon) to 2008 (Le Ciel de Bay City by Catherine Mavrikakis). During the course of the 20th through the start of the 21st centuries, Québécois authors have consistently given importance to mothers in their works, although the mothers often appear to play a minor role. Througout the nearly century-long span of the literature in this study, I observe how the mother evolves from a martyred "guardian of the hearth" who upholds religious and domestic duties to various depictions of maternal (and frequently anti-maternal) women. These myriad "maternités et identités" reflect what is happening within Quebecc either at the time each text was written or when the story takes place. I argue that the literary mother represents not only the domestic sphere in which she plays a central role but also social and political changes within Quebecc. For example, cruel mothers are used as a subversive tool to critique both traditional gender roles and governmental and religious oppression during the grande noirceur period. Québécois authors such as Marie-Célie Agnant, Lori Saint-Martin, Ying Chen and Mavrikakis present texts from multicultural perspectives that reveal discrimination and injustices on a global scale. In every text studied here, the authors privilege mother-child relationships significantly more than those between the mother and her spouse. These mother-child relationships reveal the important influence mothers have upon their offspring and the desire children have to cultivate close relationships with their mothers, regardless of their mothers' degree of affection. The authors included here rarely present the
Gender, Architecture, and Self-Construction in the Works of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (1627-1693)
Year of Dissertation:
2010
GENDER, ARCHITECTURE, AND SELF-CONSTRUCTION
Les femmes dans le marronnage à l'île Bourbon de 1662 à 1848
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation examines the presence, participation and role of maroon women in the phenomenon of marronnage, (resistance to slavery) in the island of Bourbon (Réunion Island today) from the beginning of the French colonization in 1662 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. This work investigates how enslaved women played an incentive part in the marronnage and the legacy they left.
INSCRIPTION DU PASSÉ COLONIAL DANS LA LITTÉRATURE URBAINE CONTEMPORAINE
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation argues that urban literature--a genre that has developed after the 2005 riots in France--has helped redefine French identity for a new generation of French citizens living in the outskirts of Paris whose parents were born in the former colonies. This new genre of fiction deals with daily life in the French banlieue, but also tackles themes that are linked to France's colonial past in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and the French Caribbean among others. It is precisely the transmission of this colonial past that contributes to a new configuration in French society. Chapter One deals with the history of the French suburbs, dwelling especially on the banlieue as a sociological space, which is often portrayed negatively in the media. Chapter Two shows the importance of Beur literature as a precursor of urban literature. Chapter Three considers the banlieue as an internal colony and argues that the development of postcolonial studies in France was triggered by the situation of descendants of colonial subjects living in the margins of the capital. Chapter Four deals with urban novels written by Franco-Maghrebi women. Asserting that women describe the banlieue in a more intimate way than their male counterparts, this chapter demonstrates the importance of events like October 17th 1961 and the necessity to rewrite French history. The last chapter delves into the question of blackness in urban literature and the place of minorities from Africa and the French Caribbean in contemporary French society.
TITRE (A VOIR) : économie et évolution du titre de film français depuis 1968. Questions autour de l'interprétation théorique des titres de film.
Author:
Noelle Rouxel-Cubberly
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation seeks to define the relations between film titles and their cotexts on the one hand and to weigh the importance of the values they shape and convey to the audience at large on the other hand. Also considered as an economical term in French ("titre"), the title represents cultural as well economic values. As suggested by the founders of literary titology, Claude Duchet, Leo Hoek but also Barthes, Genette and Derrida, titles lead (to) the co-text. This position of power, concretely embodied by complex institutional regulations, calls for an array of theoretical perspectives. If this study draws from these eminent theoreticians, it also examines film titles as conscious and unconscious representations as well as exchange values. Mainly borrowing from Appadurai's notion of exchange, Glissant's poetics of relation, and Derrida's reflexion on titles as "counterfeit money", this dissertation intends to explore the economics of French film titling as a sociocultural phenomenon revealed through an ekphrastic and psychoanalytic approach. A comparative study of French film comedies in the 1970's and in the 1990's illustrates the distorted mirror-effect film titles provide in our reading of the world. This study aims at theorizing film titles' own theorizing of our shifting beliefs and values.
SA NOU YÉ: FILMMAKING PRACTICES AS FORMULATIONS OF IDENTITY IN HAITI, GUADELOUPE, AND MARTINIQUE FROM 1976 TO 2011
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation considers the emergence of filmmaking practices in Haiti and in the French Caribbean (Martinique and Guadeloupe). I interpret the ways in which Haitian and French Caribbean collective and individual identities are reframed by the film medium in a series of films made between 1976 and 2011. I argue that these films do more than provide social commentary: they play an affirmative and contestatory role. Filmmakers renegotiate these identities by calling into question prevailing but limiting dichotomies: Martinique and Guadeloupe as assimilated French and now European Caribbean islands and Haiti as the first Black republic and the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Hugues Rebell, a Zarathustran Disciple, a Zarathustran Writer
Author:
Melinda Schlehlein
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
The Algerian War Era Through a Twenty-First Century Lens: French Films 2005-2007
Author:
Nicole Wallenbrock
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Abstract
Made in Marseille: Global Youth and Cosmopolitan Identities
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Francesca Sautman
This dissertation argues for the significance of hip-hop musical culture in the reformulation of French identity by socio-economic, ethnic, and racial minorities. Indeed, these groups, particularly the youth within them, are vigorously reassessing, refiguring and challenging the ways French identity is affirmed through an ensemble of dominant, mainstream discourses. Through the analysis of song lyrics, visual imagery employed in CD inserts/booklets, music videos, and strategies for promotion and production, I argue that Marseille hip hoppers active from the early 1990s to 2010 have used audio-visual modes as discursive tools to articulate hybrid cosmopolitan identities that contest essentialist notions of identity solely or primarily defined on the basis of the nation-state. The cosmopolitan city of Marseille, with its long tradition of emphasizing its difference from the rest of France, is my focus as the urban site that gives its voice to the youth culture at the center of my thesis. I thus investigate how Marseille rappers espouse a regionalist discourse that casts the transnational space of the Mediterranean, including Southern Europe and North Africa, as the locus of their negotiation of identity while affirming difference from a purportedly homogenous national center.