Browsing by Author "Garréta, Anne F"

“Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, two mid-twentieth century authors who wrote about male homosexuality. Following Eve Sedgwick, who proposed that a “rich tradition of cross-gender inventions of homosexuality” should be studied separately from gay and lesbian literature, this dissertation examines male homoerotic fictions authored by women. These fictions foreground a disjunction between authorial and textual identities in gender and sexuality, and they have often been accused of inauthenticity, appropriation, and exploitation. This dissertation cuts through these critical impulses by suspending their attachment to identitarian thinking and a hierarchical understanding of political radicality in order to account for the seduction of fantasy in these texts.

Exploring narrative strategies, critical receptions, textual and extra-textual relationalities produced by the three bodies of works, this dissertation delineates a paradigm for reading cross-gender homoerotic texts that is neither gay nor queer, neither paranoid nor reparative, and instead focuses on fantasy and how it produces pleasure. Fantasy is used in two senses here: as a preoccupation with relationships in romantic fantasies and as a desire to depart from the here and now. By thinking through both forms of fantasies, I examine the misalignments between identity and identifications in Boys’ Love, Renault’s historical novels about ancient Greece, and Yourcenar’s cross-identifications with gender, temporal, and cultural otherness. Close readings of not only the texts in question, but also discourses around them reveal erotic relationalities both within and outside of male homoerotic fantasies. The end of the dissertation reroutes my discussions back to Japan and debates about gay authenticity in order to foreground fantastical connections that would otherwise be overlooked in a reading that focuses more on identity than disidentifications, cross-identifications, and relationalities.

In this work I analyze the ways the figure of the fictional subaltern reader in Italian and French novels of the 19th century tends to dramatize her or his exclusion from the public sphere, while attempting, at the same time, to institute new forms of commonality with his or her reader. At a historical moment in which the reading of printed matter aims to constitute a “public sphere” (Immanuel Kant), a “common sense” (Antonio Gramsci), and an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson), the fictionalized reader is often a critical figure whose role is to question the national community.

In the section devoted to the Italian novel, taking as my standpoint Vincenzo Cuoco’s Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 as well as his contributions to the formation of national public opinion, I outline a history of the Italian novel as the history of a conflict between different communities imagined by two readers of Cuoco: Alessandro Manzoni and Ippolito Nievo. In other words, I consider their novels as different responses to the problem raised and addressed for the first time by Cuoco: that of the emergence of the lower classes as a new historical subject. I argue, therefore, that the representation of a peasant woman reading I Promessi sposi, in Nievo’s novel Il conte pecoraio (1857), is an intentional reversal of the patronizing policies expressed by the party that was destined to prevail, during the Risorgimento and beyond, over the democrats.

On the French side, the brief appearance under the July Monarchy of a new kind of reading heroine, struggling for self-emancipation rather than lured by escapist temptations, bear witness to the women’s growing demands for citizenship rights and for a reconfiguration of the national community issued by the Revolution of 1789 and based on their exclusion. As the Jacobin Sylvain Maréchal had exemplified in 1801, women should not be allowed to read. Within this context, heroines such as Théophile Gauthier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and, above all, Stendhal’s Lamiel, show not only the emancipatory power of reading, but a paradigmatic shift of focus from authority to readership. While impossible in the fragmented society issued by the French Revolution, Stendhal’s fictional readers still bear witness to a desire for a community in which the divide between author and reader would be overcome.

Filmmakers shared in the social and political struggles that took place globally around the year 1968, by registering the movements and forging new approaches to filmmaking. Focusing on the cases of France and Italy, this dissertation explores how different sonic strategies were deployed at the time in the staging of the emerging voices—feminist struggle, workers’ fight—and to counter dominant discourses, particularly those broadcast on official media. Political films in the seventies often relied on the promise of Eisensteinian montage to awaken spectators’ consciousness. Yet, those years were also marked by a distrust and a critique of the visual: Laura Mulvey definition of the “male gaze” or Guy Debord critique of the “society of spectacle” amongst others challenged the frameworks of representation. I argue that some directors turned to the soundtrack of their films to stake a position within the political debates of the time. For Deleuze, this moment coincided with the advent of cinema into a true audio-visual media: sound emancipated itself from images. I suggest that this new autonomy closely tracks the emancipation of the repressed voices from institutions’ discursive codings. Interlacing film and sound studies with history, “The Sound and the Flurry of 1970s French and Italian Cinema” focuses on works by Chantal Akerman, Claude Faraldo, Marco Ferreri, Elio Petri, and Ettore Scola in their contexts. Analyses of this corpus mobilize the concepts of asynchrony and polyphony as investigative tools into both the relationships between sounds themselves and the relationship between sound and image. The use of asynchrony—as theorized by Pudovkin—allows for a representation of the social conflicts as collective experience while still rendering the individual struggle. The polyphonic dimension of soundtracks enabled directors to stage the conflicts and challenges carried by these emerging voices. The simultaneous diffusion of multiple and dissonant sounds allowed movies at once to grasp and partake in 1970s political, aesthetic and social tensions.