Browsing by Author "Jenson, Deborah"

Although Charles Baudelaire's poetry was censored in part for his graphic representations of death, for Baudelaire himself, death was the ultimate censorship. He grappled with its limitations of the possibility of articulation in Les Fleurs du mal, Le Spleen de Paris, "Le Poème du hachisch," and other works. The first chapter of this dissertation, "Dead Silent," explores Baudelaire's use of apophasis as a rhetorical tactic to thwart the censoring force of death as what prevents the speaking subject from responding. Chapter two, "Voices Beyond the Grave," then investigates the opposite poetics of articulation and inarticulation, in the form of post-mortem voice from within the cemetery, and particularly as didactic speech that contradicts the living. "Baudelaire's Widows" argues that the widow is for Baudelaire a figure of modernity par excellence, auguring the anticipation of mourning and the problem of remembering the dead as a lifelong cognitive dilemma. Chapter four, "Lethal Illusions," combines analysis of suicide in "La Corde" and "Le Poème du hachisch" with interrogation of mimesis. If the intoxicant serves as suicide and mirror, the production of illusion is the possibility and the fatal pathology of art. Yet art simultaneously channels a truth understood as the revelation of illusions--not least the illusion of a life without death.

This dissertation theorizes the complex contemporary phenomenon of literature produced in French by writers of allophone origins, which is to say, writers born in non-Francophone countries. Vassilis Alexakis, Gao Xingjian, Andreï Makine, Nancy Huston, Dai Sijie, Brina Svit, Amin Maalouf, Shan Sa, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Ya Ding, François Cheng, Eduardo Manet, Hector Bianciotti, Jorge Semprun or Jonathan Littell, are frequently classified as "Francophone singularities," even though their number has now surpassed a few hundred. By closely looking at cultural and geo-political realities underpinning these writers' literature, La République réinventée reconceptualizes notions of "exile," "migrant," "diaspora," and even certain areas of "postcolonial" literary praxis as a transcultural model of literary production that is emblematic for our globalized society. Intended to reframe the debate around the transcultural literature, this study uses a sociological paradigm of methodological or reflexive cosmopolitanism (Ulrich Beck) in order to define transcultural ideologies and networks, reinforced by unlimited axes of reworked local, transnational, and global focalization.

“Mapping Manioc” looks in the ground, taking the dense, starchy, and lively materiality of a root tuber as a lens through which to read human relations of domination and reciprocity in the French colonial Caribbean. Borrowing fertile and intersecting methodologies from French and Francophone studies, Africana studies, ecopoetics, decolonial ecologies, food studies, geography, historical anthropology, and history of science, the project divests the vegetal of its connotations of lethargy to frame the manioc root as an active “plant witness” to historical tensions between colonial exploitation and practices of earth-based sustenance. In dialogue with anglophone theorists of the “Plantationocene,” recent criticism from France’s Outre-mer regions contends that present-day extractivist paradigms producing differential vulnerability to environmental harms stem from the racial taxonomies of plantation societies. This dissertation returns to the epochal shifts at the heart of French colonization in the Caribbean to uncover how one plant was harnessed to feed both the plantation’s devaluation of life and thriving configurations of human and nonhuman being beyond its reach.“Mapping Manioc” relies on a reading practice that breaches the surface of colonial archives to excavate the frictions between Indigenous and Afro/descended peoples’ nonextractive relations with a nurturing earth, on the one hand, and the exploitation of manioc’s carbohydrate calories to fuel settler colonialism and chattel slavery, on the other. This corpus attuned to plant liveliness spans a long eighteenth century, and consists of missionary accounts by Raymond Breton, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and others; lay travel narratives such as that of the anonymous mariner of Carpentras; botanical treatises and natural histories by figures like Guillaume Silvestre Delahaye; planters’ manuals, ships’ logbooks, habitation daybooks, and legal ordinances; and visual materials including engravings, watercolors, "plans d’habitation," and cartography. To evoke counterhistorical visions of human freedoms grounded in ecological flourishing, the project interweaves the colonial archive with Caribbean and Black feminist theorizations of geography and subjectivation; with perspectives from anthropology “beyond the human” and sensory ethnobotany; and with Caribbean literary and visual engagements, including novels by Édouard Glissant. Engaging these sources and artifacts, “Mapping Manioc” tracks embodied meetings of skin and starch across colonial Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and French Guiana. This approach routes ancestral life through plant life, attending to the patterns of existence of subjects who forged solidarities with nonhuman beings against plantation epistemologies and their devastating afterlives. By illuminating a genealogy of earthy resistance to colonial extractivism and dispossession, the project points to the role of ancestral food plants in resurgence, solidarity, and self-determination in the Outre-mers, foregrounding the contributions of French and Francophone studies to planetary climate justice, Caribbean climate resilience, and climate cuisine movements.

This dissertation explores the representation of cognition in the Spanish Golden Age theatrical genre the auto sacramental, with reference to the best known playwright of these eucharistic mystery plays, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and specifically his pre-1644 auto El veneno y la triaca (The Poison and the Remedy). I contextualize the auto in the Western philosophical tradition in which it was rooted, while also probing the psychomachia or allegories of mental and emotional processes in relation to philosophy of mind, cognitive literary studies and recent neuroscientific research. How are cognition, emotion, and decision making used and depicted in dramatic structures including character, plot, performance, and audience reception? This study establishes the relationship between organic neurological and psychological processes and literary tropos and archetypes that can make the dramatic mimesis of the auto sacramental understandable or successful even in modern secular theatrical contexts.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century Paris must be re-envisaged in the context of fashion as a spatial and embodied practice. While existing scholarship has focused on the role of fashion in emerging consumer culture, I focus instead on how clothing mediated bodily and urban knowledge. With the rise of department stores, the fashion press, and textile innovations in mid-nineteenth-century France, fashion became synonymous with the modern urban experience. Concomitantly with the emergence of the modern fashion system, the city of Paris was itself refashioned through vast urbanization projects. This metropolitan redesign created new points of intersection between the dressed body and the city. I argue that writers during the Second Empire and early Third Republic reframed fashion as a form of embodied space. Balancing close readings of canonical texts, Charles Baudelaire’s “À une passante” and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for example, with lesser known works, including Gustave Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs and Stéphane Mallarmé’s journal La Dernière mode, alongside fashion journals and physical garments themselves, I propose that the fashioned body was inextricably tethered to conceptions of urban space in the nineteenth-century French cultural imaginary.