Browsing by Author "Saliot, Anne-Gaëlle"
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Item Open Access Au Revoir Paris, Bonjour Pékin en Afrique Francophone ?(2022-04-23) Coopersmith, JoshuaLa géopolitique de l’Afrique francophone est en processus de changement rapide. La France a longtemps été un pouvoir sans compétition dans la région pendant des décennies mais doit maintenant prendre en compte une nouvelle force en place : bienvenue la Chine, un pays qui peut changer totalement la structure de la région. Bien que beaucoup d’universitaires et de journalistes se concentrent sur le renforcement du pouvoir chinois sur la scène internationale, peu d’entre eux explorent néanmoins ce phénomène en contraste avec les intérêts français en Afrique. La possibilité d’un nouveau pouvoir qui rivalise avec Paris et favorise Pékin, où une coexistence en paix dans le continent sont d’une grande importance aujourd’hui. En ce moment, l'instabilité politique se propage à travers l’Afrique comme un virus. Les coups d'État militaires ont touché plus de pays cette décennie. Cette thèse cherche à répondre à la question suivante : De quelles manières la récente et grandissante influence chinoise en Afrique Francophone de l’Ouest se distingue-t-elle de l’influence historiquement ancrée de la France ?Item Open Access Discipline décadente et stylistique de l'existence dans la littérature française, 1884-1922(2023-04-24) Atkinson, StephenDecadence, a loosely defined literary movement in France and England at the fin de siècle, has proved popular for its paradoxes and transvaluations that, according to some critics, destabilize modern binarisms. In this thesis, I survey four works of French Decadent literature and its 20th-century afterlives: J.K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901), André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902), and Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922). As a guiding analytic, “decadent discipline” points to several governing paradoxes in Decadent literature: the stylistic discipline involved in producing Decadent literature; the ascetic discipline of decadent styles of existence; and the recursivity of decadence-attribution, whereby rejections of decadence, in favor of discipline, are themselves deemed decadent. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick guide my analysis, which narrows its scope to the intersection of male homosexuality and religious devotion, while highlighting the centrality of racialized, gendered, and colonial violence to the subject formations depicted in this body of literature. In my conclusion, I engage with recent trends in queer theory and culture. I propose that the recursive attribution typified by decadence applies not only to all the foundational binarisms of modernity, but also to queer identity politics: linguistic rejections of binarisms tend to reify and reproduce the binarisms they purport to oppose. Alternatively, an attention to styles—in our own existences and in art—reveals the singularity of individual experience that eludes binarizing language.Item Open Access L'Épilepsie comme "crise" de la conscience: Perspectives narratives, philosophiques, et neuroscientifiques(2019-04-16) Uchitel, Julie“Each seizure is like a sort of hemorrhage of innervation. The center of image formation in my brain suffers a seminal leak, a hundred thousand images erupt at once, in visual fireworks. There is an atrocious clenching of body and soul (several times I have been sure I had died). But what constitutes personality, rational being, always held fast; otherwise, suffering would have been nullified, because I would have been purely passive, whereas I always retained consciousness, even when I could no longer speak.” Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880. Correspondance, 1853 (Paris, L. Conard) 270-271 The most intimate correspondence of Gustave Flaubert reveals that the renowned French author, prized for his mastery of free indirect discourse and other “realist” effects in works such as Madame Bovary and L’Éducation Sentimentale, suffered from epilepsy. Careful examination of his correspondence reveals that these works are imbued with references to his seizures, presented in highly metaphorical, imaginative and literary language not typically associated with epilepsy. In his description of the experience of having a seizure, Flaubert notes that “I always retained consciousness” despite a “rational ebbing”; he was mentally present during his seizures, although not in control of the contents or modalities of his consciousness. This assertation is distinctly different from popular understandings of epileptic seizures, which often assume that someone having a seizure is completely unaware of their surroundings, or unconscious, as their body is racked by convulsions. Flaubert’s description demonstrates that not only was he present, he also suffered an interruption, a dismantling, of his normal conscious state: “a hundred thousand images erupt at once” and there is a “terrible clenching of body and soul”. This raises the question, do seizures somehow unleash the floodgates of sensorial memory (images, sounds, tastes), even as the body loses control? It is evident that Flaubert was not fully conscious during his seizures, as we would describe that characterizes our everyday experience of consciousness, yet it is also evident that he was not fully unconscious. The medical field has long recognized this characteristic of seizures, that the state of consciousness during a seizure is not exactly the same as the conscious state of an individual not having a seizure. To distinguish between the two, the term ictal state refers to the period during which an individual is having a seizure and may demonstrate abnormal mental states, while the interictal state refers to any time that the individual with epilepsy is not having a seizure. Yet these distinctions fail to signal that the qualia of consciousness may be different between these two states, and different for different individuals. In the French literary sphere, a number of individuals with epilepsy have written on the subjective experience of having a seizure, delving into the most minute details of the conscious state during a seizure. These narratives, ranging from patient memoirs to graphic novels, demonstrate that each individual with epilepsy experiences a seizure differently, and different types of seizures can differentially affect the conscious state. For example, for those with focal seizures with preserved awareness (seizures that involve abnormal electrical activity in only one part of the brain) authors note a loss of sensation of the body, but not of the mind: “There was a tearing of my soul from my body,” attested Flaubert. Alternatively, for those with generalized tonic-clonic seizures (seizures that involve abnormal electrical activity throughout the entire brain), there is often a complete loss of perception of the body and within the mind: “For each seizure, time stops, like a little death” (Durand, Une Cicatrice dans la tête). If the subjective experience of having a seizure differs from one individual to another, is it also true that epilepsy can differentially affect human consciousness? Or is it more appropriate to say that the ictal consciousness is not bound by the same rules that we have assigned to the interictal consciousness of the individual with epilepsy? On a more fundamental level, what does human consciousness consist of? What is the connection between the physical human brain and the intangible mind? Science, unfortunately, has yet to answer these questions, despite the many advancements of neuroscience in recent decades. Philosophy, on the other hand, has put forth many theories of the relationship between the physical body (and brain) and the intangible mind, including those of René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In recent years, philosophy has become increasingly integrated with neuroscience, as seen in the works of Stanislas Dehaene, Catherine Malabou, Antonio Damasio, and Andrea Cavanna. Still, very little consideration has been given to epilepsy’s effects on the conscious state and what these effects reveal about human consciousness itself. This is where literature must intervene. The works of individuals with epilepsy, such as Flaubert, Valérie Pineau-Valencienne, and Élodie Durand, give us a glimpse into an ictal consciousness that is at the same time neurological, ontological, cultural, and subjective in its nature. Literature holds a key to understanding how epilepsy influences the conscious mind, through individuals’ representations of the conventions, patterns, and characteristic features of ictal and interictal consciousness. Joint consideration of neuroscience and literature is thus necessary for a fuller understanding of the relationship between epilepsy and consciousness. The present thesis aims to explore these very questions and considerations. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining epilepsy from the perspectives of literature and neuroscience, framed by philosophical theory, to explore what the modifications of human consciousness during a seizure—a “crisis” of consciousness—can reveal about consciousness itself. French literature was selected as the core of this thesis due to the breadth of literary works that discuss epilepsy, philosophical works that present theories of human consciousness, and the organic inspiration provided by Flaubert’s correspondence. The dialogue between these fields offers great possibilities for progress in our understanding of interictal consciousness, ictal consciousness, and more generally, human consciousness itself. The thesis first addresses neuroscience’s understanding of epilepsy, the underlying biology of epilepsy, and how consciousness is defined and conceptualized within the clinical context. Then, it presents a formal literary analysis of a variety of literary texts by authors depicting epilepsy, be it their own epilepsy, that of a relative, or of a fictional character. Although a seizure is a unique event for each individual, common representational patterns exist among narrative accounts of the experience of having a seizure. These include i) a loss of the corporeal self, with preservation of the conscious self, ii) a loss of the conscious self, with a plunge into the unconscious, iii) hallucinations and their frequent confusion with reality, iv) modifications, most frequently uncontrollable outpourings, of memory, and 5) violent and hallucinogenic transitions between the ictal and interictal states. The above-mentioned literary texts of individuals with epilepsy inspired the second component of this thesis: an analysis of the spoken narratives of patients with epilepsy at Duke University Hospital. In this research study, which required Duke Health Internal Review Board approval, patients with epilepsy in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit were interviewed about their subjective experience of having a seizure. Patients were presented with a series of questions about this experience and the specific wording they used to describe seizures was documented. Conversational analyses were used to identify the presence of specific narrative expressions, figures of speech, and representational patterns that patients used to describe epilepsy. These representations are then aligned with various philosophers’ theories of consciousness to consider the intertwinement of literature, neuroscience, and philosophy, with the intention of unifying these domains. A new concept to describe human consciousness is presented; namely, consciousness in equilibrium. This term refers to the notion that consciousness may take on varying states which possess differing qualia, but that internal forces continually work to guide it back to a baseline state. In the same sense that many biological processes are regulated by homeostasis, consciousness, too, is regulated by homeostatic functions. This equilibrium lies along a spectrum, ranging from fully conscious states to fully unconscious states, such that the states of consciousness may at times blend together rather than take on discrete qualia. Significant perturbations away from equilibrium, provoke what many call an abnormal state of consciousness in the individual. This may be likened to how chemical imbalances in the body perturb it away from its resting state, homeostasis, and may provoke physical illness. Epilepsy, then, perturbs this equilibrium, taking the individual to a state of consciousness outside of homeostatic limits, but still within the capabilities of the human mind. An individual may feel divorced from the perception of the body, as Flaubert described during his focal seizures with preserved awareness: “there is an atrocious clenching of body and soul”. Alternatively, an individual may deviate so far from equilibrium that consciousness itself no longer seems to exist, as in the case of Durand, who suffered from generalized tonic-clonic seizures: “Here where I am, I no longer am” (Durand, 2010). Overall, this thesis, a product of interdisciplinary inquiry, presents a novel exploration of human consciousness considered from the perspective of epilepsy. It puts French literature, neuroscience, and philosophy in dialogue with one another to advance towards a new conception of ictal and interictal consciousness. A double critique is presented: a humanistic critique of neuroscience and a neuroscientific critique of works in the humanities. This bidimensional model considers subjective and objective perspectives, permitting enriched study of the different types of epilepsy and its effects on consciousness. These considerations are not only of intellectual interest, it also presents important humanistic and clinical benefits. Patients with epilepsy often report feeling deprived of autonomy and powerless with respect to their seizures. Improving dialogue will empower individuals to make use of narrative tools to explore the psychological tension caused by epilepsy. Epilepsy here is no longer merely a neurological condition; it is also the key to a pressing question shared by all: what do I know about my own consciousness? Epilepsy here is no longer merely a neurological condition; it is a phenomenological and philosophical prompt to explore the ictal crises of consciousness that highlight, by contrast, the limitations of normative consciousness of consciousness.Item Open Access Le Butō et le choix de la chair : les influences françaises sur la quête ontologique de la "danse des ténèbres"(2019-04-07) Gulcicek, Michael Steven"Emmenez un cambrioleur dans un café pendant la journée et donnez-lui du gâteau. Il va pleurer" - Hijikata Tatsumi (Shibusawa 79). La danse est un médium d'art éphémère dont l'expression unique du temps (Valéry 22) submerge le danseur et le spectateur dans une présence profonde (Monnier et Nancy 23 ; Badiou 97). Par conséquent, la danse, comme médium, résiste à la signification (Monnier et Nancy 18, 23, 25, 34) et existe au-delà de l'ordre symbolique du langage. Pour préciser, dans la danse en général, les danseurs témoignent souvent qu'ils s'éloignent d'une notion du soi quand ils dansent (Andrieu 115, Ténenbaum 216), surtout en rencontrant une présence pure grâce à l'ouverture de la réceptivité des sens par rapport au monde physique (Gaillard 74-76). C'est dans cet élément de " l'écart " (Monnier et Nancy 32) entre le soi et le corps que le butō fonde sa propre danse. Ankoku butō - " la danse des ténèbres " - prend son origine dans un contexte mondial d'après-guerre marqué par une perte du sens, surtout dans un Japon vaincu, où le sens de la matière même se décomposait. Plus précisément, le butō s'est formé au Japon dans un contexte politique et résolument avant-gardiste des années 1950 et 1960 qui reposait avec acuité les questions générales d'après-guerre : Qu'est-ce que l'humain ? Et, qu'est-ce que le monde ? En même temps que le butō s'origine dans un contexte et dans des traditions japonaises, il est considérablement influencé par des penseurs et des artistes français. En particulier, les artistes de butō ont lu des écrits de Jean-Paul Sartre, de Maurice Merleau-Ponty et de Georges Bataille parmi d'autres contemporains. Ils ont été inspirés par des avant-gardes françaises comme les dadas, les Surréalistes et surtout Antonin Artaud (Sas " Hands " 18). Ces créateurs exploraient tous la perception, les limites de la conscience et du sens, en cherchant des moyens de libérer le sujet de ses retranchements subjectifs et sociaux. Les idéaux ontologiques font corps avec la danse de butō. En invoquant les notions d'être de bouddhisme, de chair d'Artaud et de l'érotisme de Bataille, le butō tente de danser exclusivement sur le seuil entre la chair du corps l'humain et la chair du monde. Pour rapprocher cet écart, le butō commence sa danse avec l'acte intentionnel de dépouiller le corps de la signification. Mais, forcément le rapprochement de la perte totale du sens pose les questions : pourquoi agir ? Pourquoi ne rien faire ? Et donc, par rapport à butō : Pourquoi danser ? Pourquoi ne pas explorer l'être en méditant jusqu'à la disparition totale ? Le butō reconnaît que chaque moment de la vie est un choix. Alors, les artistes de butō mélangent leur art de la danse avec leur propre vie en choisissant le butō dans chaque instant. Le butō est le choix d'explorer notre corporéité, une part d'une plus grande réalité de l'être inconnu. Le corps lui-même est un univers complètement inconnu, la chose le "plus loin" de nous, comme déclarait fondateur Hijikata Tatsumi (SU-EN 205). Le butō tente de fouiller le corps et les limites de la corporéité. En rapprochant l'inconnu de l'être, le butō cherche la nature vraie du corps - c'est-à-dire de la chair humaine -au-delà de la raison, du langage, et de la signification. Ainsi, le butō révèle les aspects profonds et aussi "noirs" et effrayants de notre nature humaine. Désormais, le butō remplit son corps réceptif à l'univers aux mouvements et aux moyens de percevoir auparavant l'inconnu. Le butō fait de son corps-même un objet d'art. Et, en le construisant, le danseur s'engage dans un processus du devenir continu, toujours ouvert aux nouveaux possibles de la corporéité et de la perception. Enfin, le danseur continue son acte de devenir sur la scène devant un public. Ultimement, je vois le choix de danser le butō comme un acte humaniste. En descendant du seuil de la chair de l'univers, le danseur de butō réincarne son corps pour étendre les possibilités d'être un humain. Il choisit désormais de proliférer cette éthique de choix humain en créant son être dans la performance. Le butō s'installe dans un théâtre métaphysique comme celui imaginé par Antonin Artaud. Le danseur de butō présente le devenir continu de sa chair, impliquant les spectateurs dans le présent absolu. Ainsi, le danseur montre les possibilités d'être dans la forme d'un humain. À partir d'une naissance japonaise et une formation inspirée par les idéologues français, le butō incarne une philosophie plus ou moins existentialiste. Et il nous montre que notre forme est la chair du choix.Item Open Access Narrative Experience and Social Conflict. Italy, France, 1943-1977(2019) Castaldo, AchilleThis dissertation investigates the relation between narrative forms, in both literature and cinema, and historical moments of deep crises of the social order: the interregnum between Fascism and First Republic in Italy; the decolonization process in Algeria seen from metropolitan France; and the worker and student struggles of the Sixties and the Seventies. The goal of my analysis is to show how a traumatic reality can fracture the ideological discourse dominant in a specific historical moment, leaving a mark on the structural and formal (rhetorical) construction of the work of art. My analysis begins with Naples immediately after World War II, by focusing on the works of Curzio Malaparte and Anna Maria Ortese. I then move to Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian War, to analyze the early films of Éric Rohmer, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, and Agnès Varda. My investigation proceeds by examining workers’ struggles in Northern Italy in Vogliamo tutto by Nanni Balestrini and ends in Bologna during the years of the ’77 revolt, where Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s early work dramatizes the communal existence of the student-worker movement. My method is based on a formal analysis of devices of disruption of the mimetic flow: anomalous use of pronouns, fragmentation, tension between verb tenses, and disconnections of the point of view. All are features through which the historical moment, I argue, is inscribed in the reading-viewing experience.
Item Embargo Resonant Wandering Forms: Tracing the Trajectories of the Cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette(2021) Maxymuk, KathleenMy dissertation contends that Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette – three filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague – conceived and staged wandering in order to change cinema, to probe deeper into its potential as a medium of feeling and thought. As they honed their aesthetics, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette charged their oeuvres with what I have qualified as crucial wandering forms. The wandering in their films quickly diverged from direct movement on screen and became progressively more complex and abstract. I thus investigate wandering as a form of expression in cinema, one that allows us to reconsider the work of each filmmaker. The choice of this trio is crucial to analyzing certain subtleties in their oeuvres that require more investigation. The forms I have conceived reveal conceptual affinities between the seemingly disparate ideas operating and evolving amongst their cinemas. My dissertation therefore offers novel opportunities to reconfigure the Nouvelle Vague by disentangling essential aesthetic, political and historical threads that link the work of the three filmmakers beyond the early 1960s, when the movement often is said to have ended. By defining new formal categories, I propose that their films contain a latent prolongation of the Nouvelle Vague’s wandering core.
Item Embargo Troubles in Representation: (Con)figuring Non-Binary Sex in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Art, and Medicine(2020) Iber, LaurelMy dissertation, “Troubles in Representation: (Con)figuring Non-Binary Sex in 19th Century French Literature, Art, and Medicine” argues that to adequately grasp the stakes of sexual non-conformity in 19th c France, we must consider the complex interplay between aesthetics and medicine, where images function as a critical mechanism for contemplating non-binary bodies and identities. I analyze the construction, representation, and conceptual articulation of sex in nineteenth-century France, through the figure of the hermaphrodite and its analogs. Together their disruptive sexual excess and instability exposes the fragility of the framework of dimorphic sex.
The methodology I employ is an interdisciplinary, synthetic approach, integrating extensive archival research into the analysis of a diverse corpus of materials. These objects include medical treatises, novels, short stories, poetry, drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and films—ranging from the canonical to the obscure. My perspective is strongly inflected by the work of Michel Foucault, but places greater emphasis on the image and the materiality of the archive. This enables me to shed light on one of the major blind spots in his theorization of sex, the visible, which for him, was always subordinate to the enunciable. Though Foucault is my primary interlocutor, this project also builds on the work of contemporary scholars in art history, medical humanities, critical theory, and gender studies.
Chapter one investigates the progressive destruction and denial of the category of human hermaphroditism within dominant medico-legal discourse. I connect this phenomenon to the medical community’s paradoxical preoccupation with antiquity’s mythical hermaphrodite. Chapter two traces parallels between the hermaphrodite, the androgyne and the castrato, examining their artistic, literary, and scientific treatment. In particular, I explore specters of antiquity in the work of Balzac, Gautier, Cuisin, and Latouche. Chapter three studies the history of famous “hermaphrodite” Herculine Barbin. Here, I dig deep into the archives to propose an alternate genealogy to Foucault’s volume. Presenting the model of the palimpsest instead, I explore how Barbin’s narrative and identity became subject to a process of rewriting to accommodate different political agendas. Chapter four investigates Barbin’s legacy through a series of 19th-21st c adaptations in a variety of media: novels, poetry, opera, theater, and film. I explain the narrative’s enduring social relevance and what the reinterpretations owe to Foucault’s scholarship.
Item Open Access Une exploration neuro-génétique de l’évolution de l’épilepsie non traitée dans La Tentation de Saint Antoine de Gustave Flaubert(2023-04-20) Bernier, GwynethNineteenth century French author Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine is a complex and enigmatic work that underwent many revisions over twenty-five years, resulting in multiple versions with different narrative structures and themes. One recurring motif in these various versions is the depiction of Saint Anthony's epileptic episodes--which I cross-reference with Flaubert's description of his own untreated presumed epileptic seizures. In this undergraduate thesis, I analyze the evolution of untreated epilepsy in Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine and other selected works. Drawing on Flaubert's personal experiences with epilepsy and his extensive correspondence, I examine the different manifestations of epilepsy in various versions of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, including the published 1849, 1856, 1872, and 1874 versions. I also explore how Flaubert's depiction of untreated epilepsy in other works, such as Madame Bovary and Un Coeur Simple compares to the portrayal in La Tentation de Saint Antoine. Using a combination of literary analysis and historical research, I investigate how Flaubert's understanding of epilepsy evolved over time and how it influenced his portrayal of Saint Anthony's epileptic episodes. I also explore the cultural and societal attitudes towards epilepsy during Flaubert's time and how these attitudes may have shaped his depiction of the condition in his works. Through my research, I aim to shed light on the ways in which Flaubert's portrayal of untreated epilepsy in his different versions of La Tentation de Saint Antoine and other works reflects his evolving understanding of the condition and its cultural context. This thesis contributes to the existing scholarship on Flaubert's works and provides insights into the portrayal of epilepsy in literature, shedding light on the intersection of literature, history, and medical humanities.