Browsing by Subject "European studies"

Before the rise of the ubiquitous MOCA (museum of contemporary) there was the Musée national du Luxembourg that since its foundation in 1818, served as the first museum anywhere dedicated to contemporary art. Yet the Luxembourg has been left to lurk in the shadows of art history. Best remembered for its mismanagement of the Caillebotte Bequest (1894-1897) that left the French state as the beneficiary of several dozen Impressionist canvases, the Luxembourg has been dismissed as epitomizing official support for an exhausted academicism.

This dissertation has sought to correct these misconceptions of the museum and the Third Republic Fine Arts administration. It provides an institutional history of the museum under the early Third Republic (1871-1914) that reconsiders how different interpretations of republicanism informed its curators' policies and practices. Information culled from archives, official publications, art criticism, and even tourist brochures, has revealed that in the 1890s and especially the 1900s, the museum's curators embraced the politics of solidarism. Applying solidarist principles such as eclecticism, tolerance, and commitment to public education, its curators defended their acquisition of both avant-garde and academic works of art. These principles further spurred curators to trace the spectrum of contemporary painterly styles to French artist tradition. In so doing, the Luxembourg's administrators implicitly upheld republicanism as a characteristically, even classically, French ideology that, in its translation into paint and institutional policies, testified to the nation's continued cultural, artistic, and political supremacy.

How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

This dissertation explores the place of Irish-Gaelic language (Gaeilge) television and film media in the lives of youths living in the urban greater Dublin metropolitan area in the Republic of Ireland. By many accounts, there has been a Gaeilge renaissance underway in recent times. The number of Gaeilge-medium primary and secondary schools (Gaelscoileanna) has grown throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the year 2003 saw the passage of the Official Languages Act (laying the groundwork to assure all public services would be made available in Gaeilge as well as English), and as of January 2007 Gaeilge has become a working language of the European Union. Importantly, a Gaeilge television station (TG4) was established in 1996. This development has increased the amount of Gaeilge media significantly, and that television and film media is increasingly being utilized in Gaeilge classrooms.

The research for this dissertation was based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Dublin, Ireland. The primary methodology was semi-structured interviews with teenage second-level-school students who were enrolled in compulsory Gaeilge classes at two schools in the greater Dublin area. Simultaneous examination of social discourses, in the form of prevalent television and film media, and the talk of the teenage students I interviewed led me to discern a "locality production" process that can be discerned in both these forms of discourse. While it is noted that this process of locality production may be present anywhere, it is suggested that it may be particularly pronounced in Ireland as a result of a traditional emphasis on "place" on the island.

This dissertation thus makes a contribution to Irish and Media Studies through an analysis of Gaeilge cultural productions in the context of increased effects of globalization on the lives of the youth with whom I did my research. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to an on-going critique of identity-based theorizations through contribution of an alternative framework.

This dissertation is a preliminary attempt to define and theorize Spanish literature of the late nineteenth century from the perspective of the colonized. I take as my starting point the novels of the Filipino writer José Rizal: Noli me tángere and El filibusterismo. Although these novels are considered to be the foundational texts of the Philippine nation, I will instead focus on their relationship to Spain and the literature produced there around the same period. This analysis will be contrasted with a reading of Benito Pérez Galdós's novel Doña Perfecta, which, as many critics have claimed, bears a resemblance to Rizal's first novel. I will show how Galdós's novel demonstrates a colonizing mentality despite being nominally about an internal Spanish conflict. In conclusion, I will argue for the necessity of an understanding of Rizal's novels in order to better grasp the total context in which peninsular Spanish novels were produced.

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.

This dissertation explores how the depiction of gender-differentiated economic roles in women’s magazines contributed to shaping Spanish women as economic actors during the first 30 years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1968). The analysis focuses on eight publications: Y, Revista para la Mujer and Teresa, published by the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) of Spain’s fascist Falange party; Senda and Para Nosotras, published by the women’s wing of the lay religious group Acción Católica (Catholic Action); and commercial magazines El Hogar y la Moda, Marisol, Ama, and Telva. My interdisciplinary methodology combines a close reading of these magazines with an analysis of relevant economic data from this historical period. This approach sheds new light on the conflict between magazines’ idealized rhetoric, which centered primarily around models of feminine domesticity and motherhood, and the desperate economic circumstances that many Spanish women endured under Francoist rule.

The years immediately following Spain’s brutal Civil War (1936-1939) were marked by violent repression and devastating material conditions, which were exacerbated by the Franco regime’s failed attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency. In my analysis of magazines published during the 1940s, I track the discursive strategies that editors used in an attempt to shift the blame for the country’s post-war economic woes away from the regime and onto women. I then explore how magazines’ discourses evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, as the regime began to embrace more liberal economic policies and reopen Spain to international trade. I demonstrate how comparatively more permissive models of economic womanhood appeared in the magazines of the 1950s in the context of Spain’s reentry into global society. But I argue that a reactionary backlash arose in the magazines of the 1960s as more and more women began to actually embrace economic opportunities and identities that fell outside traditional norms.

Throughout this work, my analysis draws attention to the numerous contradictions that existed, both between women’s magazines’ messages and their readers lived experiences, and within magazines’ discourses themselves. I therefore challenge previous readings of these popular media texts as straightforward propaganda tools, arguing instead that they served as a crucial site in an ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony in Francoist Spain. While magazines’ editors sought to reinforce a dominant narrative regarding women’s roles in Spanish society against the looming threat of potential counter-narratives, I argue that their attempts were not entirely successful. Rather, I demonstrate how didactic elements like fictional dialogues, and collaborative components like advice columns, enabled provocative queries, and even dissent, to enter into and disrupt the discursive exchange between editors and readers.

My 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.

Rewriting Dante explores Dante’s reception and the construction of his figure as an author in early lyric anthologies and modern editions. While Dante’s reception and his transformation into a cultural authority have traditionally been investigated from the point of view of the Commedia, I argue that these lyric anthologies provide a new perspective for understanding how the physical act of rewriting Dante’s poems in various combinations and with other texts has shaped what I call after Foucault the "Dante-function” and consecrated Dante as an author from the Middle Ages to Modernity. The study of these lyric anthologies widens our understanding of the process of Dante’s canonization as an author and, thus, as an authority (auctor & auctoritas), advancing our awareness of authors both as entities that generate power and that are generated by power. By addressing the creation of his authoritative figure from its inception, this study sheds light on cultural production, both as a collective, almost anonymous, process and as a result of the intervention of prominent (and less prominent) individuals. By concentrating on the part of Dante’s oeuvre that may be considered less authoritative, that is, his lyric poetry, my study emphasizes aspects of the “Dante-function” that go unobserved when focusing exclusively on the Commedia.

This research interweaves the critical discourses related to the emergence of the author in the Late Middle Ages (Minnis, Ascoli, Auctor et Auctoritas) and the birth of the songbook as a literary genre (Barolini, Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Galvez, Holmes), also touching on the twentieth-century alleged ‘death of the author’ (Barthes, Foucault, Benedetti). I concentrate on the crucial function of editors and anthologists as mediators in the canonization of Dante through the material construction of manuscripts and books. This question has led me to explore canon making as a structure of power and the interplay of cultural hegemonies in its creation. I approach this problem through the lens of material philology because it is a productive interdisciplinary methodology, as is seen in the work of historians of the book McKenzie and Petrucci, and literary critics Eisner, Storey, and Nichols.

“South as Method: From the ‘Southern Question’ to the ‘Southern Thoughts’” examines the emergence of narrative and rhetoric patterns within the context of the unclear and unstable meaning of race and nation-building discourses in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. My methodology combines a close reading of late nineteenth-century novels and short stories published in these countries with an analysis of the ways that the global editorial market and local sociological essays influenced the creation of local ‘social types’ in these texts. Bridging intersectional literary analysis with post- and decolonial theories, this study analyzes writers’ definitions of their novels rather than what critics or theorists have called ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ novels. It is an invitation to look inside the writers’ peculiar ways of producing novels in this style while prioritizing national concerns. The literary corpus analyzed spans from essays—Luigi Capuana’s L’isola del sole, Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente, José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada’s Radiografia de la pampa, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie—to novels and short stories—Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna, Mercedes Cabello’s Blanca Sol, Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre, Clorinda Matto’s Herencia, Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido and Tormento, Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo” and “L’amante di Gramigna.” In my analysis of these nineteenth-century texts, the concept of ‘social type’ is highlighted as a key framework and a descriptive tool that responds to the growing need for orientation within the unsteady national borders. In this sense, I analyze the osmotic relationship between social science and literature, which culminates in the responses articulated by Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the 1930s, through their original articulation of the south as a method rather than an object of study.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of canonical revision by migrant and postcolonial writers in Spain and Italy. By recycling, rewriting or revising canonical works or film movements of the host countries in which they work, these writers call attention to Spain's and Italy's concerted attempts to perform a European identity. In doing so, they simultaneously challenge the literary categories into which they have been inserted, such as "migrant" or "Hispano-African" literatures. Rather, these writers illustrate that these categories, too, work in tandem with other forms of exclusion to buttress, rather than challenge, Spain and Italy's nationalist attempts to overcome their-"South-ness" and perform European-ness.

The thesis consists of four chapters, each focusing on a different migrant writer. The first chapter examines how Amara Lakhous, an Algerian-Italian writer, models his novels after the film genre of the commedia all'italiana in order to make national and ethnic identity categories look like theater and spectacle. The second chapter analyzes how Najat el-Hachmi, a Catalan writer of Moroccan birth, rewrites a classic of Catalan literature (Mercé Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves) to challenge the oppositions between "immigrant" and "native," while also articulating a transnational, feminist critique of patriarchy. The third chapter studies how Francisco Zamora Loboch, an Equatorial Guinean exile in Spain, re-interprets Don Quijote as an iconically anti-racist text. The fourth chapter studies how Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo, a Congolese-Italian writer, recycles Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet in his novel Rometta e Giulieo in order to challenge the polarized dichotomy of "migrant" and "canonical" writing.

My work both draws on and critiques several, interrelated fields of scholarship, including Southern European studies, Afro-European studies, Mediterranean studies, migrant literary studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as criticism pertaining to specific canonical works these writers revisit in their works. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that a critique of racism or xenophobia in contemporary Spain or Italy necessitates not only a critique of the Global South against Eurocentrism, but also a simultaneous critique of Europe's North-South divide.

This dissertation analyzes the development of legal strategies to restrict “wastefulness” or “prodigality” during the economic crises of the long sixteenth century in Southwest Germany, as the state, community and small town families struggled to preserve family and household resources. Using local, state, and imperial court trials of “spendthrifts” from early modern Württemberg, the thesis shows that prodigality laws provided litigants with a flexible, multifaceted tool to prevent reckless financial mismanagement. Once laws began to criminalize wastefulness in the mid-sixteenth century, lawmakers, litigants, and judges used this concept to intervene in family affairs and brand heads of households as legally incompetent. Although litigants largely applied spendthrift laws against male heads of households, family members and the authorities also challenged women with property, accusing them of squandering precious family resources and transgressing gender- and class specific standards of proper household management. The new legal and social culture of thrift and wastefulness not only had profound consequences for gender- and class-based norms of economic behavior but also transformed those economic norms into prerequisites for legal personhood. Finally, the thesis suggests ways in which early modern guardianship and spendthrift laws shaped wider concepts of citizenship, rationality, disability, and deviance, pointing to long-lasting influences that shaped state policies in Germany into the twentieth century.

Abstract

The album phenomenon developed in France and Spain and lasted throughout the entire nineteenth century. Albums were books with blank pages in which the owner collected contributions in the form of poetry, drawings, and music scores. These works were created for album owners by friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even suitors, and were meant to pay tribute to them. It is possible to imagine the album as a space of intense social and economic rivalry, in which owners of the books competed with one another to obtain the most luxurious books, and to fill them with the greatest number of entries from renowned artists. Similarly, contributors implicitly competed with one another to create the highest quality entries and contribute to albums that advanced their status as artists. However, established writers did not need further publicity, and many complained about the hassle of the constant request for contributions. To highlight the scope of the album phenomenon, and the frustration it caused writers and artists, José Zorrilla denounced album entry requests, stating that he had been solicited for album contributions a total of 188,000 times in his life. Honoré de Balzac condemned the album fashion even more fervently, declaring: "To hell with all albums."

I study the album as a practice that provides important information regarding gender, economic, and artistic exchanges in the milieus in which it flourished. My approach is based on the study of different types of texts. First, I analyze three essays on social customs that present the album from a perspective that mixes journalism and satire: Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy's 1811 essays "Des Album" and "Recherches sur l'Album et sur le chiffonier sentimental," and Mariano José de Larra's 1835 essay "El album." I use these essays to formulate a contextual theory on the album. I also examine nineteenth-century albums that I consulted in archives in France and Spain. Studying both the material construction of the albums and the contributions included in them, I try to understand the social and economic determinants of this social custom. Through the album entries, I explore the artistic networks established through, and exploited by, the album phenomenon, which were essential for successfully collecting contributions. Finally, I analyze fictional texts in which the album serves as a pivotal plot element used to shape the development of the stories and the roles of the protagonists. In my analysis of literary texts that portray the album, I focus on the establishment of gender and economic exchanges in this practice. I explore the imposition of traditional gender roles in the album phenomenon, according to which women were exclusively album owners and men were contributors. In my analysis of fictional texts, I also examine the economic aspect of this practice, reflecting upon the social class of the fictional characters involved in it. The literary texts that I study are: Honoré de Balzac's La Muse du département (1837), Manuel Bretón de los Herreros' El poeta y la beneficiada. Comedia en dos actos (1838) and El cuarto de hora. Comedia en cinco actos (1848), Juan de Ariza's "Historia de un album" (1847), Henri de Meilhac's L'autographe. Comédie en un acte (1858), Antonio Flores' "Cuadro cincuenta y uno. Placeres de sobremesa" (1863), José María de Pereda's Pedro Sánchez (1883), Juan López Valdemoro's "El álbum" (1886), and Leopoldo Alas `Clarín''s "Album-abanico" (1898).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of consumer culture and the proliferation of objects, such as cardholders, parasols, fans, pocket watches, and other trinkets. The album is at once part of this plethora of nineteenth-century objects and yet it is also distinct, in that it was a special piece of material culture that promoted a particular type of personal communication and required the creation of textual production. The album was established as a unique cultural manifestation, the study of which allows for a reconstruction of different types of social dynamics in its milieu.

Due to the complexity and richness of this object-centered practice, and the ways in which it developed, the album offers multiple analytical possibilities, as a social, historical, and literary phenomenon. One of the most significant contributions of this project lies in its transnational perspective and in its comparative analysis of different types of texts: essays on social customs, literary texts, and personal collections that survive in archival albums. The study of the exchanges that were fostered, and capitalized upon, through the album fashion is essential for understanding notions of private and public and collection as a practice. My analysis of the album yields invaluable insights into gender and class dynamics, ideas of art, and visual and material culture in nineteenth-century France and Spain.