Browsing by Subject "Romance literature"

This dissertation explores the concept of agential abjection through Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood.

"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.

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 examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.

This dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic locations and in distinct historical moments. During the twentieth century in France, anthropology as an institutionalized discipline and "literature" (writ large) were in constant communication with one another. On the one hand, many French anthropologists produced stylized works demonstrating aesthetic sensibilities that were increasingly difficult to classify. On the other hand, though, poets, philosophers and other literary intellectuals read, absorbed, commented on and attacked texts from anthropology. This century-long conversation produced an interdisciplinary conceptual field allowing French anthropology to borrow from and adapt models from literature at the same time as literature asserted itself as more than just an artistic enterprise and, indeed, as one whose epistemological prerogative was to contribute to and enrich the understanding of humankind and its cultural processes. In this dissertation I argue that fiction can be seen to travel in multiple directions within France's twentieth-century conversation between literature and anthropology such that we can observe the formation of a new genre, one comprised of texts that either explicitly or more implicitly fuse fictional forms and contents together with the methodological and representational imperatives of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, I argue that fiction moves geographically as well, notably from the metropole to Francophone West Africa which became an anthropological hotspot in the twentieth century once extended field research was legitimated in France and armchair anthropology was thoroughly discredited. By investigating ethnographies, novels, memoirs and films produced both in metropolitan France, Francophone West Africa, and the French Caribbean (including texts by Michel Leiris, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jean Rouch, Jean-Claude Izzo and Raphaël Confiant), I aim to shed light on the kinds of work that elements of fiction perform in ethnographic texts and, by contrast, on how ethnographic concepts, strategies and fieldwork methods are implicitly or explicitly adopted and reformulated in more literarily oriented works of fiction. Ethnographic fiction as a genre, then, was born not only from the epistemological rapprochement of anthropology and literature in metropolitan France, but from complex and often fraught encounters with the very locations where anthropological praxis was carried out.

In my dissertation I propose that the detailed representation of food and eating in seventeenth-century Spanish art and literature has a double purpose: to reaffirm a state of well-being in Spain, and to show a critical position, because artistic creations emphasize those subjects who, because of social status or cultural background, do not share such benefits. This double purpose explains why literature and painting stress the distance between foodstuffs and consumers, turning food into a commodity that cannot be consumed directly, but through its representation and value. Cervantes's writing is invoked because, especially in Don Quixote, readers can see how the protagonist rejects food for the sake of achieving higher chivalric values, while his companion, Sancho Panza, faces the opposite problem: having food at hand and not being able to enjoy it, especially when he achieves his dream of ruling an island. The principle is similar in genre painting: food is consumed out of the picture in still lifes, or out of the hands of the represented characters in kitchen scenes, for they are depicted cooking for others. Because of the distance between product and consumer, foodstuffs indicate how precedence and authority are established and reproduced in society. In artistic representations, these apparently unchangeable principles are mimicked by the lower classes and used to establish parallel systems of authority such as the guild of thieves who are presented around a table in a scene of Cervantes's exemplary novel "Rinconete and Cortadillo." Another problem to which the representation of foodstuffs responds is the inclusion of New Christians from different origins. In a counterpoint with the scenes in which precedence is discussed, and frequently through similar aesthetic structures, Cervantes and his contemporaries create scenes where the Christian principle of sharing food and drinking wine together is the model of inclusion that dissolves distinctions between Old and New Christians. I argue that this alternative project of community can be related to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, decreed in 1609, because this event made many subjects interrogate themselves about their own status and inclusion. An artistic model of response to these interrogations about belonging is the figure of the roadside meal, which appears as the main motif of a meal shared by Sancho and a self-proclaimed Christian Morisco in the second part of Don Quixote, and reappears in a painting by Diego de Velázquez, which presents in the foreground a dark-skinned servant working in a kitchen, and in the background another roadside meal: the Supper at Emmaus. Both in literature and painting the way of preparing meals, eating and drinking creates ties, establishes a different principle of belonging, and promotes unity. In this alternative model characters are recognized as subjects of the kingdom as long as they eat and drink the way Christians do. Even though this model still leads to a single Christian kingdom, paintings and writings suggest a different form of cohesion, in which subjects are considered equal and recognize each other because of their participation.

The moral and ethical choices made during the Nazi Occupation of France would echo for generations: they served as a source of pain and pride when the French sought to rebuild their national identity after the ignominy of the defeat, and acted as the foundation for the intellectual legacy on which post-war life stands.

In my dissertation I examine the diverse trajectory of two writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Giraudoux, during the Occupation by focusing on their dramatic works. During this period, no writer could legally exercise his vocation and receive compensation without submitting to certain legalities designed to monitor the content of artistic output. Therefore, any author who published did, at least in some small way, collaborate. This particular line in the sand has become blurred with time and usage. Critics and intellectuals, not to mention the legal system, have initially categorized artists' politics, then, when the boundaries (or public opinion) have shifted, they have chosen to reclassify. Collaborationist, resistant, or neutral - these three convenient labels cannot do justice to the vast array of colors in the Occupation-era landscape.

Writers, like the public at large, responded to the Occupation by becoming extreme collaborators, opportunists, simply earning their daily bread, or becoming fierce resistants, with an infinite number of various roles in between. Although critics have historically attempted to evaluate Jean-Paul Sartre's and Jean Giraudoux's actions in order to classify them as "resistant" or "collabo," this is a reductive act. Both men, like so many Frenchmen of this period, made an infinite number of small and large decisions that refracted their post-war image according to which critic held the prism. The historiography with regards to this era has dramatically changed. Must the manner in which we "categorize" these two authors not change accordingly?

With this question in mind, I have carefully studied the authors' primary texts (plays, essays, critiques, memoirs, and letters). In particular, I focus on their theatrical offerings: Les mouches, Huis clos, and La folle de Chaillot, as these are their best-known works of the era. Next, I examined biographies of the Sartre and Giraudoux (as well as other major historical, political, and literary figures) in order to gain as much background information as possible, and moreover, to identify both tendencies and discrepancies with regards to the authors. After this I sifted through the contemporary press related to these two authors, including theatrical reviews of their plays, their own publications in order re-evaluate the Occupation-era theatrical offerings of Sartre and Giraudoux. I have chosen to focus mainly on their plays from the era, as it those are their best-known works, and the those which had the most influence, in creating their political legacy and reputation during the Occupation. Finally, I applied the theories from contemporary historians - Robert Paxton, Henry Rousso, Philippe Burrin, and Gisèle Sapiro among others - in order to develop my own analysis of the theater of Sartre and Giraudoux and their post-war legacy.

Themes centering on guilt and condemnation abound during the war, especially in these three works. Fueled by De Gaulle's myths of an almost unilaterally resistant French population, the immediate post-war period focused on deliverance from an exterior enemy. However, contrary to popular interpretation, the plays in my corpus condemn the enemy within, the French betrayal of the French.

In mid-twentieth century, Colombia’s illiteracy rate was 40% with numbers close to 80% in the rural areas. These areas lacked access to formal education and were isolated from the urban centers due to poor road infrastructure. Radio Sutatenza, an educational radio station, promised to educate and integrate rural communities to the nation through radio literacy campaigns and its pedagogical model of Fundamental Integral Education. Unlike previous sociological, pedagogical, and communicational studies of the Sutatenza project, Intermedial Sutatenza highlights the project’s political and aesthetic dimensions. Dialoguing with theories and concepts from literary, cultural, and sound studies, I analyze cultural and media productions by officials and listeners of Radio Sutatenza. I focus, specifically, on radio dramas produced by the station and on coplas and songs composed by listeners, then broadcast in radio shows, and published in the print weekly El Campesino. I propose that these cultural productions are best described as intermedial narratives to highlight their many inner contradictions and the mediated context in which they emerge. Also, in their blurring of media and genre borders, these narratives dwell between the aural and the written and emerge as embattled fields of meaning production. I argue that Sutatenza’s intermedial narratives show that the radio station undertook both a continuity of and a departure from the Hispanic-Catholic project of a nation put in place in Colombia by the grammarian presidents in the nineteenth century. Likewise, I sustain that Sutatenza reproduced and remediated the literary movement of costumbrismo and the literary genre of the cuadro de costumbres, with its ideological implications, in sonic media for a twentieth century audience. At its core, my dissertation proves that the othering of rural individuals in Colombia took place also in the radio, and that Radio Sutatenza, with its far-reaching pedagogical strategies, had a fundamental role in the construction and circulation of a specific kind of rural individual and of rurality. At the same time, my work shows that, in the interstices, polysemy and the instability of the sign and the word permit for voices of resistance to emerge. Hence, the Sutatenza narratives, on the one hand, strive to unite and homogenize rural communities, and on the other, circulate and broadcast those same communities’ cultural heterogeneity. Through this examination, I clarify the role of Radio Sutatenza in Colombian community-making processes and radio’s part in narrating the nation during mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the questions I explore and the questions the dissertation opens-up are central in a country where unequal land ownership and rural labor exploitation are at the base of a more than half a century-long violent conflict. The ultimate goal and significance of my research is that it will lead to a recasting of the discourses (historical, sociological, cultural) about Colombian rural communities.

This dissertation compares the responses of Italian Jewish and Catholic intellectuals to the process of secularization and modernization triggered by Italian national unification (1861-1870). Arguing that, in the case of Italy, the borders separating Jewish and Catholic communities have been more porous than generally thought, my research intends to destabilize simplistic historiographical oppositions based on a dichotomous anti-/philo-Semitic approach. In comparing Judaism and Catholicism vis à vis the new, modern, and secular nation-state, I offer a more complex picture of the relation between these two religions. In order to avoid presenting a one-sided account, my comparative approach brings together studies and perspectives from different fields. The first three chapters analyze a wide variety of sources, ranging from official speeches to journal articles, archival documents, and literature. I analyze the Commemoration of the Capture of Rome (1870) given by Roman mayor Ernesto Nathan in 1910 and Salvatore De Benedetti’s 1884 Opening Address at the University of Pisa on The Hebrew Bible as a source for Italian literature, as well as articles published in the Jewish journals Il Vessillo Israelitico and Il Corriere Israelitico, the Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and the anticlerical journal L’Asino. The last chapter focuses on the Jewish historical novel The Moncalvos, written by Enrico Castelnuovo in 1908, investigating the problematic appeal of secularism and Catholicism for a Jewish family settled in Rome. By drawing on this variety of sources, my dissertation both scrutinizes the interrelated role of Jewish, Catholic, and secular culture in Italian national identity and calls for a reconsideration of the starting point of modern Jewish-Catholic dialogue, well before the events following the Shoah, the rise of the State of Israel, and the Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate.

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 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.

In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from early-nineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory. Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early 1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de Paris, so central to panoramic literature.

This thesis explores attitudes of Christians toward Islam and Muslims in Spain in the sixteenth century and intends to destabilize Islam's traditional place as adversary in Early-Modern Spanish history. My research aligns itself with and employs new trends in historiography that emphasize dissent and resistance exercised by individuals and groups at all levels of Spanish society in order to complicate popular notions about the extermination of Islam in Spain. I argue that within Spain there was, throughout the sixteenth century and after the expulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth century, a continued interest in the religion and culture of Islam. I show that, far from isolating itself from Islam, Christian Spain was engaged with Muslims on multiple levels. The voluntary and involuntary migration of Spaniards to Muslim lands, for many emigrants of Christian decent, led to the embrace of a multicultural, multireligious, polylingual and polyethnic reality along the Mediterranean that was contrary to Spanish Counter-Reformation ideology. The dissertation includes textual examples from sixteenth-century Spanish and colonial "histories," and works by Cervantes, to support the argument that this official ideology, which has dominated historiography on this period, does not reflect much of the Spanish experience with non-Christians within and without its borders. My goal is to expose a context within the field of Early-Modern Peninsular studies for alternative forms of discourse that emphasize toleration for religious and cultural difference, interfaith and intercultural dialogue and exchange, and a basic interest in and curiosity about Islamic ways of life.

This dissertation examines a series of novels by Aminata Zaaria, Ken Bugul, Gaston-Paul Effa, Boubacar Boris Diop and Yolande Mukagasana. At the heart of my study is a problem that haunts much literary production and literary criticism about post-colonial Francophone African writing: the layers of distance and misunderstanding that often exist between readers and writers. Several of the authors in this study express frustration at the limited expectations that readers have of them, complaining that readers outside of the continent continue to read their novels solely in order to gain a grasp of socio-political "realities" of Africa. I propose a return to a select group of author's largely semi-autobiographical texts in order to better understand each writer's individual literary projects within the interdisciplinary framework of trauma studies. Interviews that I conducted with Senegalese and Cameroonian publishing directors, psychologists, sociologists and authors themselves offer an analysis of these texts within the context of broader social debates.

My first chapter focuses on Zaaria's La Nuit est tombée sur Dakar (2004) and Bugul's Le Baobab Fou (1983) and Cendres et Braises (1995) in order to examine intergenerational Senegalese semi-autobiographical representations of prostitution. My study ultimately finds that neither Senegalese society nor Zaaria and Bugul's narratives evidence healing through writing. Rather, both present literature as a "default" chosen because the authors found no one with whom they could initially share their stories face-to-face. Chapter Two hones in on Bugul's relationship with her mother, a painful theme revisited from one end of Bugul's semi-autobiographical oeuvre (Le Baobab Fou, 1982) to the other (De l'autre côté du regard, 2002). Chapter Three examines the trauma of parental loss in Gaston-Paul Effa's semi-autobiographical works, from Tout ce bleu (1996) to a more recent novel (Nous, les enfants de la tradition, 2008) in order to examine the evolution of Effa's personal identity quest and his extensive self-analysis over time in light of the author's permanent exile in France. My fourth chapter begins with a study of genocide survivor Yolande Mukagasana's recent narrative entitled N'aie pas peur de savoir (1999) in order to examine author/reader relationships in light of the often inconceivable trauma of genocide. I then move on to consider the ethics of speaking "for" genocide survivors by analyzing the well-known Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000) and the related Fest'Africa project. I end Chapter Four with a critique of Etoke's Melancholia africana: l'indéspensable dépassement de la condition noire (2010) in order to question whether or not sweeping theories of the various traumas experienced by members of Africa and its diaspora are in fact helpful in every context. Finally, I end my study with Effa's Voici le dernier jour du monde, which exhibits the interplay between autobiography, biography, fiction and the issue of literary violence.

I ultimately argue that a major difference between the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis and the process of seeking healing through literary narratives involves the question of audience. In the case of Sub-Saharan African literature, the author/reader relationship does not necessarily provide a safe space akin to the doctor/patient model in Freud's "talking cure." Therefore, I ultimately call for a closer analysis of the myriad ways by which authors are seeking healing and answers outside the realm of literature.

While Italian art of the twentieth century is usually associated with either the avant-garde practices of Futurism or the classicism of Fascist visual culture, the Italian modernists' complex engagement with concepts of the ‘Baroque’ has yet to be explored. Through an extensive analysis of paintings, sculptures, publications, collecting practices, and exhibitions, my dissertation addresses this lacuna by investigating how the Baroque was discursively constructed and visually represented in Italian modernist artistic and cultural debates between 1880 and 1945. I study how artists and critics such as Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio De Chirico, Adolfo Wildt, Lucio Fontana, and Roberto Longhi championed or disparaged the Baroque in the context of heated debates over the import of Italy’s rich cultural heritage, its status in modern Europe, and the potential role of avant-garde art as a catalyst for national regeneration. In contrast to previous scholars I argue that the development of modern art in Italy was actively shaped by cultural perceptions about the Baroque. My dissertation therefore sheds new light on the role of style in the cultural politics of Italy, which in turn will transform our understanding of visual culture in modern Italy, and of twentieth-century representations of the Baroque in art, literature, and aesthetics.

In my dissertation, I connect the role of literature and its interpretations with France's current occultation of its colonial and imperial past and present. The dissertation puts forth a re-consideration of an excluded work and of some hexagonal classics across time-periods.

The first chapter focuses on an excluded author from the Canon, The Baron de Lahontan (1683-1716). His Dialogues avec un sauvage (1703) are unique because the strident critique of the clergy, the wealthy and the aristocracy is free from patriotic and essentialist concerns. Today his works are claimed by some Amerindian scholars (such as George Sioui) as illustrative of Amerindian values, but largely ignored by French educational and publishing institutions. . I then examine briefly Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1773). The comparison of Diderot's Supplément with Lahontan's Dialogues underline that Diderot critique of colonialism was not the primary objective of this work and was limited to issues of sovereignty and pointedly left aside the issue of commerce and indirect political influence.

The second chapter is on the work of Flaubert, Salammbô. I propose that Flaubert' Salammbô (1862) paints a world in which a collective consciousness based on class begins to emergeI also propose basing myself on Sartre's work on the author, that in Salammbô Flaubert finds a space in which to unfold his own contradictions (as symbolized in the novel by those of Salammbô herself) regarding his belonging to and hatred of the French bourgeoisie.

In the third chapter, I examine the works of Maupassant as a journalist and novelist in the context of colonialism. As a journalist he defended the interests of an emerging class of colons as a journalist by engaging in a complicated manipulation of public opinion. Maupassant was also the author of classic novel Bel-Ami (1885) which can be read as a ruthless indictment of the financial motivations behind France's colonial expansion. One of my arguments is that Maupassant's fiction in relation to the colonial renewal of the 1880's was what Balzac's novels were to emerging capitalism: his powers of observation transcend his political beliefs.

The ultimate chapter is about Camus's L'étranger (1942), Le premier home (written in 1959 published posthumously in1994) and his relation with Sartre. I examine how the historical events shaped Camus's fiction and how after his death they contributed to his standing in the literary field today. In L'étranger Camus does not acknowledge Arab characters by name, nor is the violence inflicted upon them considered neither central nor worthy of particular concern. I argue that Camus standing today as progressive and humanitarian thinker despite writing for the French colonial empire is indicative of France's inability to come to terms with its colonial past.

My re-visitation of the above works has led me examine the notion of progress in history and how its political corollary, the division between progress and reaction, later between left and right does not incorporate the issue of colonialism. I also attempted to assess the colonial and imperial projects as endeavors motivated primarily by economic gains of specific social groups which used race and identity as justifications and cover ups. This interpretative framework based on the theories put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in his works on colonialism, racism and Flaubert.

This dissertation contributes a novel critique of hexagonal canonical works and proposes a re-evaluation of the extensive influence of political imperatives on the elaboration and status of works of literature.

"Sentimental Manipulations: Duty and Desire in the Novels of Sophie Cottin" examines four novels by Sophie Cottin, from 1798 until 1806. A forgotten but once-popular novelist, Cottin used the theme of motherhood to develop the relationship between women and desire and duty. These novels use the sentimental novel in different ways that challenge the limits of genre and confront social perceptions of motherhood. The generic transitions reveal subversive representations of women's sexuality and choice. The author's rewriting of motherhood and genre thus plays a crucial role in understanding the complex and developing notion of the sentimental novel in a period of transition after the Revolution. The eighteenth century gave rise to more structured gender divisions in society that provided little space for women's freedom outside of the patriarchal dictates of the family and motherhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1761 publication of Julie; ou la Nouvelle Héloïse and his 1762 publication of Emile; ou de l'éducation are thought to have defined social roles for women in relation to their reproductive abilities. The novel, as a site of social production, was understood to have influential moral implications and was used to confront and maintain socially accepted behavior. Mother-child depictions in literature, therefore, reveal socially acceptable behavior for women. My first chapter examines the development of motherhood as a form of social duty imposed on women. I explore the Rousseauian themes in Cottin's first sentimental epistolary novel, Claire d'Albe, published in 1978. The representation of adultery reveals the complex relationship between women's duty, virtue, and sexuality. In my second chapter, I analyze how Cottin manipulates the epistolary sentimental genre in Amélie Mansfield, published in 1802. Cottin creates narrative spaces that privilege women's expression and redefine women's choice through a violent and controversial depiction of the protagonist's suicide. I explore the social implications of the removal of the suicide scene from all publications of the novel after 1805. My third chapter examines the incorporation of elements of the travel narrative into the sentimental genre in Malvina , published in 1800, and Elisabeth; ou les exilés de Sibérie, published in 1805. Through the description of travel, I explore Cottin's representations of duty and women's education at two distinct moments in her publishing career.

What does it mean in Spain to talk about national cuisine? This dissertation examines how three of Spain's most prominent intellectuals of the early twentieth century—Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón—confronted that question in their writing in cookbooks at a pivotal moment in Spain's history. Pardo Bazán, a feminist writer and novelist, authored two cookbooks, La cocina española antigua (1913) and La cocina española moderna (1914). Burgos, a teacher, newspaper columnist, and novelist, authored La cocina moderna (1906), ¿Quiere usted comer bien? (1916), and Nueva cocina práctica (1925). Marañón, a physician and statesman as well as a writer, penned the prologue to Basque chef and restaurant-owner Nicolasa Pradera's 1933 cookbook La cocina de Nicolasa. These authors were active during a period that saw enormous changes in Spain's political structure and demographics, and in social and gender roles, and each of them engaged with the debates about Spain and the modern nation that consumed intellectual thinkers of the time. And yet each of these authors chose to write about cooking and food in a genre intended for the use of middle-class women in their homes.

Their writing in cookbooks, I posit, offered Pardo Bazán, Burgos, and Marañón the opportunity to address directly the middle-class female readers who stood at the nexus of their anxieties regarding Spain's modernization. These anxieties were generated by shifting social structures as women gained access to education and to paid employment outside of the home, and as a newly mobilizing working class threatened the social order through political and labor organization, as well as with violence and unrest. By teasing out the contradictions in their cookbook prologues, I show how these intellectuals use Spanish cuisine to promote a vision of Spain's modernization that corrects for the instabilities generated by those same modernization processes.

In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Pardo Bazán uses Spain's cocina antigua, catalogued in La cocina española antigua (1913), to "write the nation into existence" (Labanyi). By positioning cooking and cuisine in parallel to the dominant masculine nation-building discourses of the period, Pardo Bazán maps a role for her women readers, and for herself as a woman writer, in the task of building a modern Spanish nation. In Chapter Two, I focus on Pardo Bazán's second cookbook, La cocina española moderna (1914), and show how she uses Spain's modern cuisine to inculcate her female readers with the middle-class values that she believes will serve as a bulwark against the increasing unrest of the working class. In contrast to Pardo Bazán, who designates a conventional role for middle-class women in return for protection against the working class, Carmen de Burgos argues that there is no contradiction between women's domestic roles and having a public role and an intellectual life. Chapter Three analyzes how she uses a strategy of "double writing" (Zubiaurre) to show the importance of cuisine to the public sphere and to criticize the still extant obstacles to women's public activity. Chapter Four focuses on Gregorio Marañón's construction of Basque chef and restaurateur Nicolasa Pradera in his prologue to her cookbook. Marañón uses the prologue to promote a palatable version of Spain and its modernity to outsiders. Yet his version of Spain's modernity depends on reinscribing figures like Pradera into traditional, anti-modern gender and class roles.

At a moment in which the international media identify in Spanish cuisine "the new source of Europe's most exciting wine and food" (Lubow 1), this project historicizes the notion of "Spanish cuisine" at the center of Spanish haute cuisine. It also represents a foundational study in food cultural studies in Spain, offering a critical examination of cookbooks as a genre and as crucial texts in the oeuvres of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón.

In the wake of a twentieth century marked by the Occupation, the Algerian War, the AIDS crisis, and the aftermath of these events, the debates surrounding French identity have acquired particular urgency. French novelists, meanwhile, have increasingly turned to first person narratives; autobiographies and especially autofictions continue to dominate current publication lists. Equally concerned with identity questions, these same texts have often been accused of solipsism, and their authors described as narcissists of little talent. In this dissertation, I argue that the debates surrounding national identity and the problematic construction of a written personal identity are, in fact, intimately related. I analyze a variety of first person narrative works by three major contemporary authors (Patrick Modiano, Assia Djebar, and Hervé Guibert) in order to resituate these purportedly personal critiques of "Frenchness" within an evolving historical and historiographical trajectory that informs national, community, and personal identity. In so doing, I suggest the ways in which both subjects and identities are constructed (and critiqued) textually with respect to a history of traumatic events, as well as the collective memories that those events inspire. I argue that Modiano's contemporary evocations of Occupation-era France, Djebar's complex and shifting assessment of the Algerian War and the legacies of French colonization in Algeria, and the dominant position occupied by Hervé Guibert's AIDS writings in relationship to the rest of his prolific production all merit reexamination. I therefore seek to analyze the fraught construction of identity in a French society marked by its shifting relationship to history as memorialization, while complicating the generalizations that often result from identity-based scholarship. The novel juxtaposition of Modiano, Djebar, and Guibert within the dissertation enacts my desire to challenge the limits posed by reading authors solely in the light of narrowly-defined identity politics.

This dissertation takes the paradoxical role of Colette in the canon of French and women's writing, from her earliest works to present, as an entry into a radically new interpretation of her life and literary oeuvre. This work is distinguished from previous works on Colette both in its approach and in the scope of its research, relying on extensive archival research revealing unpublished and unstudied aspects of Colette's biography and reception, and using a variety of modes of analysis to interpret this research.

This dissertation shows, in its first two chapters, how the myth of Colette as the incarnation of a particularly French brand of femininity, a spontaneous, natural writer, in no way literarily self-conscious, neither contributing to nor influenced by literary innovations, whose writing expresses her instinctive femininity, was constituted, from the earliest reviews of Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école (1900), through feminist interpretations of Colette from the 1970s to present. Because Colette was understood to be a feminine writer of women by both misogynist conservatives of 1900 and radical feminists of the 1970's, their understanding of this writer remained remarkably homogenous and durable. The third chapter relies on contemporary celebrity theory in order to investigate Colette's own agency in the creation and policing of this durable public image, tracing both ways that Colette maintained her image, and ways that she profited from it, focusing in particular on her eponymous literary collection, the Collection Colette, and her "produits de beauté" cosmetics line and a beauty salon. This understanding of Colette's agential role in her public image inspires a new reading of the 1910 novel La Vagabonde and the relationship Colette depicts between the protagonist, Renée Néré's stage persona and her life when she is not in front of an audience.

The next two chapters suggest new ways of approaching Colette, beyond the durable myth of the spontaneous feminine writer that she worked so hard to maintain: as a consummate professional and as a literary innovator. The fourth chapter focuses on Colette's professionalism: using a Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of Colette's correspondence to uncover her role in the literary field, tracing the full extent of her social, artistic, and professional networks with other writers, journalists, and artists. This chapter then explores concrete examples of her manipulation of these networks, studying in particular her collaboration with Maurice Ravel in L'Enfant et les sortilèges and her management of the literary department at the newspaper Le Matin. The final chapter of this dissertation reads Colette in terms of discourses of modernism, from which she has long been excluded due to her imagined marginality to the literary field, focusing in particular on French conceptions of the harmonious reconciliation of classicism and literary innovation which reached their height in the 1920's, and which I have termed the "classique moderne." This dissertation makes a contribution to trends in French literature, literary history, the sociology of literature, women's studies, women's history, feminist literary criticism, and celebrity theory.