▼ This thesis is a clausewitzian interpretation of the five Arthurian novels of Chretien de Troyes. The essential components are principally the military relationship of the knight to his king as an arm of the Arthurian state and in their symbiotic fusion as the expression of the reigning political will. This thesis also examines relationships of power and the hierarchy of rank. Hence, the knight incarnates the physical force of the mythical King Arthur in the expression of Arthurian hegemony over an aggressive but inferior adversary. The other essential component is love as chivalrous triumph augments state power as the beloved fiancée receives her hero. Implicitly, love idealizes the martial dimensions of the knight as the couple begins its future. This idealization always takes place with the benediction of King Arthur and under his aegeis. He is thus the signal to wage war, and he determines the conditions of victory. Hence, King Arthur, in the version of Chretien de Troyes, affirms chivalrous valor and the legitimization of love. Chretien de Troyes represents the romantic aspect of medieval war because it is the sole means by which a knight proves his aristocratic worth before his king and before his aristocratic lady. Love and war are esoteric to the regal apex of power: the reigning aristocracy. It is the ethereal quality of love that is born of the martial crucible, and the intrigue articulates life and death. Life is Arthurian and death belongs to all who oppose Arthurian life. Advisors/Committee Members: Arden, Dr. Heather.

▼ In this era of literary theory explosion, literature has been pushed to frontiers never imagined before. While some critics argue that the push has benefited literature others contend, understandably so, that the trend has opened doors to misinterpretation of certain authors based on out of context reading of their works. Without trying to take side, I would simply submit that Perec is one such author who is often times misrepresented. While I absolutely understand the idea that, a book shares certain affinities with any other produced commodity and that therefore the consumer is at liberty to deal with it the way he or she deems satisfactory, we should not loose sight of the fact that the contextual back drop in which any particular work is produced offers as much an interesting reading as any other. This dissertation looks at four different novels by Perec and tries to anchor them, as the author himself begs the reader to do, in their social, political as well as their cultural background. The strategy adopted in this work consist of reading side by side, like the two sides of an open book or matching pieces of a puzzle, two novels from each of the two most influential literary periods on Perec's writing. The dissertation pays particular attention to the fact that some of the author's books seems to sit at the end of each other's spectrum and tries to construe the relevance of that polarity with regard to the author's work current criticism . The study matches in the first instance Les choses against Un homme qui dort two novels with a social agenda, and in the second phase, it pits La disparition against Les revenentes two novels from the author's oulipian experience. The reading model provided in this work attempts to highlight contextualized understanding of Perec's work and to draw challenging observations that could, may be, pave a way to a new reading and understanding of the four selected books. The most engaging remark postulated in this dissertation is the fact that it is believed that Perec is more of "un auteur engagé" (and not, as portrayed by other critics, a mere ludic autobiographical writer) who failed to articulate his philosophical vision, living them strewn all over his body of work because of his inadequate academic background. Advisors/Committee Members: Ames, Dr. Sanford.

▼ What is the relationship between the cave of Lascaux, French war memorials, comic strips of Hergé, the French résistance and a museum? These elements are all part of daily life for people living in France. However, understanding one's own culture and history is not easy in today's world. Representations of the past raise challenging issues for young generations. Memory becomes a duty - devoir de mémoire - for the young, who need to be aware of their history. Following this line of inquiry, I study the narratives of Jean Rouaud. Part one examines books on two museums from opposite perspectives. The first book, Le paléo circus (1996), is devotedto the preservation of the past, namely the paintings of Lascaux. In the other, "Roman-cité" (1996), the museum of Sciences and Industry in Paris represents today's legacy to the future. Part two focuses on five novels dedicated to mourning the deaths of the narrator's relatives: the grandfathers in Les champs d'honneur (1990), the father in Des hommes illustres(1993) and Le monde à peu près (1996), and finally the mother in Pour vos cadeaux (1998) and Sur la scène comme au ciel (1999). In these narratives, Rouaud's personal experiences are supported by both collective memory and imagination. This enables the emergence of 'sites of memory', the literary equivalent of what Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire. Identifying these 'sites of memory' reveals elements of the French cultural inheritance which creates national identity. Advisors/Committee Members: Ames, S.

▼ The narrow critical and personal approaches to Raymond Queneau's Les Fleurs bleues reflect the metaphorical image that this French author chose to represent his works: the onion. The highly discrete critical studies of this novel typify the "peeling of the layers" that are characteristic of Queneau's literary composition. So multi-faceted is Les Fleurs bleues that it remains on many levels a highly inaccessible, hermetic novel. This study proposes the usage of a holographic analogy from which the seemingly chaotic nature of Les Fleurs bleues can be appreciated as a whole, rather than for the relative quality of its parts. Capital in the usage of a holographic analogy is the return to the source-image of the text. This leads to the discovery of the absent, yet present, dreamer whose cognitive watermark frames and illuminates the text of the novel. This study begins with an overview of the major critical approaches to Les Fleurs bleues. Next, an overview is presented of the literary and mathematical experimentations of the Oulipo group which ultimately lead to the open theorization of the composition of "holopoems." In the novel, the problematic nature of compositional structure, number of main characters, vocabulary, cultural references, language registers, etc., are then isolated and analyzed. Finally, a holographic analogy is applied which synthesizes these elements, concluding that Les Fleurs bleues is an Oulipian prototype of a "holonovel." Advisors/Committee Members: Vialet, Dr. Michele.

▼ The work of Francophone authors provides fertile ground for the analysis of the importance of libraries and archives in the production of post-colonial literature. In particular, the work of Jacques Derrida, Leila Sebbar and Assia Djebar lend themselves to this kind of assessment. Beginning with Derrida’s published presentation, Archive Fever, the library/archive is defined. Francophone writers and researchers working within the libraries/archives of metropolitan France must constantly decipher information based upon historical bias. The effects of this research are reflected in the writings of francophone authors. Sebbar shows the library/archive as an exonerated institution where two cultures meet. Djebar writing is the product of thorough research of a trained historian. She engages the historical record by interweaving the past with the present, mixing archival research with North African oral tradition and personal narrative to creates a new voice. The work of Francophone authors demonstrates the importance of the library/archive and points to the importance of this kind of analysis in French literature. Advisors/Committee Members: Vialet, Michele E.

▼ In my dissertation, I examine how marginality and identity differences are represented in five Francophone novels: La mère du printemps (1982) by Driss Chraïbi, Laventure ambiguë (1962) by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Les soleils des indépendances (1970) by Ahmadou Kourouma, La répudiation (1969) by Rachid Boudjedra and L'homme rompu (1994) by Tahar Ben Jelloun. In these novels, the problematics of identity and marginalization are treated in ways that call for reformulation of the concept of culture as a homogenous entity. I analyze identity in these literary works by going beyond the homogenous cultural perspectives adopted by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques (1955), Tzvetan Todorov in Nous et les autres (1989) et Jemie Chinweizu in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1983). Using the hypothesis that internal conflicts and dialectical interrelationships are necessary factors of cultural transformation, I show how marginality is produced in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial spaces. The ability or inability to overcome constraints of cultural purity will constitute the basis of my socio-historical analysis and I situate each novel within the problematics of going beyond the borders of one's cultural space. It is this transgression of limits that Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) considers as a cultural performance founded on mutual contestations and a constantly changing identity. By basing my arguments on this innovative but conflictual idea of culture, I show how cultural dynamism is revealed by the capacity of the marginalized to overcome otherness by a principle of openness. But while Bhabha's The Location of Culture shows the plurality of cultural spaces, this plurality is problematized all the more in the novels I analyze in this dissertation. In La mère du printemps, L'aventure ambiguë, Les soleils des indépendances, La répudiation, and L'homme rompu, my textual analysis reveal varying degrees of inability on the part of the major characters to accept the absence of cultural purity. Advisors/Committee Members: Vialet, Michele.

▼ The aim of this dissertation is to explore the complex phenomenon of French identity and Frenchness in the 21st century by exploring the geographical, social and cultural site around which the November 2005 riots occurred. The banlieue, literally the suburbs, figuratively the projects, embodies the necessity to examine the dynamics of a location, marked by stigmatization and framed by a hegemonic political discourse. In chapter one, I examine the history and the architecture that characterizes the French banlieue as a site of fear and rejection. Through the study of the classic movie La Haine, directed by Mathieu Kassovitz in 1995, these fears are questioned and manifest the necessity to scrutinize obsolete notions of integration and communautarism as ethnocentric strongholds and expressions of ideological and cultural preferences. In chapter two, I demonstrate the hegemonic media framing of the banlieue as a foreign, dirty, poor and uneducated site. This biased reading and depicting reproduces colonial schemes of an old European nation. By closely reading various newspapers articles, a narrative stamped by racism emerges, thus revealing a post-traumatic syndrome of memory repressed on the subject matter of colonization, decolonization and immigration. This repressed memory explodes in the anger of the alienated inhabitants of the banlieue, and in their writings, analyzed in a subpart to articulate the accurate symptoms of a post-colonial and postmodern trauma. Last but not least, I argue through the study of its history, impact and evolution in France, that Rap music has become the polyphonic expression of repressed voices, emphasizing the great need for France to acknowledge the presence and the contributions of all its citizens. By exploring the works of the writer/rapper Abd Al Malik, who grew up in the projects of Strasbourg, a dynamic space for a creative discourse of identity materializes itself and gives way to a new France, that of the VIth Republic. Advisors/Committee Members: Ames, Dr. Sanford.

▼ In his 1971 novel La mémoire tatouée, Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi examines the role of language and memory in the process of decolonization. The complexity of the relationships between memory, language and culture in Morocco is examined through an analysis of the narrative structure of the novel. Khatibi uses the techniques of parabola and parable as well as spatialization and dialogue in order to re-create the process of decolonization that he underwent. Derridian linguistic theory and performativity are key to understanding this novel and help the reader to locate the author’s own voice or subjectivity in the polyphony of the text. It is in the acts of writing and reading that decolonization is performed. Advisors/Committee Members: Vialet, Michèle.