Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in English, is a comparative analysis of Walter Benjamin's and Annie Ernaux's readings of 'A la recherche du temps perdu' by Marcel Proust. While Benjamin emphasizes Proust's storytelling capabilities and commends Proust for his descriptions of involuntary memory, Ernaux works more critically to reimagine a writing process removed of spontaneous experience. To develop this point, we apply Benjamin's definitions of `storyteller' and `experience'; to Ernaux's Les Annees (2008), an autobiography written almost entirely without the first-person singular pronoun. Using Benjamin's terminology, we question the relationship between writing and collectivity, not only asking `how is Les Annees a collective autobiography,' but also `how can one write collectively?' We conclude by unraveling the mechanics of the `collective image' at work in Les Annees: Ernaux's collective image does not speak for all people, nor does it claim to be an objective rendition of the past; rather, writing such an image is an ethical exercise, a social engagement with one's community and one's selves.

Committee: Audrey Wasser Dr. (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges Dr. (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Literature; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, French and Italian

This dissertation examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and the representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several contemporary French and Francophone women artists. These writers and filmmakers question the home as a female interior space in which female protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and foreground domestic space, female housekeeping activities, and women's ideological roles in order to (re)appropriate the normative gender discourses of their homelands. They accomplish these goals by revealing how the home within each society functions subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention. Using Assia Djebar's work as a source of theoretical departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Metropol and the Maghreb. Using feminist film theoretical and lifewriting critical perspectives, I examine the functions of the gaze and the effects of voicing the personal for women of France and North Africa. I also introduce theories of domesticity when considering the role and position of the home in the processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction. This dissertation considers women's coming to voice through women's (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking as made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. Through a postcolonial lens of destabilization and the celebration of the in-between, hybrid spaces of first-person feminine expression and representation, I show how the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes pr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Judith Mayne (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2004, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

Annie Ernaux professes to write “au-dessous de la litterature.” (Une femme, 23) It is the aim of this paper to uncover what Ernaux means by that phrase and to examine the complexities involved in the resultant ramifications of attempting such a thing within the context of contemporary French literature. In the course of this study, I look at the issues of subjectivity, fictionality, historicity, law and language as they relate to the writings of Ernaux with the aid of critics Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Committee: Anna Roberts (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, Romance