Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

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

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2014, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

Petals of a Rose Close examines in music and prose a poem by Sylvia Plath, Edge (1963) and a passage from the novel Le Cote de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) (1921), by Marcel Proust. Both are about a deceased woman: Proust writes about his grandmother, while Plath's poem is more abstract in that the figure has no identity. Both passages are about purification and perfection following each subject's demise. Compositionally, the piece consists of six spoken essay portions and five pairs of companion canons set to the passage by Proust. Each companion canon uses the same melody, but alters the temporal, intervallic and key relationships. Each pair is unique, demonstrating the inexorable changes leading to the visions of perfection presented by Plath and Proust. The title refers to a sentence in the poem: She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close . . .

Committee: Mara Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Mike Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member); Joel Hoffman D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, French and Italian

Appreciation of the significant comical quality of A la recherche du temps perdu grows with each passing decade. Likewise, understanding of this novel's rich network of references to diverse literary and artistic works also grows steadily. Leading scholars have described the Recherche as a modern mock epic, and works as varied as Homer's Odyssey and the Thousand and One Nights have been proposed as the primary intertext for the novel's mock-epic dynamic. Such an intertext would provide structure not only for the Recherche's abundant comedy, but also for many other aspects of this novel in which the comic vision is so pervasive. The present study suggests a different primary intertext for the Recherche. It proposes that an epic tradition born out of the French Revolution fulfills this important role in Proust's novel. Usually called humanitarian or Romantic epic, this post-revolutionary epic tradition envisions a restoration of the religious hegemony that was permanently lost when Catholicism was violently disestablished at the height of the Revolution. Melodrama is another literary form that scholars agree was born out of the French Revolution's religious conflict. The chief characteristics of this literary mode have been well documented over the past three decades. Yet the many similarities between melodrama and post-revolutionary epic have hardly been noticed. This study claims that humanitarian, post-revolutionary epic is melodrama's true epic form. The sexual politics of this literary genre, renamed here “melodramatic epic,” is typically extreme; and the sexual ethic that it promotes is always highly conservative. The extreme sexual conservatism of melodramatic epic makes it the perfect comic foil for the Recherche's exploration of sexual diversity. Ongoing nineteenth-century religious conflict in France provided a constantly renewed catalyst for the production of melodramatic epic. Such conflict peaked during the anticlerical campaign that terminated the Dr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Eugene Holland (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2010, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

In A la Recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust writes that he would be mistaken in calling any of his readers “mon lecteur.” Instead, he calls each person who reads his novel to use it as an instrument to read his or her own interior text. This thesis explores Proust's theories on reading through psychoanalytic and Foucauldian optics, asking what it might mean to read within oneself through an object that is “other.” In order to explore the function of this mediative device—Proust's novel—that collapses the binaries of self and other, inside and out, reader and author, we will look at the senses that he uses as metaphors for reading, vision and hearing, in particular. In sum, the virtual coexistence of the author's novel and the reader's interior text that occurs through the act of reading creates a shared textual space in which the subjectivities of both individuals overlap in a new type of meta-textual metaphor—one that is custom-made for and by each reader.

Committee: James Creech PhD (Advisor); Anna Klosowska PhD (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature