French, Francophone & Italian Studies Dissertations and Theses

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  • Publication
    Marcel Proust and Reynaldo Hahn
    (University of Kansas, 1970-05-31) Bales, Richard M.
  • Publication
    Reimagining the Human in Modern French Science Fiction
    (University of Kansas, 2019-05-31) Lord, Christina Alexis; Kelly, Van; Scott, Paul; Fourny, Diane; Johnson, Kij; Ziethen, Antje
    Due to human activity and technology, such as deforestation, nuclear testing, and the burning of fossil fuels, many geologists and environmentalists agree that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The dangers posed by the Anthropocene – that is, the risk that the planet will potentially become an uninhabitable environment for humans and nonhumans – require a reworking of human imagination and knowledge. There is an impetus to reconfigure the human as previously the center of all things, completely independent of other complex systems of life on Earth and throughout the cosmos. While the posthumanist response calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist perspective to coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Science fiction has always been a representational tool for examining these questions surrounding human identity and the human species encountering technological and environmental change. Given the French tradition of interrelations between philosophical thought and literature, French science fiction is even more predisposed to philosophical, ethical, and metaphysical inquiries surrounding reimaginings of the human. This study examines works by Franco-Belgian author J.H. Rosny aîné (Les Xipéhuz; Les Navigateurs de l’infini), French writers Ayerdhal and Jean-Claude Dunyach (Étoiles mourantes), Éric Chevillard (Sans l’orang-outan), and French filmmaker Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita; The Fifth Element; Lucy). I argue that their works engage in a posthumanist challenge to the centrality of the “human,” posit the co-evolution and necessary interdependence of humans and nonhumans, and engage in an ethical examination of the transhumanist agenda of technologically modifying our minds and bodies. By examining tropes of Otherness in French science fiction (alien, machine, woman, animal), this study demonstrates how the works of Rosny aîné, Dunyach and Ayerdhal, Besson, and Chevillard reveal a dialectic between transhumanism and posthumanism.
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    ‘Ung Espace de Temps’ – The Role of Time in Le Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies​
    (University of Kansas, 2019-05-31) Cooper, Olivia Rose; Jewers, Caroline; Bourgeois, Christine; Booker, Tom
    Between 1450 and 1529, five Middle French versions of a manuscript recounting the tale of Gillion de Trazegnies were produced in the ducal courts of Burgundy. The objective of this thesis is to explore representations of time in the Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies in order to offer some potential conclusions about the ways in which time is addressed and rendered within this text – and, by extension, possible trends in literary representations of time during this period. Although it was not adapted from any work of verse itself, Gillion was likely influenced by its context – a period of abundant mises-en-proses – as reflected in the text’s penchant for conventional motifs and frequent repetitions. In addition to the potential role of its context in the work’s portrayal and use of time, this thesis will address time in Gillion at both the lexical and structural levels. By way of conclusion, remarks on the implications of these observations in the context of medieval French and Burgundian literature as well as the history of the novel will be followed by a brief exploration of the relationship between the text and Lieven van Lathem’s (ca. 1438-1493) program of illustration in one of the two illuminated manuscript versions of this text, Ms. 111, housed at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
  • Publication
    The Earl of Essex in La Calprenède, Thomas Corneille, and Henry Jones
    (University of Kansas, 1933-08-31) Hamilton, Helen Mary
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    Balzac, Financial Adviser: Society and the Birth of Modern Finance
    (University of Kansas, 2018-05-31) Roney, Kristina M.; Pasco, Allan H.; Jewers, Caroline; Kelly, Van; Hayes, Bruce; Juhl, Ted
    Honoré de Balzac, through his monumental cycle of novels and short stories that constitute La Comédie humaine, bears witness to early nineteenth-century, post-revolutionary, French society. This analysis will situate six of his key works within the more subtle yet equally powerful revolution also taking place, that of industrialization. His belief that things (les choses) represent the physical manifestation (la représentation matérielle) of thought required that he place a particular emphasis on society’s economic environment and each individual’s socio-economic status since the acquisition of such objects necessitates financial means (1, 9). “Gobseck” (1830), La Maison Nucingen (1838), Eugénie Grandet (1833), La Cousine Bette (1846), Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau (1837), and “L’Illustre Gaudissart” (1833) depict the transformation of the French economy from an agricultural base to one underpinned by industrial products. The diminished importance of agriculture, which prior to the nineteenth century constituted the primary store of financial value, gives birth to a new source of wealth found in modern financial instruments that remain the essential investment vehicle in today’s society. This study traces the establishment of the necessary institutional structures to support this burgeoning economy alongside the evolution of financial products from credit, to bonds, to commercial diversification, before reaching pure spéculation. It reveals a trend toward investments of increasing levels of intangibility that Balzac begins to ridicule in preference to a conservative investment strategy that favors bonds. Whereas Thomas Piketty in Le Capital au XXIe siècle (Seuil, 2013) supplements his economic study with literary depiction, the current project inverts that approach with literary analysis supported by economic evidence. It extends upon the critical work of Jean-Hervé Donnard’s Les Réalités économiques et sociales dans La Comédie humaine (Armand Colin, 1961), which asserts that the central purpose of Balzac’s work is to examine the message conveyed in the financial details Balzac deemed indispensable to his story of manners in nineteenth-century French society. Despite his well-known personal financial difficulties and an extensive bibliography of scholars approaching his work from a Marxist perspective, I present Balzac as an astute financial adviser and proponent of capitalist ideals.
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    A Critical Study of the Chorus in the Plays of Robert Garnier
    (University of Kansas, 1954-05) Dinneen, David A.
    Conventions in Art are born rather than made: like most conventions the Greek Chorus is a beautiful accident, and like most accidents, it is not perfect. Superbly as its great dramatists adapt and modify this relic of primitive religion to serve their art, just as Greek sculptors adapt their groups with an added beauty to the arbitrary triangle of the temple-pediment, there are times when we feel the Chorus an encumbrance and wish it away. On the other hand, the dramatists early realized how many important uses this standing stage-army could be made to serve. It can expound the past, comment on the present, forebode the future. It provides the past with a mouthpiece and the spectator with a counterpart of himself. It forms a living foreground of common humanity above which the heroes tower: a living background of pure poetry which turns lamentation into music and horror into peace. It provides both a wall, as Schiller held, severing drama like a magic circle from the real world, and a bridge between the heroic figures of legend and the average humanity of the audience.*
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    Paul Verlaine and Arthur Symons. A comparative study of their verse
    (University of Kansas, 1931) Cornell, William Kenneth
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    The historical basis of Romain Rolland's Le Jeu de L'Amour et de la Mort
    (University of Kansas, 1932) Jackson, Dorothy Louise
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    Estienne Jodelle's Cleopatre Captive and Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra ; a comparison
    (University of Kansas, 1930) Kruse, Virginia
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    The historical basis of Hennique's La Mort du Duc d'Enghien
    (University of Kansas, 1931) Smith, Opal M.
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    Fabre's Timon d'Athènes : Sources and relation to Shakespeare's Timon of Athens
    (University of Kansas, 1930) Osma, Helen Pitts
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    Four devices used by Maeterlinck in creating the atmosphere of his early plays
    (University of Kansas, 1929) Hall, Mary Alexandra
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    La crise de la postmodernité et de la masculinité dans les romans de Michel Houellebecq
    (University of Kansas, 2014-08-31) Viennot, Gilles André Fernand; Kelly, Van; Pasco, Allan H; Jewers, Caroline; Booker, John T; Barnard, Philip
    In the last twenty years, Michel Houellebecq has become one of the most prominent French writers, whose international renown is still growing. The author, however, is still misunderstood by some critics, for whom he is a vile masculinist, a sterile polemist, or an agitator as well as a media wizard whose texts lack content and significance. For others, he is discredited by his excessive pessimism and by the strange paradoxes and undecidable or shocking aspects that lie in his writings. In this dissertation, we argue that Houellebecq's message is as strong as coherent, by analyzing his complex argumentation. Firstly, Houellebecq deplores the disaggregation of familial bonds. According to him, this lack of affective education leads to the disappearance of love. Rightfully deemed anticapitalistic, Houellebecq regards the professional world with severity. In the disenchanted and alarmist portrait he renders of the western civilization, by adapting each of his novels to the rapid changes that the world went through, Houellebecq contends that the contamination of meaning by absurdity and suffering, in relation to the impossibility of love, leads to the complete decomposition of reality, and sinks the world into a dark and inextricable simulacrum. An anticapitalistic manifesto as well as a portrait of damaged masculinity, Houellebecq's message revolves around the destructive effects of the overwhelming economic axis which, according to him, rules the western world. This dissertation is informed by the theoretical arsenal and speculative thinking of metaphysician Jean Baudrillard, and philosophers and sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Gilles Lipovetsky. It mostly refers to three novels by Houellebecq: Whatever (1994), The Elementary Particles (1998), and The Map and the Territory (2010). It describes one of the most important influences of Michel Houellebecq: Oswald Spengler. This work situates Houellebecq in relation to precursors and contemporary writers whose vision of the world and pessimism are in line with his views in several respects: Philippe Djian, Hervé Guibert, Vincent Ravalec, Régis Jauffret and Emmanuel Carrère. Houellebecq's oeuvre is also compared to the feminist vision of writer Marie Desplechin, with the intention of balancing his harshly masculinist vision. Au fil des vingt dernières années, Michel Houellebecq est devenu un auteur français crucial, dont la renommée internationale s'est accrue. Il reste pourtant incompris par une partie de la critique qui voit en lui un vil masculiniste, un polémiste stérile, ou un agitateur médiatique dénué de message substantiel. Pour d'autres, il est discrédité par son pessimisme excessif, et par les paradoxes étranges et le caractère indécidable que ses textes recèlent. Dans cette thèse, nous montrons que Michel Houellebecq délivre un message puissant et cohérent, dont nous nous attachons à détailler l'argumentation complexe. Michel Houellebecq déplore la désagrégation des liens familiaux. Selon lui, ce défaut d'éducation affective et sentimentale débouche sur la disparition du sentiment amoureux. Jugé à raison anticapitaliste, Michel Houellebecq décrit le monde du travail avec une grande sévérité. Dans le portrait désenchanté et alarmiste qu'il dresse de la société occidentale, en s'adaptant avec chaque nouveau roman aux changements rapides que celle-ci a connu entre-temps, l'auteur soutient que cette annexion du sens par l'absurde, conjuguée à l'impossibilité de l'amour, entraîne la déréalisation du monde, et sa plongée dans un simulacre morbide et inextricable. A mi-chemin entre une critique du capitalisme et un manifeste de la masculinité en souffrance, le message de Houellebecq s'axe sur les méfaits du tout économique qui régit la société. Pour cette raison, nous utilisons largement l'arsenal théorique et les pistes spéculatives développés par le métaphysicien Jean Baudrillard, et les sociologues Zygmunt Bauman et Gilles Lipovetsky. Cette thèse s'appuie essentiellement sur trois romans de Michel Houellebecq : Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les particules élémentaires (1998), et La carte et le territoire (2010). Nous offrons également un aperçu théorique de l'oeuvre de l'un des penseurs qui ont fortement influencé Michel Houellebecq, et qui imprègne ses textes : celle d'Oswald Spengler. Cette thèse s'ouvre enfin à quelques précurseurs et contemporains de Michel Houellebecq, qui, sur certains points, partagent la même vision du monde : Philippe Djian, Hervé Guibert, Vincent Ravalec, Régis Jauffret et Emmanuel Carrère. Ce travail présente enfin la vision féministe et féconde de Marie Desplechin, avec l'intention d'équilibrer la vision masculine de Michel Houellebecq.
  • Publication
    The historical background of Sardou's Thermidor
    (University of Kansas, 1929) Riley, Noma
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    Assigning Rhythms to Troubadour Poems
    (University of Kansas, 1973) Pifer, Mary Gayle
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    A modern treatment of Esther
    (University of Kansas, 1931) Schmidt, Mariam Penner
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    François Villon in French and English drama and fiction since 1877
    (University of Kansas, 1931) Sillers, Rose Matthew
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    Charlotte Corday in literature
    (University of Kansas, 1929) McCluney, Clara Isabelle
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    Alfred de Vigny's treatment of Thomas Chatterton
    (University of Kansas, 1926) McKinney, Helen Julia