Landscape and the Imagination examines how French romantic poets represent the creative imagination as an aesthetic process. This study does not consider the landscape in poetry as an ekphrastic phenomenon, but instead looks at how the poet's perception, memory, and mental faculties form a productive medium that transforms immediate experience.

Starting with Lamartine's Méditations poétiques (1820) and their debt to German Idealist theories of art, I show how the poet's appropriation of melody dematerializes the landscape to free the lyric voice. Though Lamartine later critiqued the imagination's lack of boundaries by turning to the physical experience of nature in the Nouvelles méditations poétiques (1823), he sealed readers' perceptions of romantic poetry as vague and limitless, prompting Victor Hugo to bolster an ephemeral lyric by incorporating the immediate experiences of history and visual media. By examining contemporary theories of painting, vision, and color, my second chapter traces Hugo's developing formulation of the visual imagination in the Odes et Ballades (1822-1828) and its subsequent representation as a diorama in Les Orientales (1829). More than picturesque fantasies of the East, Hugo's exotic landscapes refer back to the poet's filtering eye, which mediates between immediate experience and invention.

My final chapter considers how Baudelaire aimed to preserve this tension between expansion and contraction in his lyric poems. By distilling various theories of the imagination and centering the work of art on the cognitive processing of memory and experience, Baudelaire undermined what had become the post-exilic Hugo's universalizing and expansive impulse. Drawing from theorists who stressed the role of the "real world" in the work of art (Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Stendhal), as well as from Edgar Allan Poe's conception of art as the product of inductive analysis, Baudelaire compressed the imagination into the conflicting impulses of the brain. My reading of the "Tableaux parisiens" (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861) relates the critical story of how Baudelaire not only features the imagination as a process, but extracts its cerebral essence as he eliminates the subterfuge of romantic tropes, metaphysical systems, and material disturbances.

Contrary to jaded contemporary readings of romantic lyric poetry as idealistic or escapist, or as reflecting a melancholic "sentiment de la nature", each of these poets acknowledges the imagination's combative dynamic. Far from being a motif, the imagination appears in each volume as a cogent and carefully developed contribution to the history of its idea.

When Teresa of Avila founded the Order of Discalced Carmelites in sixteenth-century Spain, she did so in part to restore the austerity that had previously characterized the Carmelite Order. At the same time, mindful of the hardships of convent life, she also sought to balance that austerity with a measure of alegría, or joyfulness. As a means of enlivening the atmosphere of the convents she had founded, she composed coplas, or poems, meant to be sung at daily recreations, and encouraged her fellow Carmelites to do the same. Researchers have shown that this practice was maintained in Spain until at least the early seventeenth century, but until now there has been little indication of this poetic tradition in other countries where Discalced Carmelite convents were founded. In this dissertation, poems composed in Carmelite convents in France, the Spanish Netherlands and later Belgium in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries are presented, demonstrating that the tradition begun by Teresa of Avila was actively carried on by the French, Flemish and Belgian Carmelite women who joined Teresa's order in the centuries following its foundation. Further, the presentation and analysis of these manuscripts shows that Carmelite poems adapted to new times and new circumstances, and began to function as historical documents, defenses of convent life and as a means of expressing resistance to anti-clerical hostility, notably during the French Revolution. These poems also serve to establish a literary link between "La Grande Thérèse" and "La Petite Thérèse", as Teresa of Avila and Thérèse de Lisieux are often called in French Carmel. A clear arc of poetic activity that reaches from sixteenth-century Spain in the time of Teresa of Avila to nineteenth-century France in the time of Thérèse de Lisieux is now visible, and the broader meaning and function of poetry in the convents of Carmelite women is made clearer.

The dissertation examines representations of the author, reader, and book in sixteenth-century printed editions of Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Considering both author and reader as literary constructs, I argue that authors and printer/booksellers, faced with a more indefinite readership after the advent of print, and hence with a possible discrepancy between supply and demand, have recourse to techniques similar to those of modern advertising in creating demand for their books and ensuring their favorable reception. I focus on two such techniques: the construction of the authorial persona and ideal readership. I compare authorial personae to the concept of prestige advertising, which seeks to allay fears of mass production and the profit motive by representing the printed book as an artisanal product and the author and printer/bookseller as concerned only with the reader's benefit. I also examine how editions construct an ideal reader, an idealized image of the reader that may be attained by reading and receiving the book in a certain way, much like ads present an image of the consumer to which the product can grant access. In so doing, I pursue a line of inquiry in which historical and philological approaches to authorship, readership, and book history inform our conception of how advertising functions, and vice versa.

Chapter One shows how Lemaire's Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye and its accompanying publications are an attempt to convince the literate public that Lemaire's services are what France needs most in the midst of Louis XII's bitter and costly feud with the pope, Julius II. Chapter Two examines how Marot's authorial persona is manipulated in authorized and unauthorized editions, and how the 1538 Oeuvres hint at the poet's misgivings with the flexibility of his persona and its use in attracting readers. Chapter Three shows how Marot's concerns are borne out in the works of Rabelais, who crafts an authorial persona increasingly centered on gratifying and healing readers, but who accompanies this persona with an ideal readership which simultaneously ties advertising techniques to Renaissance theories of self-fashioning and reveals the parasitism of these techniques.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the comparative cultural discourses that emerged in works written by eighteenth-century European travelers and philosophers. As they concentrate on Hottentots, Tahitians or Native Canadians' institutions and customs, these texts also construct a system, similar to language, whose ambition is to define social interactions and to measure their respective values.

In contrast to earlier travel accounts, largely motivated by religious conviction, Enlightenment travel writing became increasingly concerned with the identification of cultural structures among "Natives" in an attempt to find a common ground that could provide a universal model of human relations. Although not always in agreement, travelers and philosophers paid specific attention to customs of hospitality, commerce, and marriage as a basis for their comparison among various nations. This dissertation proposes to examine these representations of alterity as a form of "cultural language" characteristic of the period.

The first chapter analyzes Peter Kolb's text, L'Etat présent du cap de Bonne-Espérance, which sums up, and adds to, western perceptions of the Hottentot society as the population most distant from Europeans. Several identifiable Hottentot institutions are shown to be ultimately untranslatable and the source of numerous cross-cultural misunderstandings (including the European naming of the "Hottentot" people). The second chapter discusses Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes and shows how his hypothetical definition of man in the state of nature would mediate all subsequent discourse on native cultures. In the following chapter, I point to the politicization of cultural language in Raynal's monumental Histoire des deux Indes. The last chapter revisits Bougainville's Voyage and Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville to show that both authors dealt with the impossibility of defining universal cultural systems, prompting reflection upon the complexities of translation and cross-cultural interactions.

The conclusion suggests that the recurring appeal to customs and institutions as keys to understanding the functioning of social groups signals the emergence of a new anthropological discourse fascinated by the possibility and the limits of universal models, and preoccupied with the validity of moral comparisons.

My dissertation asks why many French symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s thought that participation in poetry - both the production and the reading of it - ought to be restricted. Authors studied include Pierre Louÿs, Camille Mauclair, Charles Morice, Pierre Quillard, Henri de Régnier, Paul Valéry, and Francis Vielé-Griffin, as well as influential older authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. My corpus consists of the symbolists' poems, correspondence and, above all, their numerous literary journals. Several conservative contemporary critics held that, in rejecting readers, symbolists sought only notoriety and eventual canonicity. While such considerations play a role in my analysis, I also place the symbolists' rationales for restricting readership in terms of their various, often "idealistic" poetic aims. I additionally situate those rationales in the context of non-elitist symbolist attitudes that accorded at least superficial respect to popular instinct. Still, in a period of universalized education and mass printing, it was common to anticipate, above all, incomprehension from the distracted, newly literate masses. Symbolists valued intensive readers willing to embrace "difficult" texts; they associated such readers with the aristocratic old regime.

My first chapter establishes "concentration" as an overarching artistic and social value. Concentration has two relevant connotations, here: patient, concentrated effort in the rewriting and rereading of poetry, and the social concentration of the literary tradition in the hands of the few. The following chapters show how these two values were nuanced and sometimes flatly contradicted in other, equally "symbolist" discourse. The movement's extensive production of critical discourse on poetry was, itself, a source of ambivalence. Frequently scholarly themselves, symbolists decried pedantry and insisted on poetry's oral qualities. Poems were, furthermore, meant to be read without mediation by any form of commentary. In that sense, symbolists were still able at times to claim affinity with naïve (i.e. unmediated) popular poetic instinct. I conclude by contrasting this mistrust of critical commentary with the twentieth century's more frequent blurring of primary (poetic) and secondary (analytic) texts. Symbolists participated in but were, on the balance, ambivalent about trends contributing to poetry's increased "difficulty" and ties with the academy.

French Troubadours explores the reception of Occitan lyric in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, in the period corresponding to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and its aftermath, which witnessed France's annexation of the majority of Occitania. Surveying the corpus of French romances that quote Occitan song (Part I) and French songbooks that also contain Occitan lyrics (Part II), it shows how Occitan poems--from the very beginning of their French reception--were subtly incorporated into the French canon by way of imitation, compilation with French texts, and adaptation to the French sound system.

Chapter 1, on Jean Renart's Roman de la rose, shows how the troubadours are collapsed into a set of francophone lyrics, which are enjoyed not in France but by the Holy Roman Emperor. French-language lyric, and other forms of French culture, are presented as the degré zéro of culture in the German Empire, while Germanic languages are treated as foreign. In Chapter 2, I turn to Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette, which, like Renart's Rose, appropriates troubadour lyrics linguistically, and--in one instance--also associates them with the Holy Roman Empire. Here, however, the Holy Roman Empire is not a neutral cadre, but a negative space. Chapter 3, devoted to Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour, shows how Richard obscures the first-person language and rhyme of the troubadour poems he quotes.

In Part II, I turn to the set of French songbooks that transmit Occitan lyric. A study of compilation patterns reveals that, rather than being transmitted in a separate section of songbooks, Occitan poems--which are often Gallicized--are almost always interspersed with French lyrics. Consequently, a medieval reader who encountered the troubadours only in French transmission would have little chance of recognizing their cultural specificity. In Chapter 5, I explore the "pseudo-Occitan" corpus, which comprises pieces that contain Occitan phonological coloring but were probably composed by francophones. I show that these pieces occur primarily in a lower register. This trend fictionally repositions Occitan lyric as both "primitive" and--by extension--as anterior to French lyric.

This dissertation traces a major trope of later medieval literature: the self-representation of the poet as a defendant who must answer for his poetry before God. In tracing this trope of divine judgment on poetry from the late thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century in France, I argue that the later medieval author's relationship to his audience is portrayed as a site of eschatological judgment, where God's scrutiny is always taking place through the reader's reception of the work of art. While the conceit of the poet on trial before a divine readership is a distinct rhetorical gesture, it is also an expression of ethical anxiety in many ways unique to later medieval vernacular literature. Through the exploration of five major instances of the trope of eschatological judgment on literature--in the work of Marian confraternal poets, Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan--I follow the trope's development as a rhetorical device during the period. At the same time, I show how the ways in which this rhetorical device was used can illuminate our understanding of later medieval authors' conception of the ethical stakes of literature, of their own authority, and of their connection to audiences.

ABSTRACT

In 1581 Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) returned to his home after a long and sinuous journey to Rome, which led him across Europe for more than eighteen months. While in Rome, the essayist had met with Pope Gregory XIII and visited the Vatican Library. The Roman Censors representing the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (La Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede), otherwise known as the Roman Inquisition, reviewed the first edition of his newly published Essays under the direct supervision of Sisto Fabri, the Master of the Sacred Palace (Maestro del Sacro Palazzo). About one year later, in 1582, Montaigne published a second edition of his book, revised and augmented.

In this dissertation I discuss the textual changes and additions which appeared in this new edition as a direct result of Montaigne's trip to Rome, and particularly as a result of his interaction with the Roman censors. My analysis focuses on the material evidence pertaining to the process of censorship: both in the author's own account registered in his Journal de voyage (Travel Journal), published posthumously in 1774, and in the original list of objections complied by the Roman censors, a document made public only in 2000.

The complex reshaping of the Essays Montaigne undertook, from his return to his château (November 30, 1581) until his death (September 13, 1592), reveals the ongoing dialog he pursued with the Roman officials, a dialog that can be precisely reconstructed through an analysis of textual transformations in the 1582 edition, the 1588 Paris edition, the hand-written "allongeails" on the Bordeaux Copy, and the 1595 posthumous edition prepared by Marie de Gournay. For a dozen years Montaigne carried on a discussion with his absent censors by gradually building new textual arguments in response to them.

Literary criticism of French Renaissance literature widely considers how prominent Greek, Roman, and Italian intertexts and allusions are present in, shaped, and contributed to the development of works of French Renaissance prose and poetry. The influence of Spain and Spanish literature, however, has been the focus of relatively little research. This dissertation proposes that the political rivalry between France and Spain under the reigns of Francis I and Charles V spurred literary productivity and thus must also be considered an important factor in the development and study of some major texts printed in the French language, particularly after 1519 when Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor. This election incited the French, among other major kingdoms, to balance Charles' growing empire and influence not only through warfare but also through literary representations that challenged his legitimacy, actions, authority, and supremacy.

Chapter One is a rereading of François Rabelais' prose novel Gargantua (1534, 1535) with its adversarial character Pichrocole as a French parody of Emperor Charles V. Chapter Two analyzes the French prologue to Herberay Des Essarts' French translation/adaptation Amadis de Gaule (1540) after the Spanish version Amadís de Gaula (1496?) by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. The French prologue is analyzed as a liminal text, an opening signal, for its direct discourse rivaling the Spanish text, and the work in itself is an example of emulation. Chapter Three studies the symbols representing Charles V and Francis I in the court poetry of Clément Marot's Oeuvres (1538, 1543) and in Maurice Scève's Délie: Objet de plus haute vertu (1544). These works of poetry are analyzed together to suggest a reading that considers how lyric poetry can be read as a political tool. Finally, Chapter Four is a reading of Joachim Du Bellay's Songe (1558) as a backward glance and criticism of Charles V's imperialism and heightened rivalry with France under Francis I.

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to provide an appreciation of the aesthetic profile of medieval hagiography, grounded in an understanding of its contribution to literary culture both medieval and modern. Centering analysis on the crucial figure of Saint Anthony the Great, I shall demonstrate that Anthony and the narrative tradition of his life are not only foundational to medieval hagiographical writing but also highly representative of the role of saintliness in French literary history from the Middle Ages to the modern period.

Part I, “ Ab eo omnes ”, examines the impact of Anthony's model of sanctity over the course of the medieval period. Chapter I discusses the role of the Late Antique tradition of Saint Anthony in medieval France, arguing that this legend broke the pattern of Christological mimesis on which hagiography had previously depended. Chapter II discusses the breakdown this caused in textual believability, claiming that it effectively and metatextually enacted the impossibility of the hagiographical task, that is to say, the representation of an unrepresentable God.

The second part of this dissertation, “ The Literary Machine ” examines the impact of the Anthony tradition on subsequent saintly narratives, both medieval and modern. Chapter III explores the mutation of the story of Saint Anthony over the course of the Middle Ages, describing the prioritization this caused of aesthetic over accuracy as well as the disappearance of this value-system in religious literature over the course of the sixteenth century. Chapter IV explores its uncanny reappearance in Flaubert's 1874 Tentation de Saint Antoine.

I conclude with a consideration of the significant impact that Flaubert's Tentation had on the secular arts over the course of the late nineteenth century. Finally, I draw together the strands developed over the course of the dissertation, in order to demonstrate the debt that modern understandings of literary transcendence owe to medieval hagiographical methods.

The Point of All Return: Nostalgia and the Dream of Dis-Enlightenment traces a state of being that fascinated with equal force medical and literary writers over the long nineteenth century. First named in 1688 to diagnose a fatal form of homesickness and later seen as causing deadly epidemics among provincial conscripts during the Napoleonic wars, nostalgia also came to describe the experience of feeling out of place in one's own time. Writers like Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac and Baudelaire made this second understanding possible, positing the condition as an inevitable form of dissatisfaction with contemporary life as shaped by enlightenment, urbanization and revolution. This dissertation proposes both a historical analysis of the emergence of nostalgia and an examination of its re-appropriation as a clinical symptom of modernity.

In The Point of All Return, I first chart the spread of nostalgia as a condition alongside a common mythological language that centers on the allure and illusions of rustic life. I argue that these speculations served as an occasion for writers including Kant and Rousseau to further their broader claims about human nature. I then turn to the urgent practical concerns about nostalgia in the wake of the French Revolution and the use of fiction, especially Chateaubriand, to inform this discourse. Balzac, I argue, reconsiders the conclusions of military medicine in his novels of Brittany, deploying the archetypical figure of the nostalgic Breton in the service of a counter-historical narrative that dreams of reconnection with pre-Enlightened, pre-Revolutionary modes of living. Baudelaire and Gautier offer their own re-staging of the medical mythology of nostalgia, one that both poets see resonating profoundly with Baudelaire's prose poetry. Finally, I consider Rolland's long-standing interest in Baudelairean "strange nostalgia" and its role in shaping his understanding of the oceanic feeling he discusses with Freud. Throughout my dissertation, I sustain a line of inquiry that Freud articulates in his debate with Rolland, in which I explore the futile hope for recuperating a primal experience of life that is interconnected, un-historical and impersonal.

There is an inverse correlation between the considerable amount of existing critical work on the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy relative to the rather modest quantity of poetry he has produced, and, at the same time, the paucity of critical work on his essays as compared to the great number of them that he has written. In the main, the essays of Yves Bonnefoy remain significantly understudied because they are perceived, both by the critical community and by Bonnefoy himself as being "secondary" to the primary poetic enunciation and to the theological and philosophical notion of présence that subtends his writing. This work aims to contribute to filling the gap in understanding the role and function of the essay in his oeuvre.

I argue in it that Bonnefoy relies on the essay because some elements of its nature correspond to and dialogue with certain aspects of his own thought. I thus examine the generic status and characteristics of the essay to demonstrate that it can assume a number of theoretical and literary positions more easily than poetry. I argue further that in Bonnefoy's work, although poetry has a functional capacity of immediacy which can lead to an experience of "presence," it is only the essay that allows for an understanding of this "presence," and through this understanding greater receptivity to the acts of presence contained not only within its own matrix, but also that of the poetry. And this is precisely because of the nature of the essay as a genre open both to infiltration by poetry and by philosophy; both can co-exist within the boundaries of the essayistic text and nourish each other in the total experience a reader can derive from a text. This openness the definition of the essay creates a sort of blurring at the edges of the genre which Bonnefoy consciously or unconsciously capitalizes on, using the essay to integrate the apparent contradictions of his philosophical position in order to guide the reader toward a simultaneous apprehension of "ce qui est" and présence.

Men in the Middle examines disparate representations of masculinity in North African Francophone literature, photography, film, and culture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with my analysis of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, I show that gender is not only a social phenomenon that can be constructed and deconstructed, but that there are consequences when one’s gender does not coincide with one’s biological sex. In analyzing the two novels, I examine how masculinity and maleness are defined in Moroccan society through Ahmed/Zahra’s gender performance. I then study Moroccan author, Abdellah Taïa, and his oeuvre, in which he confronts gender and heteronormative stereotypes, demonstrating that the North African Arab man does not always represent the conventional idea of hegemonic masculinity. As the first openly gay author from Morocco, Taïa uses his writing to assert his own sense of being and to show that the formerly constricting idea of the Arab man is evolving in the twenty-first century.

In chapter 3, I turn my focus to visual representations of masculinity found in a collection of postcards by Lehnert & Landrock from the beginning of the twentieth century. Through my analysis of the portrayal of young Arab boys as alluring Odalisques, I show how the West endeavored to both eroticize and often feminize the “Oriental Other,” confirming the stereotypical belief that the Orient was a place of unbridled romance that did not share the same puritanical morals of European society. In my final chapter, I look at the evolution and de-evolution of masculinity in two films: Halfaouine ou l’enfant des terrasses by Tunisian director Férid Boughedir and Omar Gatlato by Algerian director Merzak Allouache. Through his delineation and contrasting depictions of men’s, women’s, and neutral spaces, Boughedir shows how the trauma of one boy’s expulsion from the women’s hammam mirrors the equally traumatic rejection from the nurturing world of women and integration into the austere world of men. Finally, I study Allouache’s film as a representation of the dangers of hyper-masculinity as he shows how exaggerated representations of masculinity and virility can be self-contradicting and debilitating.

This dissertation examines the development of an aesthetic of cruelty in the short-prose fiction of Barbey d’Aurevilly, Léon Bloy, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. I argue that their work must be read as a reaction against its Catholic and secular context of production. Part one sets the theoretical parameters for the discussion by describing the elements of short prose that make the genre an especially powerful vehicle for tales about evil.

Part two is devoted to analyzing how these stories function within their Catholic context. First, I describe how the “Rogue Catholic” authors in my corpus embraced cruel narratives as a powerful moralizing tool, discrediting the conservative literary ideals championed by Louis Veuillot and others. I then uncover the religious themes that shape their work, focusing specifically on how they reinsert tragedy into the Christian worldview.

Part three examines the role of Barbey, Bloy, and Villiers at the Gil Blas, an influential literary journal. My claim is that many stories intentionally toe the line between religious propaganda and blatant pandering to a secular audience. On one hand, they exploit prurient themes and sensationalized violence. Through their works, they also conduct a virulent critique of the bourgeoisie. I demonstrate how they rejected the common fin-de-siècle reflex to explain criminal behavior using psychological and biological criteria alone. Rather than offering explanations for evil to temper its shock value, their narratives ratchet up the scale of horror.

In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between fiction, imposture, and the representation of human societies in French literature between 1640 and 1720. The project attempts to reconstitute a neglected literary genealogy, effectively bridging the ostensible gap between, on the one hand, the vertiginous play of mirrors which haunts Baroque literary and artistic representation, and on the other, the subversive and erudite logic of early Enlightenment philosophical tales. The three authors at the center of the inquiry - Cyrano de Bergerac, Montfaucon de Villars, and Tyssot de Patot - represented seemingly trustworthy characters as impostors, thereby experimenting within their stories, manipulating readers' willingness to suspend disbelief, and subtly exposing purported religious and political truths' as fictions' that should be doubted. As they ironically collapsed the distinctions that separated characters from real people, narrators from authors, and fiction from history, they destabilized their readers' sense of control over perception, and reminded them that perspectives on religious, political and aesthetic questions were always mediated through mechanisms of representation. Furthermore, they suggested, these imposed apparatuses emanated from a happenstance confluence of traditions and institutions, and the powerful individuals who had shaped both, possibly through deliberate deceit. In more modern terminology, these writers used fictions and figures of "impostures" to carry out thought experiments with theories of society proper to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Cyrano, Villars and Tyssot made the writing of fiction into a practice through which they created model after model of social phenomena and cosmic order, using the imagination to test out each one. As each author built upon the precedents set by previous storytellers, they blurred the distinctions between true stories and hoaxes until a mere shift of perspective could make one seem like the other.

The dissertation, titled La Recherche en question: l’aporie dans À la recherche du temps perdu, pertains to both Proustian studies and Ancient philosophy (epistemology). After a chapter on Antiquity which articulates a theoretical framework for the study as a whole, I provide a detailed reading of exemplary forms of aporia in Proust’s novel. If similarities between literature’s and philosophy’s treatment of concepts has become a rich academic field, literature (and Proust, in particular) always seems to be a mere “illustration,” a sensible representation of what is reflected upon by philosophers. In my dissertation, I developed an account of this relationship with a different viewpoint in order to access the structure of Proust’s literary epistemology. I compare modes of questioning rather than theses. In other terms, in Proust’s narrator’s “search for Truth,” I emphasize the search over the truth.

This dissertation studies the two most prominent lyrico-narrative genres of the French Middle Ages, verse romances and the dits, which have not previously been examined together. Critics have underscored the “self-consciousness” of each genre; considering them together, I argue, will serve both to contextualize and to deepen our knowledge of the modalities and stakes of linguistic indeterminacy in texts associated with each. I also argue that their juxtaposition highlights the startling queerness, defined with such thinkers as Judith Butler and Lee Edelman as the resistance to any stable conception of identity or figuration, characteristic of both. Within the dissertation, I explore different ways in which texts that we now associate with each genre foreground the indeterminacy at the heart of language and of gender and sexuality—and also at the heart of the relationship between language, gender, and sexuality. I therefore trouble the border between verse romances and the dits in order to open up new readings of how verse romances and dits perturb other distinctions, be they literary—such as the opposition of lyricism to narrativity or the neat separation of narrative levels—or ethico-political, related, for example, to the contours of the normative subject or to the hetero/homo binary. By defining and articulating queerness in terms of the relationship of language to sexuality, rather than uniquely in terms of “sodomy,” I offer a new and wider account of the unflagging queerness of medieval French courtly literature, while I explore the complex intersections between contemporary theory and medieval literature in order to make the case for the particular importance of vernacular poetics of the period to the history of the intertwinement of discursivity, gender and sexuality, which figures so prominently in modern theory.

In France of the early 1900s, the expression “return to the land” (“retour à la terre”) became a recurrent trope in the public sphere. Coined in reaction to the rise of mechanization and urbanization, it was synonymous with nostalgia for the pre-industrial era and bygone moral values: a modern version of the myth of the lost Golden Age that profoundly affected lived and imagined territorialities.

The present dissertation studies authors at the margins of production of the political discourses that generated the declinist rhetoric of the return to the land generally associated with nationalist and fascist writers. Relying on the concept of deterritorialization developed by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the debunking of the self-proclaimed “moderns” by Bruno Latour, the present work reads the return to the land in the light of territorial phenomena that affected world geopolitics and, ultimately, art. It aims to show how these writers explored the impact of territoriality on the shaping of identity and to explain why they systematically staged the return to the land as a failed attempt.
							
The title of the present study is Retours à la terre dans la fiction française et francophone du XXème siècle: Traumatismes territoriaux et échecs fertiles (Returns to the Land in French and Francophone Fiction of the XXth century: Territorial Traumas and Fertile Failures). The first chapter on Breton writer Pierre Jakez-Hélias questions the possibility of returning to the land after rural exodus and the disappearance of peasant societies. The second chapter on Algerian writer Kateb Yacine raises the same issue after colonial occupation and the dismantling of tribal societies. The third chapter on Jewish writer Albert Cohen addresses the question from the point of view of a diasporic people whose sociability was forged in exile. The fourth chapter on Irish writer Samuel Beckett studies how changes in the perception of territoriality affected literature itself. Ultimately, the failure to the return to the land sustains the flow of fictions that seek to move beyond a traditional understanding of territoriality and to explore new forms of territorialities.

This dissertation examines relationships between poetry and scientific discourse over the period from 1866 to 1876 in France. Focusing on the importance of Parnassianism to this era, the dissertation seeks to reframe traditional narratives surrounding post-Romantic poetry and poetic modernity’s opposition to science. The first chapter presents these central axes of inquiry using the concepts of the Parnassian moment and the experimental poem, which offers a model of thinking through links between science and poetry via technology and the technical imagination. This chapter also introduces the 1874 Transit of Venus, a highly mediatized astronomical event that grounds the dissertation’s discussion of science and technology. Each of the following three chapters pairs readings from the period’s poetry with a technological instrument and scientific issue related to the 1874 Transit. Chapter two studies representations of Venus, analyzing photography and works by Sully Prudhomme, Albert Mérat, Leconte de Lisle, Louis Ménard, poets of the Parnasse contemporain, and Rimbaud. Chapter three concerns the search for a universal language, exploring the role of electric telegraphy in works by Rimbaud, Théodore de Banville, Tristan Corbière, and poets of the Cercle Zutique. Chapter four concentrates on Charles Cros, a poet and inventor who hoped to contact extraterrestrial life using heliography. This dissertation argues that Cros’s heliographic project informs and appears in poems from his 1873 collection, Le coffret de santal. The conclusion connects Cros’s contribution to the Dixains réalistes to the close of the Parnassian moment, the disappointments of the 1874 Transit of Venus, and the advent of fin-de-siècle poetics.

This dissertation argues that the Surrealists’ collaborative practices reveal the formation of the self out of the collective, and that the coauthored books produced through collaboration imagine a relationship between self and other in the shared lyrical subject and the dialog of text and image. Surrealism’s collaborative work, often seen as primarily politically motivated or as a pursuit of the unconscious, participates in its broader project of redefining the human being. In the early years of the movement, beginning with these writers’ and artists’ engagement with Dada in the late 1910s, artworks that leveraged the collectivity were understood as a kind of anonymous voice or universal consciousness. By the late 1920s, the concept of collaborative work as erasure of the self was evolving, allowing for a stronger expression of individuality, especially in the art book collaborations that allowed for the creative freedom of both poet and artist. Poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952), a member of Surrealism from its inception, participated in some of the seminal co-authored poetry collections of the movement, and produced art and poetry collaborations with key surrealist artists such as Man Ray and Salvador Dali. Through research into the practices behind Eluard’s poetic collaborations, this study traces the reconceptualization of the lyrical subject as an individuality that arises from the pair. Close readings of two art and poetry collections from the year 1935 build on analysis of Eluard’s theoretical writings on the term resemblance, which he understood as the offering of the body to the world. Framing the addressee as a plurality, images and verses rethink the connection between self and other in terms of mutual contact that shapes both. By looking at Surrealism’s reversal of the transcendental ego distinct form the world, this dissertation shows their response to the rise of mass society, explored through partner book collaborations.