This dissertation examines writing on colonialism in late nineteenth-century French literature and the press as part of a distinct littérature d’actualité coloniale that emerged at the nexus of French colonial empire, global information networks, and the mass press. Four chapters situate this literature in the context of the actualité that informed and inspired it, tracing how writers commented on and transformed the colonial current events, debates, scandals and affaires that filled newspaper pages in the 1880s and 1890s. At the height of this “civilisation du journal,” journalism and literature were inextricably linked. Newspapers not only mediated information about colonial expeditions and politics for a broad metropolitan readership, they were also a formative site of literary production, as chroniques, contes, and romans-feuilletons turned colonial current events into a privileged subject for critiquing the media and its power to deceive. Chapter one reconstructs the international furor occasioned by Pierre Loti’s front-page account of a massacre at the Battle of Thuan An in 1883, which sparked a debate that helped to define the boundaries of colonial writing in the press. Chapter two tells the story of the Port-Breton colony, a fraudulent colonial venture propped up—and ultimately brought down—by a sophisticated media operation, and shows how its victims served as a cautionary tale in an age of expanding mass media. Chapter three examines how this story made its way into fiction, analyzing Alphonse Daudet’s 1890 novel Port-Tarascon against and alongside its sources in the press. Chapter four looks at the journalistic writing of prominent chroniqueur Octave Mirbeau, and explores the connection between criticism of colonial current events and criticism of journalism and media practices more broadly. A conclusion looks ahead to the end of littérature d’actualité coloniale, situating it in the context of new developments in global reporting and new literary debates codifying the genre of littérature coloniale.

“After the Fact: Encounters in Holocaust Testimony” examines the self-reflexive testimonial projects of Charlotte Delbo, Claude Lanzmann, and Art Spiegelman. This dissertation analyzes the social and mediatic conditions that are brought to bear on the production and reception of Holocaust testimony.

My first chapter argues that Charlotte Delbo transposes the formal innovations of her first work, Les Belles lettres (1961), into Mesure de nos jours (1971), a volume comprised of Delbo’s friends’ testimonies from the postwar period. Delbo’s unconventional approach for gathering testimony gestures toward the way that testimony can challenge, rather than reinforce, conventional ways of thinking about memory, truth, and experience. My second chapter puts Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah (1985) in conversation with the video interviews conducted at archival centers in the United States by examining the techniques these projects use for recording testimony. Lanzmann’s visible interventions call attention to the social situatedness of testimony, thereby granting agency to his witnesses and viewers alike. Finally, my third chapter examines Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1986, 1991). I contend that Spiegelman emphasizes the various sites of tension that are proper to the comic book medium in order to promote reading practices that can account for the “frame conditions” that mediate testimony.

My corpus prioritizes disruption by spotlighting the ways in which testimony is always mediated. Collectively, these artists redefine notions of truth and fact that have been central to the configuration and consumption of Holocaust testimony over the past seventy years.

This dissertation examines the impact of transatlantic travel narratives on literary practices in 16th- century France. In particular, I argue that textual representations of the Americas shaped the development of the French language, as well as the greater construction of a national linguistic identity. Examining the works of French travel writers such as Jacques Cartier, Jean de Léry, and André Thevet, as well as early French translations of other European narratives, I trace the influence of travel writing on foundational texts for the transformation of the French language, such as those by Geoffroy Tory and Joachim Du Bellay. These authors sought to reinvent French with an eye to both the past and the present: they conceived of its relationship to ancient languages of learning, particularly Latin, as a colonial one, and evoked examples of France's recent colonial exploits in the Americas in order to reconceive the French vernacular as a newly dominant language. Using methodologies developed by scholars in the history of reading alongside those of decolonial theory, this project examines two histories which have traditionally been studied separately—French colonial history and the history of reading in France—in order to argue that the construction of a "French" linguistic identity cannot be separated from its imperial consequences.

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.

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.

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.

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men,” writes Salman Rushdie in his essay “Imaginary Homelands.” He, like many transnational authors and thinkers, takes up this image of the “translated self” to illustrate the transformations, culture clashes, and barriers inherent to the migration process. But beyond this metaphorical application of the term, what can theories and practices of translation in the linguistic sense tell us about both the personal experience and global implications of geographical displacement? Born(e) Across: Translating the Migrant Experience in Francophone Literature addresses this question in the French-language sphere, examining cross-cultural and multilingual narratives through the intersection of linguistic and sociological visions of translation: that of the unique modes of communication “born across” linguistic borders, and that of the immigrant “borne across” geographical ones. It examines this relationship through a variety of different lenses, including sociolinguistics, cultural hybridity, and racial politics, and takes a comparative approach in considering authors and characters of diverse national backgrounds and with different relationships to migration––from first-generation Vietnamese refugees in Québec to Guadeloupean “third-culture kids” growing up in mainland France––in order to explore how their resonances and divergences offer distinct windows onto the larger experience of migration throughout the French-speaking world.

The dissertation examines the relationship between ideology and narrative experimentation in representations of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). It identifies a series of experimental approaches to representing memory and time, each of which creates possibilities for identifying the mechanisms of ideology in the production of historical knowledge. Its four chapters each compare examples of one such approach. By studying these alternative forms, one finds it is possible to generate knowledge about aspects of the war that have been insufficiently addressed from an institutional standpoint. The dissertation’s hybrid theoretical lens draws from and synthesizes diverse approaches—Althusserian Marxism, Derridean deconstruction, Benjaminian philosophy of history—that, together, inform the complex relations between structural social domination, subjective experience, and narrative representation. By emphasizing works that lack any prescriptive explanation and thus rely on the interpretive acts of readers, the dissertation argues that inventive approaches to narrating the past—and to reading those narratives—create the conditions of possibility for producing new historical knowledge.Chapter One analyzes approaches to narrating silences in films by Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais; it considers silence’s potential as a hermeneutic tool from two complementary standpoints: ideological determination (i.e. when a silence is performed but not intended) and subjective motivation (i.e. when an object is thought of but not spoken about). Chapter Two studies works of writing, film, and video—by Charlotte Delbo, Laurent Mauvignier, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ariane Tillenon—that undertake a direct narrativization of the functioning of either archival or human memory without recourse to authorial explanation. Chapter Three examines multigenerational personal narratives—a written narrative by Béatrice Commengé and a comic book by Jeanne Puchol—whose approaches to the past juxtapose multilayered memories that attain an archaeological dimension and compares these works with a detective novel by Didier Daeninckx whose investigation highlights an archaeological approach’s relevance for ideology critique. Chapter Four turns to writings by Nathalie Quintane and visual artworks by Kader Attia in which symbolic or literal acts of breaking push readers or spectators to confront the irreparability of objects of knowledge and therefore to draw their own tentative connections and conclusions.

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 French Renaissance often appears as an era of intellectual giants, characterized by a fascination with abundance (copia) and linguistic capacities that surpass and overwhelm modern readers. This dissertation challenges the perceived gulf between modern and sixteenth-century readers by proposing a cognitively grounded perspective on the production of overwhelming reading experiences, specifically centered on the appearance of lists in prose texts. The texts considered range in genre from pedagogy to historiography, theological treatises, travel literature, philosophy, and comedy; they feature some of the most canonical authors of Renaissance humanism, such as Rabelais, Erasmus, Calvin, Léry, and Montaigne. Analyzing select lists in light of cognitive limits such as working memory capacity as well as work in the history of reading and print technology, I argue that the presentation of these lists reflects technologically engaged strategies that mediate readers’ access to texts, either organizing information or exceeding reader limitations in order to invite emotional responses associated with overwhelm. By embracing the notion of reader limitations, we can begin to unravel not only the deliberate myth-making practiced by many sixteenth-century authors, but also underappreciated expressions of their anxieties around everything from religious tensions to print itself.

My dissertation, Confronting Wax Figures: Edgar Degas, Hervé Guibert, and Marc Quinn, examines the works of artists who have reinterpreted the representation of human figures in wax from the end of the nineteenth century until today. While contemporary views often focus on wax figures as eerie, grotesque, or entertaining representations of human subjects, this study draws on wax’s historical modes of representation throughout Europe to demonstrate how modern wax figures have served politics, religion, science, art, social laws and (dis)orders from antiquity to our present day. The artists chosen for this corpus have seized the powerful representational potential of wax figures—and wax as an “alchemical” material—to transform their own wax creations into powerful artistic proxies that participate in creating avant-gardist representations of the human, and in reevaluating social issues such as class, gender, and the representation of illness. Because they are at once “magic,” “realistic,” and “uncanny,” some wax figures can, paradoxically, offer more convincing representations of humans than verisimilar wax figures. Often, these non-verisimilar wax figures are more than mere copies of their object. Instead, they express something essential about its inner nature. By studying reinterpretations of wax figures as “hybrid” figures— among them Edgard Degas’s canonical Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the wax figures in Hervé Guibert’s autofictional narratives, and Marc Quinn’s installation, “Chemical Life Support”—as well as the way these figurations dissent from normalized depictions, I reassess wax figuration in modern societies as current and original modes of representation of the human. In emphasizing the place wax figuration has had in modern times, my work also participates in explaining the renewed interest of contemporary artists, art historians, and the public in wax artifacts in recent years, and the continuing cultural presence, role, and relevance of wax sculptures in Western societies today.

This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th- and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge.

La honte d’être un homme, y a-t-il une meilleure raison de s’écrire ? Regard de soi sur soi, regard de l’autre sur soi, la honte est une expérience constitutive de la subjectivité. Rien d’étonnant à ce que la honte représente donc un thème majeur des écrits de soi depuis des siècles. Saint Augustin et Jean-Jacques Rousseau, qui ont marqué des générations d’autobiographes, lui attribuent une place centrale dans leurs Confessions respectives. La honte joue également un rôle crucial dans la pratique de la confession auriculaire, rituel catholique qui s’est démocratisé à partir du XIIIe siècle. Il existe ainsi une tradition littéraire et discursive de la honte, dont se ressaisissent, non sans quelques libertés, deux auteurs du XXe siècle : Maurice Sachs et Jean Genet. Le premier chapitre de cette thèse recense les fonctions de la honte dans les Confessions d’Augustin et les confessions auriculaires du XIIIe au XVIIIe siècles : la honte est à la fois obstacle à la confession, garantie de son authenticité, et voie du salut. Le deuxième chapitre montre qu’il se dessine dans les Confessions de Rousseau une véritable théorie de la honte, alliée à une critique socio-politique. Le troisième chapitre est consacré au cas de Sachs, dont les archives montrent à quel point la honte a empêché l’écriture et permettent de mieux comprendre le « style honteux » du Sabbat. Notre quatrième chapitre montre que les descriptions que Genet offre de personnages et milieux honteux préfigurent les analyses d’Erving Goffman sur le stigmate. Mais Genet ne documente pas seulement la honte, il l’écrit pour piéger ses lecteurs et pour en faire une valeur suprême, un pilier de son esthétique.

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.

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.

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.

From black face, sexist jokes, anti-Semitic caricatures to anti-Muslim cartoons, comedic discourses have targeted minority groups. The aim of this project is to demonstrate how minorities – who have been targets of jokes – have in turn themselves become its creators, using humor as a medium to deal with complicated questions of identity. This dissertation therefore explores the place of humor in the articulation of postcolonial and diasporic identities in modern France. To do so, it will examine varied practices of humor in contemporary novels, comic books, stand-up comedy and film by authors (Dany Laferrière, Alain Mabanckou, Leïla Sebbar), graphic novelists (Joann Sfar) and stand-uppers (Fellag, Gad Elmaleh, Jamel Debbouze, Shirley Souagnon and Fary). Humoring pathos – in the double sense of rendering comical but also establishing complicity – I ask how postcolonial creation plays with the very hegemonic tropes and types that it rejects. Of interest in this project is not humor writ large, but comedic play whose hallmark is a sense of ambivalence – the cultural productions at the core of this dissertation deal with issues of gravity with a sense of levity; they simultaneously coopt yet subvert colonial representations of alterity. I examine literary mechanisms like irony, parody, and satire, which allow humorists to establish distance from the colonial models that they repeat, thanks to their methods that are rife with scorn, mockery, disdain, and exaggeration. The dissertation will also examine forms of humor in which humorists do not separate themselves from their targets. We contend with acts of self-derisory, grotesque and carnivalesque humor, which blur the distance between the subjects and objects of laughter. I argue that humorous play with official discourses allows French authors, artists, and comics not only to delegitimize simplistic Metropolitan representations of alterity, but also to furnish ludic alternatives in their place. By using humor in postcolonial creation, these humorists laugh at misery and play with images of cultural alterity without propagating them. I show that these artists reappropriate colonial rhetoric in humorous ways, such that they offer critiques of colonial enterprises themselves, while also transforming them to reflect the contemporary diversity and heterogeneity of modern France.

This dissertation examines aesthetics of in-betweenness and identity in the works of contemporary authors who migrated to France from non-francophone regions and chose to adopt French for literary expression: Vassilis Alexakis (Greece), Brina Svit (Slovenia), and Andreï Makine (Russia). Common approaches to translingualism tend to focus on the material interaction between languages in the text (plurilingual practices) or on authors’ impressions of changing tongues. This dissertation contributes to scholarship by accounting for aesthetic forms of in-betweenness that have been overshadowed by the bilingual lens. Throughout its three case studies, it argues that the original tension between native and adopted languages is explored under new poetic guises that are not limited to the thematization of bilingualism and migration. This project is informed by the reception and marketization of translingual literature in France. Specifically, it examines how the authors respond to the nation-state’s conditional hospitality and engage with reception in their own texts.

The first chapter argues that in Vassilis Alexakis' autobiographic "Paris-Athènes" (1989), the text’s polyphonic character resides in the narrator’s ability to act as the creator and critic of his own text, rather than in the interaction between Greek and French languages. The second chapter on Brina Svit’s novel "Coco Dias ou la Porte Dorée" (2007) demonstrates that, by structurally imitating Argentine tango in writing, the tension typically found between native and adopted languages is transformed into an intermedial dialogue between literature and dance. Rereading autobiographic "Moreno" in light of "Coco Dias" brings to the fore an intersubjective dimension of Svit’s translingualism as being beyond traditional communities and conventional affiliations. The third chapter argues that Andreï Makine’s "Le Testament français" and "Alternaissance" (2011) – the latter written under his heteronymic identity Gabriel Osmonde – share an aesthetic quest for a poetic language of in-betweenness, despite the absence of the habitual Franco-Russian paradigm in the second novel.

My dissertation reveals a tendency to convert linguistic displacement into an aesthetic position of in-betweenness that – rather than being reconciled – is recreated to assert linguistic freedom and test the limits of language by acting on its perception. Collectively, these three case studies call attention to the malleability and instability of translingual postures that challenge the writers’ status as “assimilationist” figures in reception.

“Institutionalizing Revolution: The Official Mural Art Campaign of the Third Republic (1870-1900)” analyzes the little-studied public mural art campaign of the French Third Republic, carried out in Parisian arrondissement townhalls in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Largely ignored by scholars and the public, the murals were also marginalized by the modernist art historical narrative as “academic art” despite their stylistic diversity. I argue the contrary and reveal the overlooked symbolic significance of the murals in promoting republican rhetoric. Combining field work with cultural studies methodology, this dissertation casts light on the townhall decorative campaign as a hinge-moment for a genre previously confined to religious institutions and palaces and later associated with populism and revolution. I illustrate not only how these murals served as tools to forge a modern republican identity, but also how, as artworks, they went beyond the restricted visual vocabulary of Renaissance and Baroque décor to develop a democratizing decorative idiom. As such, the dissertation showcases Third Republic murals as a deliberately emblematic vehicle that helped promote a new relationship between citizen and state; state and national history; and art and the public.

La présente dissertation a pour objectif de lire la poésie française moderne à la lumière de la conceptualité deleuzienne. Pour ce faire, elle se fondera sur une lecture du texte, tout en insistant sur la notion de l’expressivité poétique, dans sa double dimension immatérielle et matérielle. L’expression poétique est en ce sens rien moins qu’une révolution intérieure ressentie au niveau moléculaire, par laquelle la personnalité subjective cède à une impersonnalité lyrique. Cette impersonnalité lyrique implique une immédiation des facultés de création, l’intuition, le réflexe corporel, et le ressentir psychique y compris, le terme psychique devant être compris en effet au sens premier du terme, à savoir la capacité de l’âme d’éprouver des affects. Son expression, telle que nous la voyons dans les cas de Stéphane Mallarmé, d’Antonin Artaud, et de Marcel Proust, peut se concevoir comme le résultat de cette révolution intérieure et refondatrice. Si, par exemple, Igitur se lit comme la personnification même du néant, fondement même de toute poésie, et Héliogabale une actualisation radicale du Verbe, c’est au dernier tome de la Recherche du temps perdu que le narrateur apprendra, en pur poète présentiel, sa vocation propre. Enfin, il ne serait pas inexact de dire que, par les qualités du poétique qu’il a lui-même proposées, parmi lesquelles on compte une affirmation pure et une dimension dionysiaque extra-intellectuelle, dans son double monument littéraire et conceptuel que signent, exception faite de sa propre impersonnalité, autant d’esprits enclins à déroger à la facture classique, de-ci appropriés, de-là libérés, Deleuze fut lui-même autant un redoutable poète du concept qu’un génial concepteur de l’affect.