French and Italian

This research project focuses on three key women writers of Tunisian Jewish descent: Annie Goldmann, Katia Rubinstein, and Colette Fellous. In doing so, it uncovers their efforts to carve out a place in history for their communities through life writing. Analyzing their representations of life during the latter stages of the French Protectorate through Tunisian independence and their intellectual exile to France reveals Tunisian and Tunisian Jewish historical, linguistic, and cultural diversity and France’s impact upon it. Moreover, Fellous, Goldmann, and Rubinstein reflect upon their place of origin and their ancestors who populated it to construct a narrative of self through discussions of collective identity.Tunisia has long held a significant place in the Maghreb, from Antiquity when it was rivals with Ancient Rome up to modern times as the first Arab country to grant rights to women upon independence and as the site of the outbreak of the Arab Spring. The Tunisian Jewish community emerged out of this complex ancient history, and it has dynamically evolved with each shift in Mediterranean history. Lesser understood are the effects of medieval Iberic antisemitism and the French Jewish civilizing mission upon Tunisian Jewish communities. For their part, Fellous, Goldmann, and Rubinstein demonstrate through their works history’s impact upon their and their families’ lives in both Tunisia and France, as well as the population of the wider Mediterranean. These three authors seek to preserve the memory of a minority community disrupted by French colonialism and reduced to a fraction of its size by an independence movement that sought to construct an Arabic-speaking Muslim national identity in opposition to the colonial French-speaking Christian one that came to dominate. Their writing is in dialogue with the communal shift and loss that branches into ever-present discussions of multilingualism and monolingualism, Jewish-Muslim relations, recording memory through textual-visual media practices, and the role of gender in diasporic experiences. It also shows how identity is constructed neither by a narrow focus on the self or a community but rather an oscillation between the self, a deterministic notion of the community that the self occupies, and the constructions of communal identity.

“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.

This project brings together two historically distinct fields: postcolonial poetry and disaster studies. It argues that geophysical hazards endemic to the Caribbean, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, play a central part in shaping the region’s cultural identity and literary traditions, while also shaping its current political realities. While disaster studies researchers today emphasize vulnerability as a metric for evaluating the uneven exposure of certain communities and regions to the worst effects of disaster, the inclusion of colonialism’s impacts as a specific criterion for understanding disaster has not been systematically explored.I suggest that French Caribbean poetry can enrich our understanding of the historical relation between ecological disasters and colonialism. Martinican authors like Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Edouard Glissant turn to geoclimatic hazards as a model from which to chart the convulsive chronology of Caribbean history, to contest Western models of dominance over the natural world, and to demonstrate the ways in which these such managerial paradigms increase disaster risk and ecological fragility. Chapter 1 explores how Aimé Césaire fashions eruption into a subversive metaphor of anti-colonial resistance and racial awakening in his poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). Given the urgent political praxis of much of the region’s literature, Chapter 2 traces the historical consequences of a series of disasters, beginning with the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée and culminating in the Vichy Occupation of the Antilles during WWII, to grasp how these events conditioned Antilleans’ support for Departmentalization in 1946. Chapter 3 considers the latent ecofeminism of Suzanne Césaire’s essays, published in the literary journal, Tropiques, “cannibalize” a tradition of gendered-exotic fantasies of Caribbean space. I show how she enlists the chaotic, destructive forces of the Caribbean climate against cultural assimilation forms of development pursued at the expense of the local environment. Chapter 4 investigates the early, under-studied poems of Edouard Glissant, from the 1954 collection, La Terre inquiète. Glissant proposes a revision of frameworks that perceive disasters as discrete, one-off events and instead insists on understanding disaster in terms of a constantly unfolding chaos. This dissertation argues that French Caribbean literature articulates an anticolonial paradigm for understanding disaster, in which the futures of marginalized communities and their environments are necessarily interdependent.

Narratives featuring the figure of the female rape victim have existed for centuries throughoutFrench literary and cinematic history, often reinforcing prevalent misconceptions about what constitutes victimhood. However, recent works of memoir, fiction, and film have attempted to disrupt public perceptions of victimhood by deviating from normative expectations and dismantling entrenched stereotypes that surround the victim. While the general topic of rape in French literature and cinema has been addressed in scholarship, representations of the female rape victim in contemporary French works have not been specifically examined. My dissertation, “Narrating Victimhood: Rape in the 21st-Century French Imaginary,” fills this critical lacuna by juxtaposing and analyzing multiple representations of the victim in formally experimental works by authors such as Virginie Despentes, Gaspar Noé, Hélène Duffau, Loulou Robert, and Vanessa Springora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary project participates in an emerging conversation about the ways in which female rape victims are portrayed in French literature, cinema, and media and is therefore a timely and necessary study as rape, incest, victim blaming, domestic violence, harassment, and consent are increasingly urgent matters in contemporary socio- and biopolitical discourse. I argue that the works I examine subvert audience expectations by offering unconventional—sometimes shocking—narratives that not only dispute common tropes about rape (e.g., that it is always violent and forceful) but also dismantle popular myths that surround the victim (e.g., that she is always weak/passive and that her behavior causes her attack). These writers and filmmakers, I assert, notably deploy a wide variety of aesthetic and rhetorical techniques in order to render a nuanced and dynamic portrait of victimhood. I ultimately emphasize the ways in which writers and filmmakers who reject formulaic approaches to representing rape victimhood successfully build new narratives that draw attention to the complexity of victimhood and survival.

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.

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.

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.

Teledrumming (1922-1971) examines the cultural history of Francophone anticolonialism through the lens of media studies and critical theory. I argue that African drumming and women’s labor function as the “media” of anticolonialism in the French empire. My analysis centers on an object called the “tam-tam,” which refers to African drums as both musical instrument and communication technology. Since antiquity, people in West and Central Africa have used drums to “talk” across long distances, much like telephones. I use the term “teledrumming” to name this mediatic process instantiated by African drums. From the Haitian Revolution onwards, anticolonial groups have consistently used teledrumming to send out a “call” for revolution, beckoning colonial subjects to rise against their domination. Focusing on the twentieth century, this dissertation examines how both original and remediated forms of teledrumming structure anticolonialism. Teledrumming, I argue, is entangled with women’s labor: the tam-tam’s call is inseparable from women’s song, performance, and invisible work. Chapter 1, “Racial Melancholia,” studies the works of André Gide, Marc Allégret, and Joséphine Baker. I argue that drumming and women’s performances melancholically resist the white French psyche, as in Baker’s 1935 film Princesse Tam-Tam. Chapter 2, “Fellow Drummers,” examines how Négritude men such as Aimé Césaire imitate tam-tam rhythms in their poetry (for example, in “Tam-Tam I”) to create an anticolonial consciousness. At the same time, Négritude women such as Suzanne Césaire invisibly labor to transcribe and publish the men’s poetry. “Tele” and “drumming” thus take starkly gendered, remediated forms for Négritude. Chapter 3, “Interpellation,” studies historical representations of anticolonialism in the works of Ousmane Sembène, Bernard Binlin Dadié, and Ferdinand Oyono. I argue that tam-tams and women’s song interpellate, or produce, anticolonial subjects in 1940s French West Africa. Chapter 4, “Percussive Echoes,” primarily considers the relationship between drumming and women’s ululating song in the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962), with a focus on the works of Frantz Fanon and Gillo Pontecorvo. The central tasks of this dissertation, as such, are to valorize the tam-tam as a sophisticated African technology and to recover the subjectivity of women who have been relegated to techne.

This dissertation examines the relationship between urban space and historical consciousness in Patrick Modiano’s novels, with a particular focus on Paris and its transformation after World War II. Drawing on the importance of the “ghost town” as both a symptom and a symbol of the erasure of collective memory, this study seeks to consolidate literary approaches to urban space that have proliferated under the category of the “spatial turn” — a shift in humanities and social sciences that emphasizes the significance of space, place, and geography in understanding various social phenomena, such as memory. In Modiano’s texts, attention to geography and the experimental recording of the rapidly changing post-1945 Parisian space fuel the possibility of a narrative expression for amnesia. Forgetfulness takes shape through writing, but it stems from the modernizing city. Modiano’s questioning of memory and imagination in relation to the shared, collective space of Paris is particularly relevant, given the radical reorganization of urban infrastructures in France during the postwar period. This era was marked by significant developments and large-scale projects, such as the “grands ensembles.” This new architecture, inspired by the modernist precepts of Le Corbusier, produced a radically different urban reality. Its concrete-made, repetitive landscape had the potential to serially erase traces of past dwellings in favor of an atemporal, ahistorical mode of inhabiting space. We argue that the postwar metamorphosis of Paris, unprecedented since Baron Haussmann’s renovation in the 19th century, profoundly altered the contemporary experience of the city, as it obscured its relationship to past historical events — and more specifically, as Modiano shows, to the unbearable memory of war crimes perpetrated during the Occupation. Through its meticulous exploration of Parisian geographies and investigation into the gradual imprésence of memory — or “hauntedness” —, Modiano’s work illustrates how France’s urbanistic reforms in the postwar era affected the individual’s relationship with their memory of the past.

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.

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.

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.

“Phonographic Imaginaries: The Birth of Sound Recording in France and the French Colonial Empire” constructs a new media history of the phonograph. During the first three decades of the recording era, roughly 1877-1910, the phonograph had not yet been defined as a machine for musical entertainment, and thus still had seemingly infinite potential. My chapters examine the myths and collective “phonographic imaginaries” of the recorded voice that developed across the disciplines of science, literature, politics, and music during this time period. Chapter 1 reconstructs the history of the invention of sound recording in France and the U.S., shedding light on those whose voices and contributions to sound recording have been forgotten or silenced, and showing how the French claim a literary origin for the phonograph. Chapter 2 draws on Michel Chion’s theorization of the “acousmatic,” or sound whose source has been obscured, to analyze the earliest French narrative uses of phonographic voice in Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886) and Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (1892). Chapter 3 considers the urgent political context of the burgeoning recording era in France, namely the renewed colonial ambitions of the Scramble for Africa (1881-1914). Through artifacts related to the famed sub-Saharan figure of resistance, Samori Touré, I reveal the neglected French contributions to a collective political imaginary, what I term “phonographic imperialism,” according to which the phonograph could be used to manipulate indigenous leaders into submission. Chapter 4 investigates the postcolonial afterlives of the first field recordings made in French Algeria in 1913 by Béla Bartók. I develop an original theoretical lens through which to examine the recycling of Bartók’s recordings in the works of Francophone Algerian writer and film director Assia Djebar (1936-2015), for whom hospitality, listening, and the siren song were crucial themes. By bringing diverse perspectives to bear on the relationship between sound, technology, and listening during the French Colonial recording era, I demonstrate that sound studies is a productive lens for advancing French and Francophone literary and cultural thought.

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.

“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.

This dissertation takes the sport of boxing as a paradigm for rethinking the combative aesthetics and practices of the historical avant-garde. Beginning with the foundational theories of Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger, avant-gardism has long been characterized as an antagonistic effort to violently break with tradition. In recent decades however, scholars have sought new approaches to the avant-garde, recognizing how this focus on muscular rebellion perpetuates superseded narratives of masculine heroics and compounds institutional biases against feminine, queer, disabled, and racially othered subjects who do not meet normative standards of artistic strength. Bridging this divide, I draw upon the cultural history of sport to examine how tensions of gender, sexuality, race, and disability were expressed thematically, and at times, physically, through boxing in avant-garde poetry, cinema, photography, magazines, plastic and performance art. In so doing, this dissertation reconsiders the aggressive postures of the avant-garde’s male “heavyweights” and interrogates barriers of gender, race and sexuality that have typically delimited this cultural arena. My opening chapters examine boxing’s role in shaping notions of gender performance among both men and women of the avant-garde. The first chapter argues that, in publications like Arthur Cravan’s Maintenant and Francis Picabia’s 391, boxing became a crucial element to Paris Dada’s ironic approach to male artistic identity. My second chapter then turns to how feminine and queer artists including Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore looked to the boxing ring when confronting dominant narratives of artistic strength, simultaneously adopting and critiquing aggressive postures typically reserved for their male counterparts. The third chapter examines the European avant-garde’s fascination with Black boxers, showing how the sense of kinship that artists like Cravan, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau felt towards these prizefighters both resisted and reaffirmed the objectifying dynamics of the colonial gaze. My final chapter examines the violence of the ring against the trauma of World War I, demonstrating how the avant-garde’s engagement with boxing corresponded to anxieties about the human body’s place in the industrial world. Collectively, these studies reveal a model of artistic resistance which was not only pugnacious, but also vulnerable, contingent and self-consciously performative.

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.

Topographies of Time: The Spatiohistorical Imagination in Caribbean Narrative addresses the inscription of the concepts of space and time in historical narratives of the francophone Caribbean. Spatiotemporal thought plays a fundamental role in the politics, aesthetics, and epistemological premises of Caribbean letters and manifests in the latent tension between universality and particularity, concepts that motivate and orient this literature from before the rise of Negritude in the 1930s up to the present day. Close attention to this conceptual history demonstrates that the dominant understanding of Antillean literary history in the twentieth century, which can be summarized as a shift from the anticolonial concept of Negritude to that of the postcolonial concept of créolité, obfuscates a more intricate and dynamic history.

Part one, “The Caribbean Stage of Universal History,” examines the historical narratives of two Caribbean historians, C. L. R. James and Léonard Sainville. These authors work within a model of universal history to position the Caribbean as the central stage on which a globalizing modernity develops. In part two, “Emplacing History: from the Discontinuities of Time to the Poetics of Place,” I consider two novels by Édouard Glissant and Vincent Placoly that exemplify the transition, in the 1960s through the 1990s, towards a theoretical and narratological engagement with the concept of particularity. They turn away from the universalizing rhetoric of Pan-Africanism and look toward the geographic and cultural specificity of their native Martinique. The final part, “Antilleans Abroad: The Caribbean Author in a Postcolonial World,” offers a reading of two Haitian authors, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière. In addition to negotiating the perils and problematics of migration itself, Laferrière and Danticat must contend with the expectations of the transnational and postcolonial literary marketplace, one which exerts specific pressures on the writers it encompasses. This focus on individual experience (including that of the transnational author) results in a return to the linear narratival forms of the first phase of universality. This dissertation challenges the boundaries between theoretical and historicist approaches to literature and proposes an alternative to the common dualistic framework in francophone studies between the colonial and postcolonial.

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.

Although he is commonly held to be a thinker of life, this dissertation argues that it is essential to read Jacques Derrida primarily as a thinker of death. Indeed, Derrida’s work displays an ongoing engagement with Plato’s definition of philosophy as a meletē thanatou, or careful reflection upon death. Reading Derrida’s work on death in this way foregrounds its enacted dimension, through which the reader is drawn into an aporia which itself is constitutive of a meletē thanatou.

The first chapter of this dissertation frames deconstruction’s key concepts around an understanding of death and the legacy of meletē thanatou. It places some of Derrida’s earlier work into dialogue with his contemporary Jacques Lacan regarding the centrality of Sigmund Freud’s death drive to the generation of meaning. It also critiques the neglect of the Platonic legacy in certain contemporary readings of Derrida’s work on apophasis and metaphysics.

The second chapter consists of close readings of Derrida’s 1975-1976 seminar La vie la mort and on Aporias, which show the extent to which Derrida’s reception of the Platonic legacy of meletē thanatou is mediated by his engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The third and final chapter discusses Derrida’s work on meletē thanatou in relation to that of his French contemporaries, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. However, this chapter also places special emphasis on the heretofore neglected parallels between Czech philosopher Jan Patočka and Derrida, namely in the way that their reception of Heidegger enables us to understand the centrality of a thinking of death to their thought on questions related to being, truth, and the European project.

This dissertation contends that it is necessary to read Derrida as a philosopher of death in order to qualify him as a philosopher of life, and that the thus far unexplored correspondences between his thinking and that of Jan Patočka are a rich and vital source for reinterpreting and understanding Derrida’s philosophical inheritance from Plato to Heidegger and his place within that tradition.