The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of the female messenger archetype in Chrétien de Troyes's romances within the context of the rising courtly literature written in France throughout the early twelfth century. The romances by Chrétien that will serve as cases in point for this thesis are Érec et Énide, Lancelot, and Yvain. I analyze the various courtly ladies of the lower nobility to whom Chrétien attributes direct discourse and study how their verbal influence over the plot and the extent to which they are directly involved in the action of that plot correlate to one another. This, as a counterpoint to the queen's traditional role as seemingly powerful, but ultimately passive object in the chivalric paradigm, demonstrates how Chrétien uses the female messenger archetype within his romances. While this study focuses on examining the existence of the female messenger archetype, it also acknowledges the variation amongst the different female characters, even as they fit into the role of the female messenger archetype within Chrétien's individual works. Lastly, the ambiguity of Énide's character, as the oldest example of the female messenger archetype, in comparison with the examples from Chrétien's later works, suggests a possible development in Chrétien's use of the female messenger archetypes, specifically a crystallization of the literary function of both the queen and the female messenger figures in his corpus.

In this thesis I will discuss the influence of Sartrean themes found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays: No Exit (Huis clos), Les Mouches (The Flies), and Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales), on the theater of Alfonso Sastre, particularly in the plays: Death Squad (Escuadra hacia la muerte), and In the Net (En la red). In No Exit, the famous quote “Hell is other people,” sets the standard for what type of discussion Sartre initiates in his theater. I will compare the historical context and the Hells that Sartre and Sastre both experienced during their time as active playwrights and how this influences the Hellish environments the two playwrights create for their characters in each of their plays. Following this study of context, I will compare the diabolical atmospheres created in the plays, how they are created and their impacts on the characters and text.

This research begins to explore what political tools are necessary to elevate women’s position in society by transforming legislation. Women in Francophone West Africa do not enjoy certain basic rights and there is need to improve their status. The promotion and appointment of women to the position of prime minister, Mame Madior Boyé in Senegal in 2001 and Mariam Kaidama Cissé Sidibé in Mali in 2011, gives us hope that women-friendly agendas will be given priority. I pose the question: Did the appointment of these two women to the heads of their respective governments improve the status of women and their political representation in West Africa? There is existing research that suggests that more women in government increases the visibility of women’s issues. I argue that simply having women in positions of power is not sufficient; participation in informal politics and civil society is imperative. These women have to go into the position with a commitment to women’s issues and a willingness to work with the already existent networks of women’s associations dedicated to furthering women’s rights. I study the successful passage of a new woman-friendly constitution in Senegal. In particular, I look at each participant’s role in making this happen, the associations who pushed for reforms for many years, the reformist president Wade, and Boyé who was a founding member of one of the central women’s associations, the Association of Senegalese Female Legal Practitioners. I compare this with the unsuccessful signing of new family code in Mali. I discuss the disinterest and indecisiveness of the president and Sidibé, as well as the influence of the strong opposition from the conservative High Islamic Council. There are also institutional barriers to change, namely the pluralist legal system of customary law, Islamic law, and state law. Finally, I discuss other possible reasons for the differences in these two countries’ results, such as Senegal’s longer history of democracy and general acceptance of modernity and women’s rights.

This thesis is an analysis of the current situation of women in contemporary France. It analyzes the current situation of French women in education, the work force, politics, and French society, with the intent of uncovering the gender inequalities French women encounter in contemporary France.

Le Horla de Guy de Maupassant et Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu d’Honoré de Balzac sont deux nouvelles françaises du dix-neuvième siècle. C’était une époque de grands bouleversements où des changements sociaux, politiques et scientifiques ont transformé le pays. Il y avait une tension extrême entre le nouveau et le vieux, la science et la religion, la rationalité et les choses qui restaient inexplicables. Balzac et Maupassant étaient tous les deux des écrivains dans la tradition réaliste, mais dans ces deux histoires on voit des éléments mystérieux, fantastiques, et même surnaturels. La perspective réaliste ou naturaliste est représentée dans ces nouvelles, mais elle s’avère insuffisante dans tous les deux. Dans cette thèse j’examine la contraste entre la rationalité et l’inexplicable, et je tente de répondre à cette question : Pourquoi, dans deux histoires des grands réalistes, y a-t-il tant de mystère ?

Cette thèse analyse la différence des occurrences nationales et culturelles qui ont abouti à des cultures et industries viticoles radicalement différentes en France et en Autriche. Bien que les deux pays aient partagé des histoires antérieures à la dissolution du Saint Empire romain germanique, la culture et la relation de chaque pays au vin en tant que produit culturel diffèrent grandement. Dans cette thèse, j'explore pourquoi ces deux cultures ont développé des approches si différentes du vin, de la vinification et du vin.

This paper examines the interconnections of nature, magic, and violence in the Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales) of the Countess of Ségur and their illustrations. It focuses on the ways in which the Countess reappropriates the framework of the literary fairy tale and subtly breaks with the traditions established by past fairy-tale authors, encouraging a return to nature and a movement away from the perceived corruption of the nineteenth-century city within the context of a timeless magical world. Close study of the Countess’s multiple perspectives on violence as either a motivating form of punishment or as a display of pure malice reinforce the dichotomy of good vs. evil as it is developed in the text, reflecting the author’s desire to create an ordered world in which obedience is rewarded and cruelty is justly punished.

This thesis focuses on Christine de Pizan’s mythological allegoric work entitled Epistre Othéa, written around 1400. True to the beliefs she portrays in many of her later seminal works, such as The Book of the City of Ladies, or The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine displays in this piece a strong didactic vision. The crucial pairing of text and image in the two manuscripts that I chose to focus on prove the power she exerted as a woman and as an artist but also mark her intention to strengthen her moral and political message through the use of different media. The purpose of this thesis will be to analyze the polyphonic voice that emerges from both the textual and pictorial elements of the Epistre in order to decipher Christine de Pizan’s distinctive ideology. I propose to examine the re-interpretation of two mythological figures, Medea and Minerva, in the Epistre and investigate the impact of this conscious manipulation of sources on Christine de Pizan’s overall works. Furthermore, the comparison between the figures of Othea and Christine herself is analyzed as a way to affirm the author’s idiosyncratic stance and delineate the scope of her proto-feminist views.

In the wake of the industrialization, urbanization, and global conflicts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe was forced to call into question its Enlightenment faith. In particular, Bildung—as the cultural education of the individual that emerged out of the Enlightenment—lost its footing amidst experience’s new texture of trauma. This thesis will examine Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, and Michaux’s Misérable miracle as each work pertains to and reconceives of the intertwining of Bildung and elegy, as a literary form both underpinned by and unconvinced of Bildung. For them, I will argue, elegy served as a potential form for re-writing historical indifference and for preparing, through limit-experience and loss, linguistic antidotes for the elision of difference produced in history’s wake.

This Master’s thesis examines the ways in which the Holocaust continues to figure in French-Jewish autobiographical fiction. I examine texts by two leading authors, Georges Perec (1936-1982) and Philippe Grimbert (b.1948). I treat Perec as a first-generation survivor of the Holocaust as he was a child during the war and suffered the loss of both his parents, while Grimbert was born to Holocaust survivors shortly after the war and thus belongs to what has come to be known as the second generation. In both Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) and Grimbert’s Un secret (2004) the body plays a central role as a site on which traumatic memory is inscribed. Trauma also determines the form and language of both novels, influencing not only the narrative structure but also the semantics utilized by the narrators. These post-Holocaust autofictions confront similar themes: both deal with the concept of the “unspeakable” and attempt to address the “emptiness” in the wake of the Holocaust and come to terms with the tremendous loss of life. Although thirty years separate Perec’s W and Grimbert’s Un secret, the overwhelming parallels between the two texts suggest that the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed on from one generation of survivors to the next through the disturbances of language. In my analysis, I illuminate common tropes that appear in these two works as instances of transgenerational traumatic transmission. The introduction provides a description of both works, a discussion of the autofictional genre and its use in both texts, and an overview of the trauma and literary theory with which I engage. The first chapter, “Traumatic Memory and its Inscription on the Body,” offers a close study of the body in both works. Both works juxtapose athletes who possess superior physical capabilities to weaker individuals who are marked by deformities, wounds or symbolic scars. I discuss the location of the narrators’ wounds in both texts and what this might suggest in psychoanalytic terms. I argue the location of the wounds, on the narrator’s mouth in W and on the narrator’s eyebrow in Un secret, are linked to what type of work these narrators undergo throughout both texts vis-à-vis trauma. Specifically, I use Freud’s Das Unheimlich to discuss the wound above the narrator’s eye in Un secret, linking it to the processes of testimony and remembrance. The second chapter, “Doubled Narrators and Narratives,” focuses on the various instances of doubling present in both works. I pay close attention to the doubled narrators, Gaspard Winckler in W, and Simon in Un secret, as well as to the presence of two alternative narratives in each text. I use Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage to support my argument that the doubling present in both texts provides a mirror that is crucial to the narrators’ processes of remembering, witnessing, and recording. In addition, Gabriele Schwab’s text, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma is fundamental to my argument that the legacy of trauma is inherited by the second generation. The third chapter, “The Influence of Trauma on the Production of Time” comprises an in-depth analysis of the poetics of time in Perec and Grimbert. Identifying Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as an influential model for Perec and Grimbert, I explore the opening paragraphs of all three works, noting particularly how the interaction between the adverb “longtemps” and the passé composé destabilizes the representation of time in order to convey the fragmentary nature of memory.