This thesis examines the relationship between French female Catholicism during the 17th century and representations of Huron women’s spirituality in Relations des Jésuites. I argue that the nuances of French dévote culture highlight the elevated status of women in Huron indigenous society. These portraits of Huron women by the Jesuits inspired French women to breach the cloister and become missionaries, resulting in newfound religious freedoms for dévotes achieved through imperialistic efforts against the Huron nation.

The thesis of this paper is twofold. First, there is the general concern to investigate and demonstrate clearly that there are relationships between certain superficially unrelated disciplines, namely philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism. Second, by way of accomplishing the first aim, there is an attempt made to synthesize and explicate the contributions of a significant twentieth century intellectual. The particular procedure employed to attain these ends is the consideration of an academic field which is continually being reshaped by other separate but related disciplines. For my purposes the figure of Jean Paul Sartre and the field of literary criticism are both, as shall be demonstrated, appropriate for this investigation. The format for analyzing Sartre’s literary criticism shall be as follows. (1) There is an investigation of Sartre’s philosophical claims. (2) There follows a discussion of Sartre’s view of literature, its value, significance, and role in society. (3) The next section relates Sartre’s views of literature to traditional problems in literary criticism. (4) In the final portion there is a brief evaluation of Sartre’s contributions to a contemporary literary criticism.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of seven different variants of the fairy tale commonly known as “Donkeyskin,” classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale motif index as ATU 510B. By comparing so many different iterations of one fairy tale, it is easier to recognize the inherent attitudes concerning women and their place in society contained in this tale. Additionally, reading multiple variants from different centuries lends a perspective on the way that these attitudes changed over the centuries. Each of the thirteenth century texts considered end with their heroines trapped in loveless marriages, much like the seventeenth-century fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” their direct literary descendant. The nineteenth century texts then present death or marriage as the alternatives for women, while the twentieth century brings the first instance of a heroine choosing for herself. This comparison allows the reader to learn not only what was considered a “happy ending” at the time, but also to gain a better understanding of the means by which a woman could gain agency.

Published in 1985, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur is a collection of six autobiographical and semi-autobiographical short stories written during and just after the German Occupation. Echoing the French national sentiment of the 1970s and 1980s, these stories examine Duras' own capacity for good and evil, for forgetting, repressing, and remembering. The first of these narratives, the eponymous "La douleur," is the only story in the collection to take the form of a diary, and it is this narrative, along with a posthumously published earlier draft of the same text, that will be the focus of this thesis. In both versions, Duras recounts her last tortuous months of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from a German concentration camp after he was arrested and deported for his participation in the French Resistance. Though Duras claims in her 1985 preface to "La douleur" that she has no memory of having written this diary and that it has "nothing to do with literature," when it is compared to the original version it becomes clear that substantial changes in style and tone were made to the 1985 version before publication. Though many of Duras' peers disregarded this rewritten version of "La douleur" as a shameful distortion of the truth, it is my contention that historical accuracy was never Duras' primary goal. Instead, what manifests in these two versions of the same story is Duras' path toward understanding and closure in the wake of a traumatic event. Using a combination of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, I will show that Truth and History are essentially incompatible when narrating trauma. Instead what is central to these two texts is their emotional accuracy: the manner in which the feelings and impressions associated with a traumatic event are accurately portrayed.

La chanson d'Yde et Olive, an early fourteenth-century epic poem from the Picard region, exemplifies the medieval custom of text renewal that seeks to adapt pagan materials to fit Christian doctrine. Largely based on the plot of the Ovidian fable Iphis and Ianthe from The Metamorphoses, its main character Yde undergoes a metaphorical transformation from a woman into a man. Moreover, much like the Ovide moralisé, a Christianized adaptation of the Latin original, Yde et Olive's message can be understood as a Christian parable for the purging of the sinful soul. To set up the poem's didactic message, the poet carefully infuses the story with contemporary social concerns, such as the theme of incest and gender disruption, both potentially offensive forces to the medieval social structure. In the backdrop of these threats to society, the heroine's overcoming of her struggles becomes all the more meaningful, leading to a clear moral message to the reader. While being a hybrid in genre and structure, the poem shows many borrowings from Christian hagiography, especially from the later, more romance-influenced versions of the Vitae of female transvestite saints. In these narratives, the heroine's spiritual development is typically portrayed in terms of "becoming male," which can also be understood as an erasure of sexual difference to approach God in a Neoplatonic sense. Moreover, the development of Yde's own hybrid state leading to the climax of revealing her new sex exemplifies medieval literary criticism, elaborating on the central theme of uncovering truth by exposing the hidden gem beneath the rough surface.

The Basque people and their language have been politically oppressed for centuries. I examine the history of the Basque language and how its oppression and revitalization have been shaped by the language policies of France and Spain, the two countries spanned by the Basque country. I focus my research and predictions on the French Basque Country, which is currently subject to a more oppressive language policy than Spanish Basque Country. The number of Basque-speaking bilinguals in the French Basque Country is decreasing and attitudes regarding instruction of the language have become more apathetic. I explore governmental, community, and combined efforts to preserve and encourage use of the language and draw several conclusions about viable future revitalization efforts.

This thesis seeks to investigate the factors that cause the existing sexism within the educational system in the banlieue (suburban districts mostly comprised of North African immigrants), and the societal prejudice that exists between the society of the descendants of the immigrant population and the rest of French society. This thesis explores Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film, La Journée de la jupe, which highlights the major inequalities within the French educational system and stereotypes of the banlieue. The narrowed focus of this thesis is on the inequalities between women and men, which cause for the outbreak of sexism that runs rampant throughout the toxic institutions in the underprivileged areas of France, the banlieues, by analyzing the film.

When Anatole France died 1n 1924, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had lived long enough to enjoy the honors which are not usually bestowed upon men until their death. His long life filled with years of labor and earnest endeavor to improve the lives of his fellow-men, through a better adjustment to society, culminated in his election to the French Academy. By some critics he has been called the greatest writer of today. It is difficult to tell exactly upon what merits this distinction is based. Anatole France was not content to simply call himself a skeptic. On the contrary we find in him a curious combination of novelist, historian and critic. His works show an interest in many literary activities. In La Vie Litteraire he reveals himsel as a lover of ancient literation. In L'histoire Contermporaine and L'eglise et la Republique he is an anti-clerical and supporter of the seperation of Churcn and State; a bitter critic of all dogma. In Crainquebille we see him as the Socialist and champion of the rights of the people, and in Vere Les Tempa Mellicum and Sur La Pierre Blanche he is the optimist, strongly confident in a future Utopia. Probably it is in the realm of social satire that he can make his greatest claim to fame. So elusive is France in his feelings that his readers are not certain whether his is an intense interest in society or a context for it. Whatever we may think, we cannot deny that it is a strong feeling against what he calls evils of the day -- the church, politics, class inequalities, and many others which gave birth to such novels as L'Histoire Contemporaire, Sur La Pierre Blanche, and the little story Crainquebille. The strange combination of feelings which France arouses added to the fact that he is still a contemporary, makes it difficult to assign him any definite place in literature. So strong are his feelings that they dominate the contents of his work, and his satire is abundant in contradictions. Difficult as it may be to assign him a niche in literature, it cannot be denied that as a sincere disciple of justice and liberty, he has left a deep influence on France.

French Canadian playwright Joseph Armand Leclaire (1888-1931) was very well known and respected in his time. Although he wrote over thirty plays, lyrics to several songs and an abundance of political poems, most of his work has been lost and Leclaire himself seems to have been forgotten. Several of his plays were produced at the time they were written, including his 1916 play La petite maîtresse de l'école (later published in 1929 as Le petit maître d'école), but none have been presented postumously nor have any been translated. This M. F. A. thesis presents the first ever translation and adpatation of Leclaire's play, titled in English as The Little Schoolmaster. The first half of the thesis provide historical context for the play's significance, as well as information about Armand Leclaire and the changes he made to his own work between the original 1916 version and the 1929 published version. The thesis then analyses the creative acts of translation and adaptation, proposing a new model of translation for a linguistically rich audience. Through this new model of translation-adaptation for a bilingual spectrum, the thesis concludes by demonstrating that dramaturgy can serve as a dynamic instrument for communities to engage in the exploration of bilingual and bicultural identity.

Race science is built on ideas of division and categorization. In the historian's quest to tell the story of race science, certain frameworks have been used that can greatly inhibit our understanding of this fraught topic. The impulse to study race science in the framework of the nation-state has led to certain misconceptions and lends itself to a historical narrative wherein racist concepts stop at artificially imposed borders. In addition, the national framework detracts from the individual's contributions and instead lumps these contributions together on the level of the nation-state, thus opening the door for judgments about whole nations being more or less responsible for race science. In this work, I explore contributions to race science pertaining to the "Jewish race" (which I have simplified to the phrase "Jewish race science") made by individual French writers and scholars. These contributions have been overlooked at times by historians who look to more notorious examples, such as those made by German race science theorists; in failing comprehensively to examine all significant contributions to race science, historians have often inhibited their own ability to understand Jewish race science fully. If such a historical field is to be understood, one must be aware of the full range of development of Jewish race science, both in terms of geographical scope and scholarly focus. By bringing attention to Jewish race science contributions made in nineteenth-century France, it is my intention to broaden the understanding of this field and to help bring about a new approach to the field that is less reliant on the nationalist framework in its evaluation of the nature and impact of race science.