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It is virtually impossible today to broach the subject of realism in the arts without at least mentioning the name Gustave Flaubert. Long considered the father of realism in the modern novel, with his seminal works Madame Bovary and The Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert was an integral part of that continuing movement in France that was determined to sever once and for all the novel's binds to aristocratic convention and pretension in order to focus on the life of the common woman and man. And Flaubert did find himself in good company then--Zola, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, the list goes on, were artists all for whom the effort to advance the form, so that the novel had much greater relevance to the modern world, was of paramount importance. Singularly devoted to stripping the gauze from the lens that had softened the edge for centuries, these few would endeavor to present the human being, the human condition, in its raw, natural, often unpleasant form. For the majority of these writers, however, this new chapter in the history of the novel would rely almost exclusively on this change in primary subject matter. Not so chez Flaubert. In examining the correspondence and major works of Gustave Flaubert, it is possible to track the development of the artist, to follow the arc of thought and opinion that would ultimately shape Flaubert's determination to "write about nothing." Like most of his contemporaries, who were wholly (and vocally) disgusted by the world around them, what this determination meant for Flaubert was that the utter banality of modern life should be reflected in every face, it should be heard in every word, seen in every action, in every place, in every object. What this also meant, and that which further separates Flaubert from the pack, was that Flaubert's narrator, and indeed Flaubert himself, should blend so well with the background presented that both writer and conduit would ultimately disappear. Sorting through the formidable catalogue of analysis available today in articles, reviews and full-length texts, some written more than 100 years ago, it is possible to piece together the "how" at the heart of Flaubert's masterworks--the development and strategic use of free indirect speech, the reliance on action/inaction and dialogue, the astute staging of object, the seamless integration of place, all of which facilitates Flaubert's ability to present, if not the fully realized psychological portrait, then at the very least the sophisticated vehicle designed exclusively to reveal the inner life. In Flaubert's hands, we the reader would directly experience the world as it is/was through the eyes and minds of his principal characters. Still, the question remains. Flaubert would devote five full years of his life to the development of his first masterwork. He would devote another five to the crafting of the second. With this determined Flaubert, we have the who, therefore. With Madame Bovary and The Sentimental Education, we have the what. In France at mid-century, we find the when and the where and, through a close reading of the literature, we can begin to piece together the how. But why? In the correspondence alone, we bear witness to a man struggling mightily to bring to fruition two works of highly uncertain promise. Why would Flaubert endure, why would he fight, when the result, the future of these works, was so uncertain? Via the analysis of specific strings of correspondence, through a sampling of solid, inspired critique, through close readings of the texts themselves and, of course, through acknowledgment of the no-holds-barred approach of the author himself, we arrive at one possible explanation here. "Notre coeur ne doit être bien qu'à sentir celui des autres," Flaubert once wrote, and it is with this in mind that we offer to you this glimpse of the man who would live and die by that problematic, much-maligned maxim "art for the sake of art."

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 514-535). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

This study of Abdelkebir Khatibis autobiography, La Mémoire tatouée, addresses two specific questions with respect to autobiography: What does this autobiography tell us about autobiography in general and about its own status as autobiography? What is the relationship between Khatibis autobiography and his other more well-known texts? Chapter One focuses on questions of autobiography and how this text challenges generic classification and definition. The analysis in this chapter focuses on a consideration of form and innovation, the multiplicity of the autobiographical subject, and questions of completeness, accuracy and memory in the creation of autobiography. Chapter Two begins with the idea that this autobiography is a story of becoming, of how the protagonist comes to be a writer. As such, it is also the protagonists history as a reader, from his days at the Quranic school, to his years in the French educational system, and to his first efforts at creative writing. The narrators mention of a previous publication and his suggested ideas for future publications lead the reader to understand that this autobiography, as a story of writing, addresses the past writing efforts, the present autobiographical project, and possible future texts. Chapter Three addresses the intertextual relationship between Khatibis autobiography and his other texts. Khatibis key concepts of pensée-autre and double critique, the bi-langue, and the intersémiotique are evaluated here with respect to decolonization, translation and bilingualism, and writing and its relationship to multiple signifying or semiotic systems such as geography and urban planning, tattooing, and calligraphy. I show in this chapter that these ideas, elaborated in Khatibis later texts, are all present in the autobiography. The analysis of the intertextuality of Khatibis autobiography and his other texts reveals that the autobiography serves as a kind of introduction to Khatibis body of work. The repeated references to music, especially in the autobiography, indicate a fugal relationship between the autobiography and the later texts: the former is the theme and the latter are the variations on that theme. Thus, the autobiography is a prelude to Khatibis lifes work, his Text.

This dissertation examines the different ways in which Edouard Glissant, Kateb Yacine and William Faulkner combine landscape, history and identity in their work. The depiction of landscape in literature is not new, but the French Romantics in the 19th century, for instance, tended to describe the beauty of landscape without conceiving any rapport between landscape and humankind, and thus created a gap between the two. For Kateb and Glissant, landscape is also a witness of History. The (hi)story of their respective communities has been confiscated and shattered by the respective colonizers, hence the necessity to recreate it through the poetics of land. However, because of the different contexts some differences in the conception and use of landscape arise between these three writers. In the case of Kateb Yacine, the Algerian landscape is the repository for the ancient history of North Africa. The North African people have to turn to their landscape in order to recreate their history and redefine their identity. For Edouard Glissant, the landscape was an accomplice of the Caribbean People. When the slaves escaped the plantation confinements the wilderness was their only refuge. It is then essential for the Caribbean community to take roots in this land in order to create its own history. In the case of William Faulkner, the land of his "Yoknapatawpha county" is presented as the podium where some injustices in the South took place, such as the dispossession of Indians, the spoliation of their lands, slavery, and above all the tragedy of the Civil War.

More often than not, the linguistic research of Cajun French rests primarily at the morphological and syntactic level or focuses on aspects of culture and identity. It was thus my goal here to examine Cajun French at the phonological level. More specifically, I examined two phonological phenomena in Cajun French: assibilation and affrication. Both of these features may result when the dental consonants /t/ and /d/ precede either of the high vowels /i/ and /y/. Under these constraints, therefore, words such as petit (small) and dire (to say) are pronounced as [pitsi] and [dzir] when assibilated and [pitʃi] and [dʒir] when affricated. Affrication of dental stops is a well-attested feature of Acadian French in Canada and is a purported feature of Cajun French, while a high rate of assibilation is common in Quebec French. Assibilation, furthermore, is rarely mentioned when discussing Cajun French. I used recorded interviews of 60 individuals from the Cajun French corpus, created by Dubois in 1997, to analyze the presence and variation of these features in four Louisiana parishes. My first goal was to determine where in Louisiana one finds these features. Secondly, I analyzed which linguistic factors affect assibilation and affrication. I found that voicing context plays a role in determining variant production in certain settings, particularly with assibilation. For affrication, I found that syllable position is actually an indicator of lexicalization in Cajun French. Nowhere is this lexicalization more evident than in the categorical affrication of cadien (Cajun). Thirdly, I examined the effects of certain social factors on variant usage. Results showed that gender affects variant use, with women generally preferring the occlusive norm while men demonstrated greater variation. Location was the most significant factor to the production of both assibilation and affrication. St. Landry and Avoyelles had higher rates of both features than Lafourche and Vermilion, for example, where the features were extremely rare. Finally, variant rates increased among younger speakers despite an overall attrition and leveling of Cajun French occurring in these communities due to language shift and language death.