Texte remanié: Ph. D.--Modern languages and literatures--Washington (D.C.)--Catholic university of America, 1985. Titre de soutenance : Androgyny in the novels of Guy de Maupassant.

Considered an integral part of Metropolitan France, the island of Corsica is situated nonetheless on the very periphery of the modern state that claims it. Actually situated geographically closer to Italy than to any part of France, its culture and its people are likewise more closely related to their Italians neighbors than to the rest of what Corsicans term "Continental France." Following the acquisition of Corsica, both government officials and bourgeois travelers would seek to visit the island, often recording their findings and publishing these memoirs for others to know of their travels. This concept of travel memoirs, specifically those regarding Corsica, had already been a fairly common practice among the British, as they had often placed interest in the island itself. From this group of French and British travel memoirs would come the writings of James Boswell, P. P. Pompéi, and the Baron de Beaumont, among others. Corsica becomes a place of unique setting for novels and short stories throughout the century, with tales of banditry, vendetta, and violence from the island. For those authors seeking to place their stories in Corsica, inspiration was drawn from the very travel memoirs they had read regarding the island, although often they chose to ignore them in favor of stereotypes. I have chosen three specific 19th century authors in relation to the images created by the travel memoirs of Corsica: Prosper Mérimée, Honoré de Balzac, and Guy de Maupassant. The purpose behind each author's use of the images of Corsica was very different and shows different ways that these images were used. Mérimée directly used Corsica to question the triumph of the civilized over the uncivilized, Balzac used Corsica to represent France itself, and Maupassant used Corsica to show that "reality" is really nothing more than a personal illusion. Though when publishing their travel memoirs the authors might not have expected much to come of them, they have actually influence an entire century of writers, and possibly an entire nation, with their images of Corsica.

Lenka Mundevová Translation of Colloquial Language Devices in Fiction: A Century of Maupassant's Ivrogne in Czech Translation Abstract The dissertation compares the stylization of the dialogues in the French original of Maupassant's short story Ivrogne (The Drunkard), written in 1884, with five Czech translations published between 1902 and 1997. The comparative analysis is focused on the devices of colloquial language, including dialect, which appear frequently in the dialogues of the story and prove to be extraordinarily useful when interpreting Maupassant's text. The analysis of the excerpted material is preceded by the description of the basic characteristics of colloquial French and Czech, followed by the description of their stratifications. The mutual relation of the colloquial language varieties is an important prerequisite for the evaluation of the translations of colloquial language devices and their appropriateness in the individual Czech versions of Ivrogne. The paper also deals with the development of Czech aesthetic translation standards and their relation to the standard of local fiction, outlining the important tendencies of Czech fiction translation applied when colloquial devices were conveyed from French to Czech during the specified timeframe. The individual language devices used in the...

In its first part, the thesis deals with Guy de Maupassant's life, the importance of short stories in his work, their reception in the French and Czech literary milieu as well as their uniqueness in the context of the literary movements of the 19th century. As a part of the thesis, an overview of the Czech translations of Guy de Maupassant's short stories is included. A separate chapter is devoted to their reception in the Czech literary context. The second empirical part focuses on the comparative critical analysis of the inital texts and their translations. The translations were chosen so that they could represent different generations of Czech translators (1902 - Pavel Projsa, 1960's - Luděk Kárl and Břetislav Štorm, 1990's - Dana Melanová). Here, the thesis deals with the skills of the translators to express the stylistic concisseness of Maupassant as well as the different stylistic levels of the original text (pathos and poetic language on one hand and informality on the other). In the conclusion, a final critical evaluation of the translations is given.