The changes within the cultural space of the nineteenth century (the new intellectual ideals, the materialization of scientific projects, the rationalization of the economic structures along with the formalization of the social life) bear all the imprint of the tendency toward clarity, appropriateness, conspicuity and transparency bequeathed to the urban civilization by the Age of the Philosophers. Nostalgia, a blending of suffering and pleasure, alters the definition of this space of clarity by means of a historical experience through which modern man seeks his identity and his place in the modern world. The cultural destiny of nostalgia raises some fundamental questions: To what extent could one identify urban space as the birthplace of the modern historical experience? What relationship is there between nostalgia and space during the architectural and the socioeconomic urban dislocation under the Second Empire? When does the haunting idea of 'home' lose its materiality in order to become an image of modern anxiety? Something that has sometimes been overlooked is the fact that nostalgia is not merely an attribute of romantic poets but that it is equally present in the narrative substance of the naturalistic novels of Zola. I deem the works of Zola to give evidence of a nostalgia of the origins, of a longing for a return to nature seen not only as a holder of all our antisocial instincts but as an original source of the language as well / acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this study is to examine the poetry of Pernette du Guillet according to Renaissance poetic theory which was based on the interplay between imitation and invention in the creative process. Renaissance scholars believed that imitation provided the writer with his sources of inspiration and with examples to be assimilated through the process of innutrition and then changed and amplified by invention. Pernette creates her love poems using the prevailing love imagery of her time. Essentially a Neoplatonic love poet, her poems also reflect the influence of Petrarchism. She imitates specific authors who wrote within the Petrarchan and Neoplatonic traditions, including Petrarch himself, Bembo, Serafino, Chariteo, Maurice Sceve, and Mellin de Saint-Gelais. In addition to imitations of model authors, she also imitates the rhetoric and imagery of the Petrarchan and Neoplatonic codes To the Renaissance mind, invention was necessarily linked to imitation, since imitation served as the source of the author's inspiration. Part of Pernette's invention results from her combination of the Petrarchan and Neoplatonic codes and her development of contentement. Na(')ivete and humor both constitute a departure from Neoplatonic style and develop from native French influences, including the work of Marot. Pernette practices two major types of na(')ivete in the Rymes: (1) her creation of an intimate, conversational style, and (2) her outstanding experimentation with rhyme and form. Her humor includes playful banter, elegant wit, and clever manipulations of language. What makes her work distinct is her use of humor and na(')ivete in intimate love poetry. While these additions are unexpected in the works of the first Frenchwoman to write Neoplatonist love poems, they reflect the dynamic relationship of imitation and invention / acase@tulane.edu

Despite copious research on Rabelais's giant epic, Gargantua, Pantagruel, and the Tiers Livre (1532-1546), relatively little research on Rabelais has concerned itself with his last complete work, the Quart Livre (1552). Several scholars have written on the book's language and satirical art but they have concentrated primarily on the relationship of the Quart Livre to Rabelais's previous books. A recent monograph by Paul Smith recognizes the literary merit of the Quart Livre but provides only limited, albeit valuable, analyses of certain episodes of the book while entirely ignoring others Regardless of their research on the Quart Livre, scholars traditionally have based their conclusions on the text's major episodes of M. Gaster, of Quaresmeprenant, and of the parolles degelees, resulting in a lack of concern with the episodes which link these celebrated passages. Scholars apparently have avoided a detailed critical study of the text because of its supposedly fragmentary nature: Floyd Gray considers that 'plus que dans les autres livres, le recit est discontinu.'$\sp1$ While the text's narrative sequence may be obscure at times, it offers nonetheless a coherent and rich theme throughout its seventeen episodes: that of community. Rabelais presents his reader with a series of alien, and at times comical, insular communities encountered by the Pantagruelist community voyaging to consult the oracle, Dive Bouteille. It becomes evident that the traditions and standards of these foreign communities contrast, often harshly, with the tolerant and confident community led by the giant Pantagruel. In short, the insular communities offer examples--sometimes based on the adversarial religious communities existing in the sixteenth century--of social organizations whose extreme principles Rabelais found both troubling and humorous. His protagonists' community becomes emblematic of the moderate and goodwilled attitude Rabelais champions in the book's prologue and throughout its narrative The present study is an analysis of Rabelais's notion of community as seen in both the major and minor episodes of the Quart Livre. By broaching and developing the theme of community, Rabelais's final work also touches upon the themes of utopia and exile, significant leitmotifs in many Renaissance texts. The Quart Livre is not only Rabelais's arguably most intriguing work but, by virtue of its rich thematics and dispersive style, is also a profoundly important Renaissance text which deserves close study. ftn$\sp1$Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l'ecriture (Paris: Nizet, 1966), 178 / acase@tulane.edu

Michel Rybalka was the first critic who in 1969 tried to define the crisis pervading Vian's universe through the figure of the double, in fiction as in reality. My study is an attempt to show how the identity conflicts are expressed through the treatment of the body of his characters and through his themes. Vian's specificity, in his trangressive approach to the body, lies in the very personal fantasy world and poetic dimension that he brings The core of my study bears on the constant juxtaposition of the love for the body and the death or slow destruction of that same body. This painful conflict is an essential component of Vian's world. His obsession with the 'body beautiful' reveals in fact his obsession with death. He focuses on beauty as a means to ward death off. I will show that through the simultaneous representation of a glorified body, and of an abused body, Vian asserts that it is impossible for the individual to become a whole being, free of an existential void I will present the love for the body and for life in a first chapter which I will situate historically. In a second chapter, I will show how the obsessive horror of death appears in the form of old age and disease. I will expose in a third chapter how the search for an identity involves an exploration of the sexual body. In a fourth chapter, I will explain how the quest for identity through the body eventually leads to a feeling of emptiness. It seems that for Vian the concept of emptiness arises from the essential duality of man for whom the body is a mask, biding a profound alienation. Vian is halfway between narcissism and the rejection of himself. What I call narcissism in the context of Vian's work is the double movement that consists first of a self-analysis followed by the desire to find some answers in society, and secondly, after this appeal to society has failed, of a return to one's own image and body leading to despair / acase@tulane.edu

In the creation of his tragedies, Jean Racine draws upon an already existing dramatic form and style: the seventeenth-century French dramaturgy, predominantly based on the Latin translations of Aristotle's Poetics. However, unlike his contemporaries, who were unfamiliar with Greek, Racine had acquired a sound knowledge of this ancient language during his years at Port-Royal. Therefore, he was able to read the original text of the Poetics and better understand its principles than could most of his contemporaries whose only contact with Aristotle was through the imprecise and even erroneous Latin translations. Racine's translation of certain passages from the Poetics reveal not only his insight into Aristotle's original thought, but also his preoccupation with the emotional effect of tragedy rather than its technical composition. A critical confrontation of Aristotle's Poetics wth Racine's translation of this classical text and with Racine's dramatic creation shows the extent of Racine's indebtedness to Aristotle and the degree of his originality in the formulation and dramatic application of his concept of the tragic The first chapter of this study deals with tragic action. Racine's interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine of the primary importance of action focused, not on the proper disposition of the incidents, but on the emotional effect the incidents are designed to produce. However, whereas in the Greek tragedies described by Aristotle action was the result of an external collision of contending moral forces, action in Racinian tragedy stems from a conflict of the collective and individual self The second chapter examines the problematic nature of the ideal hero. Aristotle deduced the qualities of the tragic character from the function of tragedy which is to produce the emotions of pity and fear. An analysis of Racinian tragedy reveals that the seventeenth-century dramatist never lost sight of this objective. However, whereas the heroes of antiquity are often engaged in an unequal struggle with destiny, the Racinian hero discovers within himself the existence of an individual entity which is in conflict with the collective values. It is the discovery of this incompatible duality which leads to his sense of profound isolation and his downfall. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI / acase@tulane.edu

In this Dissertation I examine a group of novels by Juan Goytisolo, Magdalena Lasala, Angeles de Irisarri and Lourdes Ortiz which re-interpret the Moorish presence in the Spanish past. Informed by New Historicism and Post-colonial theory, my Dissertation examines the long history of intertexts that narrate the Conquest of Spain by the Moors in the form of the 'Loss of Spain' legend and the uses recent novels make of the Reconquest as a negotiation between Arab and Christian identity. The symbolic return of the repressed self in the form of a massive wave of immigrant Moroccan workers becomes the framework for a recent boom in narratives that reconstruct Spanish national identity as multiple and heterogeneous The first chapter analyzes the legend of the 'Loss of Spain,' one of the most provocative metaphors that were produced to explain Spain's relationship with its 'others.' The different versions of this legend, which expand throughout Spanish literary history, continuously re-interpret the meaning of this foundational myth. In the second chapter I read Goytisolo's Don Julian as an extremely subversive, although intensely problematic, reinterpretation of the legend. Goytisolo, following Americo Castro, emphasizes the importance of Spain's Arab past, embracing it through an intensive use of language, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Don Julian also defies the hegemonic centers of Spanish culture, performing a Derridean trespassing of discursive and geographical frontiers Chapters Three and Four analyze contemporary readings of the Reconquest in the form of novels that problematize, as does Hayden White, the notions of history and fiction as they narrate the lives of Medieval Spanish Women. The Trip of the Queen of Irisarri and Moorish and Christian Women of Irisarri and Lasala show the ambivalence that characterizes discourses of cultural difference, following the notion of stereotype of Homi Bhabha. Ortiz's Urraca and Irisarri's Queen Urraca , in the Fourth Chapter, establish the difficulties of narrating the life of a woman who is mother, wife, and Queen. These novels question Spain's official history of the Reconquest, as well as Franquist discourse on national unity, revealing Spain to be a hybrid and heterogeneous nation / acase@tulane.edu

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In seventeenth-century France, rhetoric constituted an ensemble of precepts governing all forms of discourse. The influence of this art of persuasion and eloquence on the dramatic literature of the period has been the subject of studies primarily devoted to Cornelian and Racinian tragedy. This dissertation examines the relationship of rhetorical theory and practice to comedy, and to Moliere in particular Part One of the study brings into historical perspective the ancient affiliation of the ars poetica and the ars oratoria and explores the interrelated comic and rhetorical traditions of the agon form. The normative influence of rhetorical ideals and modes of expression on literature is shown to have persisted throughout the centuries-long dominance of the artes liberales in Western Europe. The contributions of rhetoric to the neo-classical canons of French drama are subsequently examined in light of Marvin Herrick's work, which establishes that rhetorical analysis of comedy was standard critical practice during the Renaissance, even after Aristotle came to influence poetic thought and dramatic criticism In Part Two, rhetorical principles of invention, disposition, and elocution serve to analyze selected verbal debates, or agones, that parallel the judicial and deliberative genres of rhetoric. Moliere exploits to comic end the moral and psychological dimension of hapless plaintiffs and frustrated raisonneurs whose attempts at persuasion are seldom successful. The comic poet's Aristotelian sense of persuasion as demonstration is manifest in his use of role reversal, a valuable source of comic irony and dramatic interest: accusers become accused and raisonneurs caution against the limitations of logic Considerable evidence is adduced to support Lane Cooper's hypothesis that a serious kind of dianoia characterized by formal rhetorical proofs is proper to comedy. However, reasoned discourse serves primarily to highlight the broader archetypal context of Moliere's works. The defeat of the alazon-imposter and the ultimate vindication of the young are not effects of rhetorical argumentation. Rhetoric enters comedy as a subsidiary art capable of illuminating but not superceding the inexorable comic justice that requires the triumph of the new order over the old and makes of Molieresque comedy the celebration of life itself / acase@tulane.edu

The object of the following study is to analyse the role of Racine in the works of the eight most influential literary critics in France and Germany during the reign of Napoleon I: J. W. von Goethe, F. Schiller, A.W. Schlegel, Mme de Stael, F-R. de Chateaubriand, B. Constant, P. de Barante and S. de Sismondi. These critics were important participants in the development of romanticism in France and they contributed to the redefinition of the methods and goals of literary criticism. Because of historical circumstances and individual personalities, the debate on classicism and romanticism gained a greater publicity than would have otherwise been the case. It is therefore justified to ask why literary criticism experienced such a far-reaching shift and how the transformation of criticism, and subsequently literature, was accomplished, as well as in what way the relationship between French and German critics determined the nature of romanticism in France The fundamental premise of this work is that French and German writers of the napoleonic era focused their critical and literary innovations on a rediscovery of the poetic power of Jean Racine. During the eighteenth century, French classical theater had become the standard against which most plays in France were judged. Some German critics had also attempted to transfer the rules of French classicism to the German theater. For the proponents of theatrical classicism, Racine was the writer most often proposed as a model and the French tragedian was the object of a critical cult, making him the symbol of classical perfection through submission to the formal rules of the seventeenth century, including the Aristotelian unities and the practice of imitation. In this way, the individual merits of the writer had been transformed into an example of the objective, universal aesthetic viewpoint of the eighteenth century classical critics and remained so, at least in France, until well into the nineteenth century. Any change in literary theory had, consequently, to deal with the function of Racine in literary criticism, the aesthetic theory implict in French classicism and the artistic value of the tragedian's works themselves The task of the Empire critics was complicated by the close relationship between literature and politics under Napoleon I. The period produced an overt desire, on the part of the French regime, to establish political control over most of Europe through military conquest. The successes of Napoleon's armies were directly linked to the conviction that the French nation, having overcome the chaos of the Revolution, could return to the power of France under Louis XIV. Since the emperor saw himself as the new Sun King, it is not surprising that the literary glories of the past were endowed with the same feeling of superiority as was the political destiny of France in Eurpoe, in fact this was merely an extension of the prominence of French literary fashion in eighteenth-century Europe. Imitation of Racine and submission to the emperor were judged to be inextricably joined, a fact acknowledged by both classical and romantic critics The role of Racine in the romantic criticism of the Empire will thus be useful in defining the changes in society and literature which took place after the French Revolution and led to the French romantic movement in the 1820s. It should be possible to explain some of the elements that distinguished French romanticism from its European counterparts. The example of Racine criticism during a short but important period also points out the process of evolution in literary and critical ideas. In this way both the specific nature of aesthetic change and the more general shift of the attitudes of an entire society can be seen. Coming to terms with the classical heritage was a major part of French literary development in the nineteenth century / acase@tulane.edu

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