My dissertation uses close readings of four texts dealing with the actress, spanning the naturalist novel (Zola’s Nana, 1880, and Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin, 1882), autobiography (Sarah Bernhardt’s Ma double vie, 1907) and autobiographical fiction (Colette’s La Vagabonde, 1910), in order to examine late nineteenth-century representations (and self-representations) of the actress in relation to the discourse of hysteria. I argue that in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, pathology and performance came together in the stereotype of the hysterical actress. In the wake of the French Revolution, and the subsequent political upheavals of the nineteenth century along with the emergence of a consumer capitalist society, \(fin-de-si\grave{e}cle\) society was living a moment of particular anxiety. This anxiety found a focal point in the hystericised figure of \(la com\acute{e}dienne\), who came to embody a threatening blurring of gender and class distinctions. Actresses were pathologised in a discursive gesture which sought to identify and contain the threat which they were seen to pose, and which seemed to offer an objective narrative which re-established boundaries and identities. The discourse of hysteria, however, was by no means as secure or monolithic as it might seem. I argue that the discourse of hysteria is underpinned by a fundamental performativity which has the potential to be profoundly subversive. By examining different modalities of response to the phenomenon of the hystericisation of the actress, I show how in both male and female-authored texts the discourse of pathology is undermined and reappropriated in a way which foreshadows twentieth-century feminist theories. / Romance Languages and Literatures

I locate my dissertation at the critical intersection of philosophy, medical discourse and literature, and anchor it around five intertwining concepts: modernity, subjectivity, masculinity, immunity and Frenchness. I contend that immunity, as a concept at which life and law converge, offers an alternative and largely overlooked episteme shaping contemporary French literary consciousness as a primary regulator/negotiator between health and sickness, belonging and not belonging, volition and involition, and, finally, self and other. I treat immunity metaphorically and scientifically, and then trace the episteme through the works of three French authors—Émile Zola, Albert Camus and Hervé Guibert—all of whom adopt the medical novel as a way of addressing the relationship of the individual to society and to the self. Anne-Marie Moulin frames the immunological revolution as an ever-evolving "semantic event." In this vein, I devote my first chapter to examining how immunity instituted itself as a common trope of "becoming" embraced—and left naturalized—by post-structural thinkers grappling with their corporal limits. This rhetorical turn culminates in Jean-Luc Nancy's characterization of the immune system as the body’s “physiological signature," inhibiting the potential of man to transcend his biology. In my second chapter, I move from the metaphor of immunity to a brief exposition of the history of the science, ending my survey with Elie Metchnikoff (and his legacy), the "father" of cellular immunology who envisioned the internal body as a dynamic, every-changing structure. I focus the next three chapters of my study on literary examples where the male protagonist’s immunity has been compromised. For my first two examples—Le Docteur Pascal by Emile Zola and La Peste by Albert Camus—I analyze the portrait of the supposedly immune doctor, considering what the “costs and benefits" of this immunity are and how this "exceptional status" is destabilized. Then, in my last chapter, I switch perspectives from the doctors to the patient, examining the texts of Hervé Guibert who, I argue, models his writing strategy on the retrovirus’s tactics, challenging literary conventions so as better to exteriorize his experience and “contaminate” (in the etymological sense as "touch together") his readers. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines the link between food and writing about food in French modernist texts in nineteenth and twentieth-century French novels, tracing the central role of food in realist fiction as an encoder of bourgeois discourse to its persisting, yet altered, role in modernist texts. While the propagation of gastronomy and culinary discourse through realist texts presupposes and relies on the seamless conversion of diners into readers and the meal into text, this dissertation has at its root the exploration of the narrative potential inherent in the creation of space in conspicuous "second-order" consumption, leaving the diner and the reader, and the meal and the text, side-by-side, in play. I reflect on how the deliberate alignment and co-staging of the meal and the word (or the diner and the reader), rather than their conflation and collapse, throws into relief not only the act of incorporating the meal, but also the extradiegetic moment of incorporating the text, or a (self-)consciousness of the meal as text. I explore how this shift in the staging of food and eating is not only a hallmark of the play that characterizes modernist novels, which inscribe self-conscious moments of their own creation and consumption within the narrative itself, but also a key element in understanding the shifts from realism to modernism, as the meal remains central to both while at the same time crystallizing key differences in how narratives are crafted in each. / Romance Languages and Literatures

While the themes of garbage and refuse pervade many of the most important works of Italian cinema from the era of Neorealism to the present, thus far no scholarly attempts have been made to examine the commonalities germane to their portrayal and their relationship to larger questions of Italian cultural trends. The present study explores how filmmakers' depiction of the residual is synecdochic of an artistic vision that endeavors to capture reality at its most unprepared and, subsequently, comes to represent the increasing complexity of the mimetic undertaking in an Italian society thrust rapidly into the late stages of capitalism. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Realism is a mode of representation that purports to depict contemporary society objectively and in its entirety. By contrast, modernist artists are often regarded as having turned away from external reality to represent subjective states and to emphasize the artistic (versus mimetic) qualities of art. Building on recent scholarship that has demonstrated that Spanish realist authors were mindful of the limitations of the realist project, this study examines frames as devices through which both realist and modernist authors and artists working in fin-de-siècle Spain signal the limits of perception and representation. / Romance Languages and Literatures

"Impossible Voices: Phenomenologies of Sound in Beckett" is the first sustained exploration of sound in the prose and drama of Samuel Beckett. Bringing the field of sound studies to bear on Beckett's works, this dissertation argues that Beckett's treatment of inner speech--the sounds and voices in the "mind's ear"--is implicated in an aesthetics not only of failure, but of impossibility. The "impossible voices" of the dissertation's title are the "dead voices" or "human murmurs" of Beckett's purgatorial soundscapes. These sounds, qua manifestations of inner speech, cannot be fully exteriorized. This unbridgeable gap between inner speech and sounded speech within the self finds it analogue in a breakdown of communication between self and other, as shown in the three major plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. Where conversation in these purgatorial worlds often asserts or provides mere presence, meaning is found by apophatic means such as noise, catachresis, and the ineffable. The organization of the chapters of this dissertation indicates a move from embodied voices--speaker and listener in two separate, functioning bodies--to a dynamic in which a disembodied voice speaks to a body in a "listening posture." The listener's vocal expression, moreover--if it exists--is secondary to that of the voice. This study thus makes a case for the importance of sound in the Beckett canon, using phenomenological readings to show that the impossible in Beckett is bound up with sound. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin. / Bibliography: p. [242]-250.

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin, 1967. / Bibliography: p. [258]-288.

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin, 1967. / Bibliography: p. [258]-288.

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin. / Bibliography: p. [242]-250.