No description available.

No description available.

Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Diss., 2006

Th. Ph. D.--Rutgers university, 1987.

Freie Universität Berlin, Diss., 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in French." Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-199).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [264]-272).

This dissertation examines the role of women in four of Émile Zola's novels, in particular their privileged position as the conduits through which he exerted his "experimental" literary method. Zola has long been recognized as subjecting his female characters to extreme violence, but scholars have not yet thoroughly explored how the ways in which he represents this violence provide insight into the nature of his narrative practice. For Zola, literary fiction offers access to a scientific truth, and the female body and its capacity for procreation is the source material for his investigation. By subjecting his female characters to analysis and ultimately dissection, Zola violently exploits the creative potential of their bodies and builds a literary empire upon them. In La Curée, Zola presents one of his first experimental heroines, a bored and pampered wife whose identity is constructed through reflections and refractions via a series of mirrors, both visually and narratively. This multiplicity of interferences effaces the female voice and subjectivity while exploiting the visual appeal of the female body. Nana offers a counterpoint on the same theme, featuring a woman who, through the desirability of her body, reverses the paradigm and exerts control over those around her with masterful manipulation of optics and language. Nana's body inscrutably defies analysis and playfully disrupts gender constructs by assuming contradictory sexual characteristics that are only indirectly observable. Zola shifts his narrative focus from the women themselves to the broader notion of sexual difference in La Bête humaine, in which the female body signifies the difference that drives male desire and destabilizes civilized society. The representability of sex becomes increasingly problematic as female speech, filtered through the body, puts the reliability of language into question. The problematics of the legible body that Zola develops in these texts can be traced all the way back to Thérèse Raquin, in which he conducts a literary investigation into the relationship between bodies and texts. This short novel, Zola's first of the genre, is particularly interested in the different (pro)creative capacities of male and female bodies and the representational possibilities inherent in them.

One of the more pervasive clichés regarding women in late nineteenth-century French literature is the commonplace that treats social spaces as metaphors for the women who inhabit them. An idea inherited from older traditions that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages, this commonplace often appears as a parallel drawn between women and the social spaces (often a garden or other “natural” setting) ascribed to them. Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant both make extensive use of this commonplace. While some recent research, Heidi Brevik-Zender’s book Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in late Nineteenth Century France (2015) for instance, has examined the phenomenon of women and social spaces, thus far the focus has been on Paris and the urban setting. Less work has been done on women and their “natural” spaces. This dissertation examines Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875), where the garden of the Paradou becomes an explicit metaphor for the body of the novel’s central female character, Albine. In Zola, the garden functions as an “other” space that at first appears to underscore woman’s difference from man. Zola, meanwhile, undermines this insistence on difference. Guy de Maupassant, in his short stories Miss Harriet and “Première neige” and in his first novel, Une Vie (all published for the first time in 1883) represents the notions of separate male and female space as entirely illusory constructs that disguise the male domination that obtains nearly everywhere. While Maupassant’s short fiction shows a pessimistic outlook on correcting this “problem,” his novel, Une Vie, proposes a radical solution, based in non-traditional family structures and female homosociality. I conclude this study by looking more broadly at the pervasiveness of the femino-spatial cliché with reference to examples from contemporary culture.

abstract: ABSTRACT Emile Zola is considered one of the fathers of 19th century French Naturalist literature. He is famous for his eloquence, sarcasm and is well known for being a provocateur. He wants to follow the principles of science: observation of his characters in their living environment (or milieu). He holds that individuals inherit physical and personality traits from their ancestors, such as atavism, which can be passed from grandfather to father and father to son. This assumption leads to Social Darwinism and impacted Zola like many other European intellectuals who believed in the new social sciences. Religion was going extinct on the old continent and the trend was to apply these theories to literature and humanities. The author also captures the political and social unrest of a struggling working class in his novel Germinal, where starving miners rebel against the bourgeois class that exploits them. Baldomero Lillo is a Chilean naturalist follower of Emile Zola who found inspiration in Germinal to write Sub Terra-short stories depicting the grim life of the coal miners. The author knows them well since he shared his existence with the miners in Lota, in the southern region of Santiago. Unlike Zola, Lillo, who was less educated and less inclined to trust science, opts for a compassionate Naturalism which relates more to his culture and personal inclinations. Le milieu or el medio ambiente in the Sub Terra stories is dreadful and the author seeks to expose the master/slave relationship in a society that still resembles the European Middle Ages. Le milieu, that is to say the external forces that surround the miners (their geographical, social and political environment), eventually engulfs and condemns them to a life of servitude and misery. Determinism on both continents decides the fate of each member of the society.   / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. French 2012