Writers have long explored and attempted to portray the visual artists challenge of creating the ideal in the real world through art. My thesis asserts that the Pygmalion myth, originally told in written form in Ovids 8 A.D. Metamorphoses, is the quintessential model to explore the changing, and sometimes problematic, relationships between the artist, the creation, and the creative process. The three main characters in the Pygmalion myth the sculptor, the sculpture, and the divine intervention each appear, albeit in different manifestations, in its later adaptations. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in French literature, authors explored this tripartite relationship in their texts. I claim that the retellings in my corpus attest to a renewed interest in Ovids myth at a time when ideologies and conceptions about the creative process underwent significant changes. Platos conception of the ideal in The Phaedrus and The Republic serves as a grounding for each of my texts. I begin my examination with an exegesis of the Pygmalion poem in Ovids Metamorphoses. Chapter two explores the creation theme at the heart of Pygmalions quest in eighteenth-century theater to indicate the point at which French literature saw a marked increase in Pygmalion adaptations. Here, I introduce LAmante statue (1774) and La Fausse statue (1771) into the Pygmalion corpus. Looking at the ways in which the creator figure attempts to control the potential of the ideal object through destructive means, I turn to nineteenth-century fantastic short stories in Prosper Mérimées La Vénus dIlle (1837) and Balzacs Le Chef-doeuvre inconnu (1831/7). A final chapter reveals how innovations in technology and artifice aid the artist in reconstructing the ideal in two decadent novels: Villierss LEve future (1886) and Rachildes Monsieur Vénus (1884). This dissertation will contribute to nineteenth-century French literary studies and eighteenth-century theater as well. Adding criticism of two eighteenth-century plays to the already significant body of Pygmalion retellings underlines the myths renewed popularity at the time. Each chapter examines these adaptations as part of a greater metamorphosis of the Pygmalion story itself. From creation to destruction to reconstruction, the creator figure adapts - with varied results - to a changing artistic, technological, and cultural environment.

The indigenous Francophone Algerian novel dates from the early 1950s and since then has been a political manifestation of uneasiness. The anticolonial undertones of this literature demonstrate the sufferings and harsh realities of life under an oppressive colonial regime; meanwhile the postcolonial novel continues the representation of this suffering through the residual effects of colonialism and the impact of the bloody decolonization war. This dissertation contributes to the discourse regarding suffering as a result of French colonial oppression in light of François Hollandes official recognition of the trauma of colonialism and the acceptance of the events from 1954-1962 as a war rather than an internal conflict. This dissertation analyzes the power and effects of suffering in the colonial and postcolonial Francophone Algerian novel through violence and poverty, the plagues of colonialism. In doing so, it looks at the role of suffering in this literature and its effects on narration and character development. The themes of violence and poverty plague the colonial novel insomuch that the characters actions become directly tied to their suffering; whether leading to despair or hope, death or revolution. In looking at the role and effects of suffering this dissertation analyzes the works by Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun and Kateb Yacine.

In her 1982 groundbreaking work on the epistolary form in novels, Janet Gurkin Altman gives a working definition of epistolarity which will be a guiding concept for this project; she defines it simply as: the use of the letters formal properties to create meaning (Altman 4). Of course, to create meaning is a complicated endeavor. How does one create meaning from the letters formal properties? The contemporary authors who engage with epistolarity do so on several levels from the thematic to the structural. From novels that have several characters engaging in letter dialogues to one-sided exchanges that bear more resemblance to a diary than to a series of letters to a correspondent, the epistolary genre pushes the boundaries of public and private and creates questions about audience and intent that are not present in other forms. Within the last half century, the epistolary narrative has re-emerged in the works of marginalized authors from various linguistic and national backgrounds. Taking tropes from earlier epistolary texts, these contemporary authors create texts that maintain the intimate feel of earlier novels while also changing the genre to demonstrate their knowledge of trauma, exile, and psychoanalysis, an awareness that has permeated Western consciousness in the twentieth century. In the body of this project, I discuss epistolary novels by three very different authors: Gisèle Pineaus LExil selon Julia, Linda Lês Lettre morte, and Amélie Nothombs Une forme de vie. Despite being from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, these authors share two common interests: the French language and the use of the epistolary form. Additionally, these authors have all had a traumatic experience of diaspora and/or exile that has shaped their development as writers. Using Freudian theories of ego, melancholia, and narcissism, I contend that the self-reflective nature of the epistolary narrative is particularly conducive to exploring the psychological difficulties that result from this traumatic exile. Specifically, in the texts that I examine, writing letters becomes a melancholic act in which the letter writer seeks to reconnect nostalgically with a past that never existed.

Louisianas French revitalization movement has received millions of dollars in taxpayer funding through its various initiatives such as music and cultural festivals, public school French immersion programs, and academic exchange programs, among others. Over forty years ago, the state of Louisiana created CODOFIL, a government agency dedicated to the promotion of Francophone language and culture in Louisiana, yet the number of Francophones in the state has continued to decline at an alarming rate according to the most reliable data available. My study investigates the ideology and demographics of those involved in French education programs in Louisianas public schools. Who decides to become a French teacher and why? What do the administrators in charge of these programs really hope to accomplish and why? Through analyzing the unique corpus of interviews that I have created by speaking with these individuals from around the state, I provide answers to these questions. The people who currently aspire to become French teachers in Louisiana are not deeply rooted in francophone culture through family or upbringing, but they seem to adopt the ideology of the larger French revitalization movement and see themselves within it. The administrators, however, show an opposite profile from both a socio-biographic and ideological perspective. The administrators of immersion schools tend to be Louisiana natives with personal connections to Cajun and Creole culture, but many of them do not speak French and typically find themselves in charge of an immersion program more by accident than design. Yet the administrators and those university students who aspire to teach French share at least one important ideological belief. They both see French immersion schools as an essential part, if not the only essential part of the French revitalization movement.

Over the course of thirty years, the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau created a singular artistic project he called the Orphic trilogy: Le Sang dun poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament dOrphée (1959). This trilogy is marked by an Orphic pattern of a poets journey into an underworld to confront death. I will show that Cocteaus invention is to have Orpheus be in love with death, for death to be an attractive and irresistible force to the poet. Simultaneously, Cocteau avails himself of the Narcissus myth, the man in love with his own reflection. Orpheus and Narcissus converge in these films as a synthesis of Cocteaus personal obsessions, which I will identify in his own life. I will reveal that Cocteaus usage of Narcissus results in a queer aesthetic which courses through the trilogy. Through a close textual and visual analysis of these films, I hope to enrich the appreciation and criticism of this major artistic achievement.

This work classifies and critiques several aspects of Francophone travel narratives in the comics medium according to four parameters. First, this analysis identifies a history of the usage of 'travel' as a theme, as an integral character, and as a narrative construct. Second, this project addresses the history of semiotic approaches to Francophone comics to the present day as well as demonstrates a few semiotic approaches that have had considerable attention and some that critics have not as yet exploited sufficiently. I use the poetic term of 'allusion' in comics travel narratives in the creation of another semiotic layer that has received very little attention by critics. While it is commonly asserted that images in sequence (as seen in comics generally) combine to establish a unified interpretation of a work as a whole, my notion of Allusive Arthrology specifically addresses the potential of comics to engage with previously published works on the textual and visual levels in what may be understood as an extended framework of meaning-generation. Third, I examine authorship, with a particular focus on individual versus multiple authors and how those modes influence subjectivity and authenticity in autobiographical and biographical comics travel narratives. This treatment entails the identification of several mechanisms, namely conversational substitution and anthropomorphism, which influence plausibility, as all representational works possess at least at some level of subjective motivation. Finally, this work addresses the representation of two major characters in autobiographical comics travel narratives - author and landscape. The author typically represents him/herself more than any other character in the autobiographical travel narrative, whereas, generally, landscape holds a subordinate position; nevertheless, landscape plays a major role as both a space and a character. In the final chapter of this project, I examine the representation of author and landscape side-by-side, as well as the representation of landscape as a space and character. I have found in this sub-genre of bande dessinée that there exists a direct correlation in the relationship between landscape usage and the assertion of a political statement.

The Ursulines of New Orleans have been serving their beloved community now for just short of 300 years, ever since they arrived from France in 1727. They brought with them long-standing traditions and values from the Old World and innovated in many ways to adapt to the New. One of these traditions was the sending of circular letters that served as eulogies for their deceased sisters. They maintained this tradition in New Orleans but also developed a unique style, creating a <i>livre des d&#x00E9;c&#x00E9;d&#x00E9;es</i> (or &ldquo;book of the dead&rdquo;) that contains the biographies of the sisters and memorializes them for future generations as models of Ursuline piety and priorities. This thesis describes the eulogistic tradition as it developed in France among the Ursuline order in general and the obituary circular letter tradition in particular, providing a background for the practice as it was implemented in New Orleans. I will show that the letters not only reveal details about the lives of the individual sisters but also insights as to the values and priorities inherited from France and maintained in New Orleans. Then I will demonstrate how these values and priorities were adapted in the face of unique challenges for life and ministry in Louisiana.

The theme of cultural identity is one of the main problematic of francophone literature. Through the years, women writers, especially in Guadeloupe and Martinique, used this theme as the main topic of many of their writings. Characters, especially women narrators, try to understand this notion of cultural identity and its construction in other to make this theme theirs, since cultural identity is at the crossroads of their own story, the history of the Caribbean, and the perception these young women have of themselves. A new generation of writers, born in France of Caribbean families, tries today to offer a new outlook on the construction of the cultural identity. In their books, young female characters do not always succeed in finding self-identity. In such cases the consequences are always tragic to the character in question. With this study we will show the evolution of Afro-Caribbean identity in three generations of female writers. Based on four works, La vie sans fards by Maryse Condé, L'exil selon Julia and Fleur de Barbarie by Gisèle Pineau, and D'eaux douces by Fabienne Kanor, this thesis will answer the following questions: what is the representation of cultural identity in the four books of the corpus, and is it possible for the female narrator in each to be successful in redefining her cultural identity? Having analyzed the instability of the narrative voices, the spatiotemporal frame, and the literary genre of the works, it is the mother who is the main obstacle to the construction of the cultural identity, then to the representation of the body which is going to be developed. This long process is not possible without an appeal to the imagination, by writing or reading, and it is finally in the domain of the imagination that the female narrators life or death will be ultimately decided.

Between 1978 and 1990 five newspapers close to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National had the choice of defining their stand on so-called révisionnisme which in its extreme form denied the existence of the Shoah, considering it to be the fabrication of a Jewish conspiracy. Within révisionnisme, a négationniste discourse affirmed that the gas chambers never existed, while a relativiste discourse denied that the Shoah was an act of genocide. However, most of the extreme-right newspapers did not adopt the cause of révisionnisme, even if they sometimes evinced an indulgence towards it. Only the weekly Rivarol and the militant François Brigneau who worked for Minute, Présent and National Hebdo and wrote the most on the subject openly espoused révisionnisme. The reasons for their stance included neo-fascist views, belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Their stance was in keeping with ideas commonly expressed in French neo-fascist circles that made for a révisionnisme of exculpation. On the other hand, the French Catholic intégriste milieu close to the Front National, which is represented by the newspapers Présent and Aspects de la France, was not generally révisionniste, notwithstanding the occasionnal expressions of relativisme by persons in the schismatic lefebvriste movement or close to Présent. This rejection of révisionnisme by Catholics on the extreme right was conditioned by various factors: the nature of Maurras's nationalisme intégral and anti-Semitism transmitted by I' Action française; the Catholic Church's modified position on the Jews; and the (offensive) atheism of the upholders of révisionnisme. This same révisionnisme extended beyond latter-day Nazi sympathisers. In its French version, it served to unite elements of the extreme right and the extreme left, as witness the role played by La Vieille Taupe, the extreme left group which was (and is) the leading publisher in France of tracts favouring révisionnisme.

This thesis attempts to re-examine the work of Jean-Luc Godard and in particular the claims which have been made for it as the starting-point for a revolutionary cinema. This re-examination involves, firstly, a critical summary of the development of Structuralist thinking, from its origins in linguistics, with Saussure, through to its influence on Marxism, with Althusser. It is this `Structural Marxism' which prepared the ground for a view of Godard as a revolutionary film-maker so its influences on film theory in the decade after 1968 is traced in journals such as Cahiers du Cinéa and Screen and in the work of their editors and contributors. Godard's relationship with such theories was a complex one and some of the cross-breeding is revealed in a brief account of his own ideas about his film-making. More important, however is his practice as a committed `political' film-maker between 1968 and 1972 which is analysed in terms of the responses it makes to the cultural opportunities offered in the period after the revolutionary situation of May 1968. The severe problems revealed by that analysis may be partially resolved in Godard's greatest `political' achievement Tout va bien, but a comparative analysis proves that in earlier `a-political' films such as Vivre sa vie, he was creating more meaningful and perhaps even more revolutionary art, whose formal experimentation is more organically linked to its subject and whose ability to communicate ideas far oustrips the later work. In conclusion some indications are suggested of a more fruitful basis for Marxist theories of art than Structural variants, seeking a non-formalist approach in the work of Marx, of Trotsky, of Brecht and Luk`acs.