acase@tulane.edu / Although a significant amount of scholarship has extensively explored Klimt’s depiction of women, little attention has been dedicated to his recurring interest in pregnancy. In light of its relative obscurity in Western art overall, the impetus and meaning behind the pregnant body’s repeated presence throughout Klimt’s oeuvre is worthy of further study. My thesis examines how Gustav Klimt uses depictions of pregnancy as a vehicle to redefine the spiritual, scientific, and psychological divisions of society. In his disillusionment with the so-called progress of modernity under the aegis of masculine leadership, Klimt embraces the feared ‘feminization’ of fin-de-siècle society as a welcome reprieve from the failures of patriarchy. Despite his celebration of femininity, Klimt nonetheless relies heavily on traditional stereotypes of women. In the constantly evolving conversation between art and new paradigms of social order during the nineteenth century, Klimt proposes a feminine utopia wherein ‘Woman’ is the savior of a suffering humanity, with her womb serving as a site of redemption. By referencing divisive social issues, he encourages viewers to question their antiquated values. Klimt positions Woman not only as a spiritual savior and progenitor of the species, but also as a metaphorical site where self-definition and social harmony can be achieved. In chapter one, I discuss Klimt’s conflation of sacred and profane, and spirit and flesh as captured in Hope I and Hope II. Envisioning himself as a spiritual leader, Klimt preaches art as a new religion more suitable for the modern age. In the next chapter, I explore Klimt’s incorporation of scientific theories and imagery as a critique of humankind’s self-appointed place at the top of the animal kingdom. With allusions to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel’s Monism, Klimt locates the woman’s womb as the sole site where primordial unity can be achieved. In the third chapter, I investigate conceptions of individual and collective identity through the lens of nineteenth-century developments in psychology and sociology. Using the pregnant body as a metaphor of ruptured binaries - between self and other, male and female, interior and exterior, conscious and unconscious - Klimt reveals that the similarities humans share overshadow the arbitrary and superficial differences. Klimt turns to the influence of women as intuitors of the biological impulse, bearers of life, and agents of change in an ossified world. Klimt’s utopianism is grounded in the female body as a source of radical change and social transformation. He posits Woman as the savior and source of a renewed hope that will birth a new evolved humanity more attuned to the tenets of femininity in its embrace of the irrational. By juxtaposing the promise of new life with the haunting figure of death, Klimt’s pregnancy paintings symbolize the death of the civilized body and the birth of a liberated self. Klimt positions women as the procreators of a new generation composed of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or perhaps in Klimt’s universe, of Überfrau. / 1 / Nicole Lampl

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La recherche porte sur létude technologique de la polychromie de la sculpture mosane en bois du XIIIe siècle. Elle se base sur lélaboration dun catalogue comportant 82 sculptures dont 26 ont été étudiées en atelier, principalement à lInstitut royal du Patrimoine artistique de Bruxelles (IRPA), ou dans des conditions datelier. Les résultats de la recherche ont été analysés selon un double point de vue : technologique (les matériaux et leur mise en oeuvre) et historique (lanalyse de laspect des sculptures dans leur contexte).

Thèse de doctorat : Histoire : Metz : 1998. / 1998METZ011L. 350 ref.

Thèse de doctorat : HISTOIRE : Metz : 1999. / 1999METZ002L. 267 ref.

Thèse de doctorat : HISTOIRE : Metz : 1996. / 1996METZ008L. 115 ref.

Une analyse des liens franco-allemands dans le secteur de la sidérurgie, des années 1930 au début des années 1950, a été effectuée à partir d'archives publiques et privées, allemandes et françaises. A travers les stratégies privées des grandes entreprises et les politiques publiques des deux États, cette recherche a montré la mise en pratique du processus européen, appliqué à l'échelle sectorielle. Dans les années trente, les sidérurgistes français et allemands avaient contribué à la renaissance de l'Entente internationale de l'acier qui fut une réponse assez efficace à la crise. Le travail en commun qui s'en suivit fut l'occasion de liens qui dépassèrent les simples relations professionnelles car il mettait en contact des personnes issues des mêmes milieux sociaux, pourvues d'une culture européenne commune. La douloureuse période de la guerre ne fut pas une simple parenthèse et certaines relations professionnelles perdurèrent. La sidérurgie française paya un lourd tribut humain, car nombre de ses ouvriers travaillèrent en Allemagne, pour les grands Konzerne. Malgré ces blessures vives, dès 1946, du côté des sidérurgistes français, on envisage déjà la reconstitution d'un cartel européen de l'acier, à moyen terme. Des rencontres officielles entre les professionnels des deux pays ont lieu, à partir de 1948, en particulier dans le cadre de la Chambre de commerce internationale. Mais avec les crédits du plan Marshall et l'occupation alliée en Allemagne, les Américains jouent désormais un rôle majeur. Jean Monnet, partiellement sous cette influence, impose une interdiction totale des ententes et une organisation supranationale, la CECA. Les sidérurgistes des deux pays, par pragmatisme, vont accepter cette nouvelle donne. Les liens construits dans les années trente, les habitudes de travail à l'échelle européenne, permirent à ces industriels d'aborder cette nouvelle organisation sans trop de résistance.

Thèse de doctorat : HISTOIRE : Metz : 1999. / 1999METZ003L. 446 ref.

This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a reexamination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender.

Thèse de doctorat : ETUDES ANGLAISES : Metz : 1997. / 1997METZ003L. 373 ref.