This study reveals how Enlightenment writers use exotic encounters, real and imagined, as a stage for criticizing their home culture and for examining the limitations on their ability—through literature—to step outside of that home culture. If self-critique is the ultimate goal …
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The central assumption of this study is that the awareness of a historically constructed, culturally sanctioned condition of subalternity is at the heart of the fictional production of Francophone African women writers. Subalternity here is viewed as a narrative and spatial cont…
Liberal political theorists often attempt to claim that a set of universal ideals can ensure equal agency and freedom for all. This paper makes use of the case study of the French approach to Muslim headscarves as a case study for exploring the limitations of this philosophy. In…
The concept of the author has changed over time, along with the forms of media that have been used to circulate texts. In my dissertation, I examine assumptions about writers with roots on the African continent by looking at representations of their status and function as author…
Sounding the Text proposes a methodology called sounding, an interpretative gesture of listening for sounds and measuring silences in cultural texts in a way that articulates an ethics of committed listening. Sounding counters the silencing of marginalized Francophone voices wit…
This study investigates language use, language acquisition, and identity construction among Senegalese immigrants in Paris and Rome. Whereas previous research in second language acquisition (SLA) has focused on the relationship between identity and language use in single sites, …
Since independence in 1962, Algeria has exhibited a strong desire for two goals: (1) to search for cultural identity through Arabization and Islamic traditional values; and (2) to modernize through industrialization and Western technology. In the process of achieving these goals…
This dissertation analyzes the failed assassination attempts against King Louis-Philippe of the July Monarchy and Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire to understand the contentious political culture of mid-nineteenth-century France. It is divided into three parts: the repre…
This thesis investigates the role of the jaw in the articulation of Arabic, French, and Korean consonants. Using jaw position data, it tests two recently developed theories of the relationship between phonological and phonetic representations: Keating's Window model and Browman …
This thesis focuses upon the representation of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Cossacks in nineteenth-century French culture. It examines how different representations motivated by either aesthetic or ideological questions informed French readers about the existence of Ukraine and its…
Historical linguistics has no generally accepted methodology for statistically estimating whether the connections it documents between languages are coincidental or statistically significant (likely to reflect historical realities). Currently the best proposals are very suscepti…
After 1900, French psychiatrists honed their discipline's cutting edge in the Maghreb, not in Paris. When German psychiatric innovations overshadowed French accomplishments, French doctors saw the colonies as an experimental space for rejuvenating their profession. Unlike metrop…
The aim of this dissertation is to examine the development of the system of art education in Morocco during the French colonial Protectorate, 1912–1956. In this context, I will also explore the hypothesis that France, in its position as a ruling colonial power, used state sponso…
Understanding the artist Georges Rouault as a prophet for his time and place may provide a crucial key to the interpretation and valuation of his work, and its method of presentation. Prior studies have carefully analyzed his plastic technique, development of style and iconograp…
Conversion, a ubiquitous theme in medieval literature, is a fundamental element of saints' lives. This dissertation defines conversion as a physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation of the individual; it also explores how conversion reflects influential movements of coll…
This study analyzes the role literary works have played in the elaboration of French national identity and—in the age of globalization—questions how contact between nations occurs. National identity is embedded in a transnational identity upon which it depends, and it is precise…
The global expansion of France during the nineteenth century is one of the most significant phenomena in modern French history. It was animated by an official creed, referred to as the “mission civilisatrice ” or “mission to civilize,” that established boundaries for what the Fr…
Starting from the basis that identity, individual or communal, is a narrative construct, the following study attempts to uncover the ways in which Jewish, Beur, and Antillean narrative is informing French national identity. Identity construction involves the positioning of bound…
Exile is a prominent subject in many recent texts by Jewish women writers in several languages. Comparative analysis of the role of exile in two such texts, the Mexican Sabina Berman's La bobe (1990) in Spanish and the Tunisian Chochana Boukhobza's Un ete a Jerusalem (1986) in F…