Thesiss

This study examined the beliefs and opinions of U.S university students towards learning foreign languages. Four major areas were explored, including attitudes and motivations towards learning foreign languages, perceptions of foreign languages in the U.S., and favorability of A…

In this dissertation, I explore the texts of several writers from Haiti and Algeria to better understand how people live out their revolutions. I argue that in these two countries, revolution has been a cultural raison d'être since the fight for independence. This research perta…

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, …

My dissertation compares British, German, and French Romantic drama, emphasizing women writers' plays about female combatants in the French Revolution. The term French Revolutionary Theater denotes an extended metaphor for examining the drama of death, war, and political protest…

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…

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…

This dissertation focuses on reactions to the French canon in four Francophone novels. The study examines the use of allusions to, quotations from, and parallels with French canonical works in an effort to determine how these canonical works are mobilized in the creation of a ne…

The subject of my dissertation is cinematic constructions of African immigrant and French identities. I analyze Vivre au Paradis (Bourlem Guerdjou), Soleil Ô (Med Hondo), La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembene), and Mémoires d'immigrés (Yamina Benguigui) from cultural, aesthetic, and pol…

In 1683, in Algiers, soldiers of the Dey loaded the French consul into a large cannon and shot him at the French fleet in retaliation for the French bombardment of the city. Many French consuls in the échelles of the Levant and North Africa suffered harassment, imprisonment, or …

In Algeria, the women situation parallels the language situation. In both cases, the allocation of space and therefore of power has changed resulting in tensions between the sexes and between the language users. Arabization, the language policy aiming at expanding the role of Mo…

The goal of this project is to show the overall function types of meta-discursive markers in language. I discuss marker function types as a process of marking up the context/co-text to signal or mark relations between components in the speech act: the speaker, the hearer, and ut…

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 …

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…

Our study addressed a cognitive issue in a context involving three languages, Arabic, French and English. We examined the decontextualization skills (DS) of 230 Tunisian students aged 16–17 years through their written definitions in L1, L2 and L3. Our objective was to investigat…

This document will undertake a comparison of the urban spaces and the narrative subjects that inhabit them in Maghrebian autobiographical narratives of childhood of the latter half of the twentieth century. The postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha has suggested that one of the m…

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…