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"Motte, Warren F"
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French fiction today
\"French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present-and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Edmond Jabès on the Margin
Edmond Jabès's writing, a body of work spanning six decades and including some thirty volumes, is an eccentric discourse in the fullest sense of that term. Based upon questioning and dynamism, Jabesian poetics interrogate the nature, the potential, and the limits of the literary act itself. An important element of this process involves an examination of the character of literary space. As Jabès defines the latter, he deploys a curious but very deliberate strategy of displacement: writing, he suggests, should not organize itself around the evermore-problematic notion of the center. Rather, it should recognize the fertile and relatively neglected space of the margin. He argues that the latter offers an unparalleled locus of creative liberty, far from the tyrannical (and finally contradictory) orthodoxies of centrality. Jabès has illustrated this theory of marginality in his own writing, playing it out materially in such works as the seven-volume Livre des questions, the Livre des ressemblances trilogy, and the recent four-volume Livre des limites. The component terms of that theory have consequences in Edmond Jabés's writerly practice.
Journal Article
Cultivating the Earth: Ecocritical Explorations in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature and Film
This dissertation examines the ways in which ecocritical perspectives on the relationship between human communities and the sum of their physical, social, political and cultural environments have been represented in a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone literary and cinematographic works. I study these works with the intention to understand in what ways the concept of cultivation, ranging from farming, to the aesthetically sculpted environments of pleasure gardens, to the agricultural plantations of the colonial past and today, to the conceptualization of the Earth as an infinite source of plenty awaiting global cultivation, are indicative of humanity's changing views and attitudes toward nature and the Other. My dissertation investigates a number of novels and films— Prisons et paradis (1932) by Colette, Au Hazard Balthazar (1966) by Robert Bresson, Un jardin de curé (1979) by Pierre Gascar, Je vois des jardins partout (2012) by Didier Decoin, L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1999) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Sauvage (2001) by Jacques Jouet, Globalia (2005) by Jean-Christophe Rufin and Home (2008) by Ursula Meier—in order to provide a panoramic view of shifting social, cultural and political attitudes toward nature, rurality, aesthetic lanscapes, the Other (as seen in plants, animals and the human subject in the colonial space), but also of themes correlated with globalization, pervasive aspects of technology and science, as well as forms of social disapproval or resistance to certain \"progressive\" mechanisms.
Dissertation
Border Crossings: Mobility in the Contemporary French Novel
This dissertation examines how French novels in the twentieth and twenty-first century depict stories that are marked by (im)mobility and border crossings, leading to a multitude of individual and collective experiences. Several common threads that suggest what it means to cross borders in narratives unite the texts that I have discussed. The novels testify to new, changing experiences, as the world around us evolves in new ways, too. Border crossings and movement in general offer a way to make sense of the lived experience of the present. Moreover, different kinds of border crossings (social, spatial, temporal) tie into general topics like migration, society, hospitality, trauma, and the crisis of the marginalized characters. In this light, I have examined texts of Marie Redonnet, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Marie NDiaye.
Dissertation
Intersections and Crossings: Navigating Boundaries in Immigrant Women's Works in France
In this dissertation, I examine how Josephine Baker, Annie Ernaux, Irène Némirovsky, and Nathalie Sarraute navigate notions of home, nation, and belonging in their lives and works. Chapter One focuses on categories and their formation, how they act as limits that have real effects on those within them. That chapter also centers on the theme of borders and boundaries as limiting, and how physical borders are used (un)officially to restrict access. In Chapter Two, I examine borders as liminal, conditional, transitory, and threshold spaces. I also inspect cases of border crossings and what it means to acknowledge arrival onto the other side of a borderline. Chapter Three investigates the flexibility to cross back and forth across a borderline, which demonstrates the border as permeable for some and not for others. I address changing spaces and immigration: border crossings and arrival into a new place, looking at depictions of arrival and how arrival is ultimately impossible as is returning to the past as it becomes apparent that the border-crosser is recognized by others and by themselves as an outsider. Lastly, in Chapter Four, I focus on issues of belonging in France as a particular location from which all the authors in my project lived, where assimilation is impossible because it falsely moves in a singular direction. In my conclusion, I reexamine each author individually, investigating how they write from the space of the border, establishing their dexterity as border-dwellers. Finally, I demonstrate how each author claims a space for herself in the novel and in France, addressing her agency in her writing.
Dissertation
Raymond Queneau and the Early Oulipo
Founded in 1960, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle can congratulate itself, should that suit its mood, upon forty-five years of uninterrupted activity. Or four and a half thousand years, since the Oulipo habitually counts its decades as millennia.1 Even measured by a more secular calendar, the Oulipo has certainly shattered the record of longevity for literary groups, leaving Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Lettrism, Situationism, and so forth behind like so many sleek but abashed hares bested by the tortoise.
Journal Article
Siting the periphery: Representations of space in the contemporary French Basque novel
This dissertation explores the dynamic but often overlooked peripheral literature of the French Basque Country, examining the different ways in which space is represented in the contemporary novels of that region. In four chapters focusing on physical, literary, linguistic and narratological spaces, my analysis examines on the work of four authors from Bayonne: Itxaro Borda, Marie Darrieussecq, Marie Cosnay, and Xabi Molia. Using a variety of novels by these four authors, I examine some of the diverse approaches they have taken to those spaces in their work. At the same time, however, their work also exhibits certain shared characteristics, such as an emphasis on innovation, the desire to challenge convention and blur boundaries, and an interrogation of concepts like identity and the periphery. All four authors question the need to define and categorize, embracing movement and change and, ultimately, raising some important questions: What is space? What is the periphery? What does it mean to be Basque? Like Borda, Darrieussecq, Cosnay, and Molia, I do not endeavor to provide definitive responses, but rather to examine the ways in which the four authors from Bayonne explore those questions through the representations of space in their dynamic and innovative work.
Dissertation
