This dissertation brings to light a poetics of space in postwar texts and films that represent the aftermath of historical trauma. I show that the spatial poetics of confinement, deportation, and diaspora in works by Charlotte Delbo, Marguerite Duras, and Albert Camus highlight the unsettling but unavoidable continuity between sites of atrocity and the everyday world. Instead of depicting the concentration camp as an enclosed and impenetrable site of extreme violence – one that must be remembered, while sealed away in both time and space – these works insist on the connections between everyday life and catastrophic violence. This focus on space enriches the critical discussion of traumatic memory, which has predominantly evaluated trauma as a temporal disruption of the psyche. By reading works of literature and film through the lens of space, I show that the ongoing political urgency of this traumatic history was envisioned as the proximity between concentration camps and the pacified, quotidian world. Across texts that range from testimony (Delbo) to fiction (Camus) and experimental film (Duras), the concentration camp comes into direct contact with urban and domestic spaces. As a result, these works radically dismantle the perceived boundaries of the camp, emphasizing its capacity – as site, system, and figure – to contaminate even the most familiar spaces of the everyday, such as the city street, the railway station, or the home.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962) were two contemporary Francophone Algerian authors whose works display a vital attachment to their lived experience in colonial Algeria. The Algerian War of independence (1954–1962), moreover, is a crucial event in their development both as writers and as politically engaged public figures. Whereas the lived experience of a poor childhood in Algeria informs their autobiographical novels — Camus’s Le Premier Homme (1994) and Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (1950) — the Algerian War informed their modes of political engagement, particularly with regard to violence.

Between History and Fiction investigates the various ways in which Algeria figures in the works of Camus and Feraoun. Their autobiographical novels are analyzed with respect to existing theories on the genre of autobiography in an effort to show how the genre itself is modified in order to conform to the social, cultural, and historical circumstances of their autobiographers. This is particularly relevant in my first chapter’s analysis of Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre, which defies the Rousseauian autobiographical model and invites a reading that ascribes it a more collective than particular dimension. By recording the life of any Kabyle of his generation as much as his own, Feraoun’s autobiographical novel helps to construct a fuller portrait of the Algerian communities in the first half of the 20th century and thus becomes historiographically important.

In my second chapter, my reading of Camus’s autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme, shows that the author challenges contemporaneous views of Algeria as a nation. Instead, Camus proposes a new understanding of Algeria, which I qualify as a patrie, and which I elaborate in terms of different forms of memory, of forgetting, and of a call to create a foundational moment for a new Algeria in the present instead of searching for one in its past history. Following this reading of Le Premier Homme is a discussion of Camus’s role as a politically committed writer, an écrivain engagé. Beginning with the distinction between Camus’s form of engagement and that of his contemporaries, I challenge the widespread notion among critics that Camus was ultimately pro-colonialist for not standing up for Algerian independence. Instead, I defend his position as more closely aligned with the long tradition of the écrivain engagé, with his adamant opposition to indiscriminate violence, and with a different understanding of history.

In my third chapter, I look at Mouloud Feraoun’s work as a form of littérature engagée. I begin by arguing that his novels perform a memorializing gesture by engaging characters, events, and forces in ways that record both the static and dynamic aspects of Kabyle society in colonial Algeria. I subsequently show that his work as an écrivain engagé culminates in the work he did in his Journal (1955–1962), where he records the events of the Algerian War for most of its duration. I read the Journal as a form of engagement by virtue of the way in which it bears witness to events that escape immediate understanding. By looking at Feraoun’s unrelenting opposition to violence, I also relate his form of engagement with the tradition of the écrivain engagé. Here, I bring back Albert Camus’s position as a way to show that the two men see eye-to-eye on numerous historical and ethical questions, especially where Algeria is concerned.

Although this affinity between Albert Camus and Mouloud Feraoun is made more explicit in this last section, this entire dissertation is an attempt to (re)create and maintain a dialogue between these two figures. Taken together, their works complement the official history of Algeria and, furthermore, offer new avenues and paradigms toward understanding its cultural and political complexity from its independence in 1962 to the present.

By bringing to light the importance of the body and feminine expressive agency in the writing of Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, this dissertation makes a case for dance as a key locus of modernity in nineteenth century French literary history. Each of these poets was challenged by the question of how to represent the dancer as an embodied being. My study works through the entanglement of images, figures of speech and fantasies centering on dance in these poets’ works, through which each of these writers confronts and responds to changing aspects of the modern world. In particular, I am interested in moments in which the dancer is neither idealized nor denigrated, but rather a powerful symbol of movement, agency and embodiment. How does the autonomy and resistance of the female dancing body inspire the poetics of these writers? In addition, how can a critical emphasis on feminine artistry and agency through the figure of the dancer help us better understand these male authors’ relationship to gender and femininity? I will propose that these authors’ writings were not purely misogynistic and dismissive of the feminine; rather, each was forced to grapple with the dancer’s autonomy and individuality. Finally, this study seeks to reaffirm the importance of each author’s interest in the body and bodily experience, challenging a literary history that has often characterized the poetics of these writers as disembodied and disengaged.

In contrast to traditional readings of his work, I argue that Zola stages the mediation of sensory data in the urban metropolis and in his own writing in order to curate different modes of spectatorship that can navigate the disruptive, dissociative effects of modernity. This differs from the conventional discourse of theorists such as Simmel and Benjamin who consider the 19th century – with its industrialization, technological innovation, and rapid urban expansion – an era of fragmentation and overstimulation. Recent scholarship reinforces this position and places focus 1) on the visual, and not other senses, and 2) on the writer’s supposedly negative representation of social entropy.

I begin with the cultivation and adaptation of touch in Au Bonheur des Dames. How do literature and capitalist enterprise reformat human information processing? Following Benjamin’s dictum that “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training,” I consider the grand magasin, and Zola’s fictional version of one, as a site of haptic training. Examining the shopper’s contact with fabrics, I argue that the department store fosters an empowering form of calculation along with phantasmagorical experience. Next, I turn to sensorial mismatching and fantastical descriptions of produce in Le Ventre de Paris to illustrate that Zola’s naturalism joins together scientific discourses and aesthetic trends of his era. His use of synaesthesia, I argue, is just as much a fruitful conversation with Baudelaire’s poetics as it is a serious dialogue with psychologists, such as Helmholtz, who are trying to map out perceptual incongruities. Zola’s focus on distorted perception provides not only an artistic education of the senses, but also a kind of “cognitive architecture” meant to simulate the processes through which sensory input is received and (dis)ordered by the brain.

Finally, I read La Curée as an enactment of modernity’s proliferation of copies. I step through a scientific treatise (Duchenne) and a theatrical debate (over a production of Phèdre) that provide theories on how to accurately duplicate “human expression” across media. I show that Zola’s tableaux vivants and his embedded Phèdre scene are not meant to produce, or suggest higher fidelity; instead, his copies of copies depict perceptual practices encouraged by different, competing media. By depicting various modes of attention within his narratives, and by explicitly showing how sensory data is mediated (and manipulated) in various media, the author ultimately experiments with reader awareness and participation. If we can consider this perceptual reformatting as entailing knowledge sets and adaptive tools, then we can begin to rethink the notions of dissociation and loss in modernity.

My dissertation, "The Gospel According to Zola: National Identity and Naturalist Utopia in Fin-de-Siècle France" is a sustained interdisciplinary investigation of Emile Zola's Quatre Evangiles (1899-1903). These novels are an allegory of the French Republic of the future in which the heroic Froment family cures social diseases such as depopulation, agricultural stagnation, recession, anti-Semitism, as well as class and sexual inequality.

Although critics have tended to dismiss this series as marginal status to the Zola canon, I show how the study of these works should cause us to rethink our usual approaches to the whole of Zola's oeuvre. These late novels mark a radical shift from Naturalism's critical dissection of the Second Empire to a positivist Republican utopianism. My study complicates the picture we have of Zola's social and political commitments by historicizing how we came to understand republicanism as a progressive, pluralistic, inclusive politics. I show that, unlike his earlier works, the Evangiles envision active caretaking roles for men and advocate women's equal educational and professional opportunities through original archival research on the critical reception of these novels by feminist journalists.

My analysis also suggests that these works epitomize a vision of government devoted to what Foucault calls biopower, where the state's function is to "faire vivre et de laisser mourir" by resolving social conflict through the intermarriage of people of socially adverse backgrounds. The Froments' biopolitical regulation of the family and education provides certain benefits for women and workers, nevertheless, the eugenic program they enact ultimately disallows for social, cultural and racial diversity. The Evangiles' homogenization of religious, racial and class identity in continental and colonial France gives voice to an aggressive strain of imperialism supported by republican universalism. The study of the Quatre Evangiles enriches our understanding of Zola in ways overlooked by standard accounts of the intellectuel engagé by situating his literary interventions within fin-de-siècle reform discourses and ongoing debates on universalism, ethnic and religious specificity, and assimilation in the French Republic. My dissertation recovers Zola's forgotten corpus as an important foundational fiction in French literary and historical canons.

Queer Idiosyncrasies: Description and Deviance in the Novels of Zola and Huysmans proposes to complicate literary-historical narratives about the relationship between French naturalism and decadence using analytical approaches informed by sex and gender studies and queer theory. In particular, it examines the ways in which these writers’ penchant for literary description and cultural moralism leads to new and surprising expressions of non-normative genders and sexualities that are at odds with their aesthetic projects. Their novels are revealed as intertexts—responding and adapting to one another—whose forms, styles, and themes are mutually shaped over the course of their authorial careers.

The first chapter consists of a comparative study of Zola’s La curée and Huysmans’s Marthe, histoire d’une fille. Here, I contend that La curée’s heterotopic style manifests early naturalism’s anxieties concerning the conjugal deviance and androgyny of modern France, and that Marthe’s poetics of placelessness prefigures decadent tropes even in Huysmans’s naturalist phase. In the following chapter, I argue that Zola’s anti-clerical novel La faute de l’abbé Mouret, in attempting to write a scientifically informed version of Genesis, unwittingly models a radical type of gender parity based on friendship. I then frame Huysmans’s En rade as a decadent parody of La faute in which sterility and auto-eroticism are inextricably bound up with decadent autoreferentiality. Chapter three turns to Huysmans and Zola’s late works—Là-bas and Paris respectively—to show how their individual polemics against modernity and modernism offer visions of liberated womanhood and subversive homosexuality. Finally, in the short coda that follows, I perform close readings of a third author’s work, La Marquise de Sade by Rachilde, to affirm both the possibilities and the limits of my own methodology, and to recast Rachilde’s relationship to naturalism and decadence.

"Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State" addresses the way the Algerian civil war has been portrayed in 1990s novelistic literature. In the words of one literary critic, "The Algerian war has been, in a sense, one big murder mystery." This may be true, but literary accounts portray the "mystery" of the civil war--and propose to solve it--in sharply divergent ways. The primary aim of this study is to examine how three of the most celebrated 1990s novels depict--organize, analyze, interpret, and "solve"--the civil war. I analyze and interpret these novels--by Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal--through a deep contextualization, both in terms of Algerian history and in the novels' contemporary setting. This is particularly important in this case, since the civil war is so contested, and is poorly understood. Using the novels' thematic content as a cue for deeper understanding, I engage through them and with them a number of elements crucial to understanding the civil war: Algeria's troubled nationalist legacy; its stagnant one-party regime; a fear, distrust, and poor understanding of the Islamist movement and the insurgency that erupted in 1992; and the unending, horrifically bloody violence that piled on throughout the 1990s. Alternating close readings with deep contextualization, I examine how the novels conceptualize the civil war within Algerian history, then propose a reading of the novels themselves by drawing out their positions in relation to each other and to the civil war.

After a general presentation in the first chapter, Chapter 2 offers a reading of Boualem Sansal's Le serment des barbares, a novel that presents the larger themes of the dissertation: the distortion of public memory; the difficulty in narrating the civil war; the mythification of history; and the role of the state in contributing to violence in Algerian society. Chapter 3 follows the paths proposed in Sansal's novel by considering the novel's claim that the popular understanding of the war of independence is largely a myth, and that insidious but important episodes of that struggle were deleted from history. Chapter 4 examines the treatment of the civil war in Yasmina Khadra's Les agneaux du Seigneur, an enormous commercial success that frames the civil war as a noir genre fiction of terror and crime in a village outside Algiers. Chapter 5 examines the discourse used to discuss the civil war, and focuses specifically on the rhetoric of state discourse. Chapter 6 reviews the basic political context of the civil war and what is known about the violence itself. Chapter 7 examines the role of political Islam in Algeria, since this is a crucial element of the civil war and its treatment in the novels. Chapter 8 considers the civil war in the depiction of Assia Djebar's Le blanc de l'Algérie and synthesizes the dissertation's major themes.