“‘My style will become itself a part of my story’: A Study of Generic Innovations in the Life-Writing Narratives of Georges Perec and Camille Laurens,” examines how serial life-writers develop forms of writing that mirror the ways in which they work through trauma. I argue that the life-writing forms employed by these authors are as much a part of their writing project as the content of their narratives. The first chapter presents an overview of life-writing as a genre, with a particular focus on autobiography and autofiction. The second chapter analyzes the structure of Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and seeks to explain why two of its three narratives were conceived as fictions. The third and final chapter investigates the effects of repetition on Laurens’s autofictional corpus, especially the role of repetition in the characters’ understanding of themselves and of patterns of loss in their lives.

This dissertation is to explore the academic efficacy and relevance of two comparatively new technologies, video games and Virtual Reality (VR), how they relate to an older cultural phenomenon, theater, and how a discussion of both topics can result in a better understanding of how to supply students in the classroom with the chance to improve various aspects of their L2 acquisition. Examples of these improved aspects within the field of SLA are more often associated with things like vocabulary and grammar. In fact, this has been an extremely popular direction to go in since games were first brought to language classrooms (vocabulary in particular). Aside from lexical and grammatical gains due to gamification, though, there are other aspects to be improved like students’ sense of identification, their ability to interact with narratives, their various forms of engagement, and their sense of immersion within the classroom space. This dissertation will help to move the discussion of gaming in this other direction. This project aims to provide and detail an alternative to those looking for a technologically and/or theatrically relevant or game-based teaching method to support students’ language learning; Digital Game Based Language Learning (DGBLL), a subfield of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), prizes and plays with various concepts that have come naturally to theater for centuries (e.g., contextualization and verisimilitude), while simultaneously extending a hand toward those who are technologically inclined or interested in incorporating gameful or theatrical tactics in their classroom.

This doctoral dissertation traces the socio-historical roots of the vampire in French culture and literature from the Reign of Terror through the Second Empire. I begin with an exploration of the fear of the undead (in fiction and in real life) by examining the anxiety about the life-death boundary that was brought on by the guillotine’s swift blade during the Terror––eyewitness accounts detail that the blade was so swift that some severed heads continued to exhibit signs of life. From here, in readings of La dame pâle [The Pale Lady] by Alexandre Dumas (1849), La vampire, ou la vierge de Hongrie [The Vampire Woman, or the Virgin from Hungary] by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1825), and Netflix’s 2020 series Les vampires I argue that the vampire characters are rendered through an imperialist lens with traces of racial and orientalist discourse under Napoléon Bonaparte during the First French Empire. I coin the term “vamperialism” to argue that the Empire is also a vampiric entity in its colonialist and expansionist values. In my third chapter, I argue that real-life acts of blood-drinking during the Second French Empire offer a glimpse of the lasting effects of Haussmannization when the slaughterhouses were pushed to the outer rims of Paris and the ways in which violence coincided with class stratification to breed the vampirism. Lastly, I examine Théophile Gautier’s La morte amoureuse [The Dead Woman in Love] (1836) which portrays a female vampire who can be read as a feminist liberator as she is hunted and demonized by the patriarchal powers of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, I argue that for a creature who shows no reflection in a mirror, the vampire becomes society’s mirror and casts a wide reflection by embodying anxieties about the life-death boundary, imperialism and the racial other, the dissolution of class boundaries, and the desire to control women and their sexual liberties.

This dissertation examines clinical and literary representation and performance of hysteria in nineteenth-century France. Engaging with fin-de-siècle prose and poetry, the project analyzes literary performances of hysteria in conjunction with the clinical demonstration of the female hysteric. Focusing on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Rachilde’s La Jongleuse, and Rollinat’s Les Névroses, the chapters interrogate writerly movements, stylistic choices and socio-political themes that emerge from the hysterical framework popularized in a positivist culture by Jean-Martin Charcot. The dissertation begins by situating the curiosity for hysteria in medicine and culture of fin-de-siècle. Drawing on scholarship in the field of hysteria studies and French cultural history, I offer a reading of hysteria as a phenomenon or a performing body in which both the patient and doctor are conjoined by the enigma of the malady. From there, the dissertation turns to critical readings of literary works. Each chapter closely examines Charcot’s diagnostic practices and applies the lineaments of the hysteric stages, i.e., the phases of the malady as organized in his nosography, to discern an aesthetic developed from the clinical representation of hysteria. The first chapter, on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, expands on the recurrence of paralysis in the novel as a thematic and stylistic motif. By drawing connections between Charcot’s demonstration of pathology and Zola’s naturalist writing I substantiate how Thérèse Raquin, while aligning with scientific objectivity of Charcot, goes beyond a superficial exhibition of physiology to expose the sensations of an ailing body. Chapter two probes Charcot’s notion of “clownism,” which is the second stage of hysteria. By analyzing the cultural significance of the clown figure and carnivalesque aesthetics, the chapter draws attention to the performance in the diagnostic practices of clinicians treating female hysterics, and argues that Rachilde’s La Jongleuse challenges performative agency, queer sexuality, and female autonomy. The final chapter turns to the final stage of the hysteric model, called “delirium,” which is placed in dialogue with Rollinat’s Les Névroses. This chapter situates the mode of fantastique in Rollinat’s poetry as also manifest in the clinical narratives of hysterical delirium. Analyzing the mortuary aesthetic in the poems, the chapter argues that both, textual and clinical bodies, portray the liminal paradox of the living-dead.

This dissertation is at the intersections of Black popular culture, French Cultural studies, and Linguistic Anthropology. Primarily, this project focuses on the diffusion of Jamaican dancehall music and culture in Guyane (French Guiana), an Overseas Department and region of France. Dancehall music as a status granting institution (Stanley Niaah 2004) offers Guyanais artists radical politics along racial, gender, sexual, and linguistic lines. Rather than looking to France, Guyanais dancehall audiences and performers, I argue, find an influential source of identification in a trans-Caribbean culture. This phenomenon complicates our understanding of Francophone identity as Guyanais people choose to identify with a regional Black Caribbean identity even as they exist in the Francophone world. More specifically, I draw on semi-structured phone interviews from dancehall enthusiasts in Guyane, a linguistic analysis of code-switching between Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and a study of the embodiment of the "bad gyal" and "rude bwoy" personas to examine how Jamaican dancehall music is creatively appropriated in Guyane.

This dissertation participates in an emerging and exciting discourse on French science fiction. Owing to the well-established relationship between science and science fiction, coupled with our rapidly-increasing reliance on science and technology as the filter through which we think to comprehend the world and our place in it, the excavation of narratives that reflect and participate in that crucial relationship is more important than ever. In this dissertation I analyze three primary science fiction texts across three distinct visual media – Claire Denis’ 2018 film High Life, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius’ 1980s bande dessinée L’Incal, and the recent streaming television series Missions – each of which I read as an aesthetic and narrative representation of a world in collapse. Collapse is a term I use inclusively, to encompass collapses that are external – ecological, economic, political – as well as those that are internal – psychological, emotional, intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual. Despite the (hazy) distinction between outer and inner collapse, I formulate these collapses across narratives as interrelated, where exterior collapse results from, but also perpetuates that which is interior. Ultimately, in my admittedly, but rightfully, pessimistic reading of these texts, collapse comes to be understood as a cyclical process that is perpetually in the works, and which we, as inferred by these science fictions, can never escape. Throughout this study I propose that the science fictions at issue here, and others like them, function as key aesthetic interventions, providing us with accessible platforms from which to confront and to counter the many crises of the contemporary moment. In this aesthetic capacity, I assert that science fiction can help us to grasp the vast complexities of the rapidly shifting paradigms that define reality and that determine just how civilizations function.