Munson, Marcella L.

This interdisciplinary dissertation examines Latinx political self-representation across a variety of narrative forms including fiction, nonfiction, film, and social media. Beginning with identifying points of political intersection and divergence within the imagined Latinx voting bloc incorrectly homogenized in mainstream discourse, the dissertation looks at how narrative empathy and political concerns for a singular issue– the child migrant crisis–play out differently across fiction and nonfiction written narratives. The dissertation then takes a turn towards exploring the lack of prominent Latinx political figures in the cultural imaginary, especially Latinas, by looking back to Latin America for exemplary models, and presenting community organizing as seen in recent filmic representation as an alternative form of political engagement. Finally, it focuses on two Latinx political figures–Oscar Zeta Acosta and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–who rose to notoriety half a century apart, yet took similar community insider/political outsider approaches to their historic runs for office. Overall, the dissertation stresses the importance of self-representation as a means of creating and controlling narrative empathy, as well as countering a mainstream narrative of a monolithic Latinx bloc that is both politically unengaged and threatening.

This study examines the representation of women in Emile Zola’s famous series Les Rougon-Macquart. Critics have described Zola’s novels and their presentation of women as misogynist, yet this judgment obscures many of the textual details establishing the female protagonists’ relationships to industrial capitalism and the rapidly changing social landscape in late nineteenth century France. This study reexamines the narrative synthesis between Zola’s naturalist “objective” narrator and his female protagonists. It also highlights one particular pairing that of Adelaide Fouque and her opportunist daughter-in-law, Felicité Puch: Whereas Adelaide, the biological matriarch of the family who figures in each of the twenty novels, does not have an active voice, Felicité as maternal protectrice of the family speaks frankly, even aggressively. Zola uses this pairing to link one generation to the next, a key structural element of his naturalist project. Ultimately, Zola’s representation of women is more complex than might otherwise be understood.

In 1767, Mme Benoist published an epistolary libertine novel entitled Lettres du
Colonel Talbert. Although she has received little critical attention to date, she was a
prolific author who appeared with great regularity at minor literary salons. Her presence
at these salons is well-established in personal memoirs and correspondences, and actively
remarked upon by other authors—men and women—of the period, including Mme
Roland and Choderlos de Laclos. Mme Benoist’s preferred genre was the novel with its
explicit blend of high and low literary cultures, its melding of the philosophical and the
sentimental, its pursuit of formal innovation, and its deliberate marketing in multiple
formats and for multiple audiences, including publication through the mainstream book
market, and serial publication in revues and journals with a large female readership, such
as the Journal des Dames. This study focuses on Lettres du Colonel Talbert (1767) as
both a paradigmatic and privileged text inside Mme Benoist’s larger corpus, and one
which explicitly engages many of the most pressing moral and philosophical debates of the period, including the legal status of women. To do so, Mme Benoist appropriates the
libertine novel as specific novelistic subtype. In Les Lettres du Colonel Talbert, Mme
Benoist parodies the libertine novel and in doing so, converts the libertine textual
economy to one in which well-established narrative codes of femininity and masculinity
are inverted. Although her depiction of the heroine, Hélène—an exceptional and
courageous young woman who resists the predatory advances of a man through sheer
strength of moral character—is not in itself unusual, Mme Benoist’s choice to frame her
heroine’s moral struggle in a narrative epistolary exchange between two diametrically
opposed male “types” in enlightenment thought—the libertine and the honnête homme—
Mme Benoist effectively subverts masculine textual dynamics at the level of plot and
character. More importantly, she also subverts the libertine novel’s traditional
identification with masculine authorship.

At the turn of the twentieth century when French imperialism is on the rise, the writers and naval officers Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen represent otherness in their literary work in different and even antagonistic ways. Loti, who became famous early in his lifetime, depicts exotic lands and his vision of the Other in an impressionist, sentimentalist, and sometimes-ethnocentric way while Segalen proposes to redefine exoticism polluted by colonial discourse. Segalen recognizes the uniqueness of foreign cultures and innovate in giving a voice to the Other. In spite of the differences between the two authors, it has not been emphasized enough their mutual attraction for the past and imaginary civilizations, their opposition to the assimilation of foreign cultures into European culture, and their blindness toward colonial ideology.

If mid-twentieth-century African-American authors based discussions of race in America on the theories of prominent Franco-African writers, African-American writers such as Richard Wright were also highly influential in discussions of race in the French literary context. Wright's novel Native Son focuses on protagonist Bigger Thomas, a young black man who accidentally commits murder. After realizing how the white community has interpreted his act, Bigger tries without success to break free of "double consciousness," or fragmented subjectivity, first articulated by W. E. B. DuBois. Boris Vian's text J'irai cracher sur vos tombes problematizes Wright's literary analysis of race through protagonist Lee Anderson, an explicit literary reworking of Bigger. Lee, in deliberately passing as white in order to murder two women, displays a more deliberate subjectivity. The act of passing erodes the legal foundation of black segregation and highlights a more active subjectivity, yet it also displays the limitations encoded in that act.

The realist authors of nineteenth-century France consistently represent the Jewish woman as the epitome of beauty and intelligence. While glorifying her image, this representation betrays a complex system of social and gender bias. By examining selected works of Balzac, the freres Goncourt, and Maupassant, a nuanced transformation can be traced in the representation of the Jewish woman. As a literary figure negotiating a social system that emphasizes her religious identity, she is celebrated, vilified, and ultimately transformed into a heroine by virtue of her courage rather than her physical attributes.

Daniel Defoe's seminal novel Robinson Crusoe reflects major philosophical currents of the Enlightenment and brings them to bear on diverse issues: scientific advances, new economic models, British colonialization, the relation of the Other to the self. But if Robinson Crusoe presents Friday as Other who fulfills a crucial role by helping Robinson as narrating subject successfully complete the journey of self-knowledge, Michel Tournier's postmodern revision, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique , has a quite different teleological aim. Through constantly shifting narrative and theoretical perspectives Vendredi undertakes a forceful critique of key aspects of the Western tradition which Robinson Crusoe confidently hailed: Lockean and Cartesian reasoning, traditional framing dichotomies central to the Western tradition (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel), modern conceptions of the thinking subject. Vendredi ultimately suggests the inability of the postmodern subject to know itself while simultaneously critiquing those Western traditions whose perspectives are founded on hegemonic globalization.

Many critical studies of Colette, drawing heavily on psychoanalytic theory in order to explicate the biographical particulars of her life which are present in her works, have sought to brand the writer as feminine archetype of the free-spirited and inconstant libertine of the early twentieth century. But while such studies often note the general importance of the theme of love in Colette's works, they have tended to ignore both the larger literary metamorphosis which the theme of love undergoes and its metonymic links to the act of writing itself. Indeed, in Colette's works the letter and the mirror become privileged symbols through which the love felt by the narrator is channeled and ultimately displaced towards the act of writing and self-apprehension. Paradoxically, the act of writing is what enables Colette's narrator to enact her own liberation, it is also the act of writing in which she encounters isolation.