French Studies (Theses)

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Foreign language anxiety in the Irish third-level context and the potential of performative pedagogy for learners' of French
(2023-10-23) Clancy, Sarah
Who among us has never been lost in translation at one point or another when learning a language? Given its complex nature, the study of second language (L2) acquisition has become a largely interdisciplinary enterprise and has received considerable critical attention from many different research disciplines including psychology, linguistics, education, and sociology. Research trends across the disciplines have been predominantly centred on the cognitive, linguistic and social dimensions of the language acquisition process. There is, however, an additional affective dimension within the language learning process which, until very recently, has attracted considerably less critical scholarly attention. While engaging with these interrelated dimensions, this study seeks to call attention to and interrogate more closely the impact of emotion on the language learner and, more specifically, on the ever-evolving and complex process of language acquisition. Within this broader focus on the affective dimension of language learning, the investigation specifically concentrates upon foreign language anxiety (FLA), a psychological construct which represents a significant emotional barrier to successful language acquisition. Both theoretical and experimental, this investigation employs a single pre-post intervention case study as a primary methodological tool in order to address two central research aims. Firstly, this study seeks to uncover to what extent final year students of French, in the Irish third-level context, experience FLA, and to explore the principal factors that trigger this reaction in the language learning process. Secondly, it aspires to investigate the potentiality of performative pedagogy, enacted through a theatre praxis, in reducing or alleviating students levels of FLA. At present, Ireland is undergoing a dynamic evolution in its linguistic and educational landscape, which provides the basis for a rich and contemporary case study on language learning. Despite Ireland s evolving relationship with language and language learning, presently, there is a dearth of research and lack of awareness on L2 acquisition that is specific to the Irish context, and perceptions of language learners in the Irish context remain anecdotal. To facilitate and evolve the knowledge required to develop this refined understanding, FLA was chosen as the point de départ for this investigation, as it has never been explored in the Irish context and provides valuable and holistic insight into the various dimensions of the L2 acquisition process. Pre-intervention findings highlighted the influence of empathy, familiarity, understanding, forming dialogic relationships, and self-confidence on FLA levels. The performance intervention, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighted a number of significant ways in which FLA may be alleviated in and through performance, including the development of communicative proficiency, the establishment of empathetic support, the integration of a creative medium to teach language, the removal of uncertainty surrounding the examination process, and the development of a collective sense of accomplishment. Findings also provided additional evidence with respect to transitioning performance from stage to screen and, moreover, the important role it played in alleviating students FLA. While the embodiment of a character provided students with one veil to overcome their communication apprehension, the screen served as another mask that helped them to reach their highest potential.
A Literary translation and critical analysis of Voltaire's "Prix de la justice et de l'humanité" (1777)
(2021-02-19) Clancy, Sarah
On 1 October 1777, the Economic Society of Berne proposed a reform discussion in the Gazette de Berne, that required entrants to ‘compose and write a complete and detailed legislative proposal on criminal matters.’ As a member of the Society, Voltaire composed and submitted his own treatise Prix de la Justice et de l’Humanité (1777), in response to the proposed competition as a gesture of support. Unlike many of his other celebrated works, Prix de la Justice et de l’Humanité was never adequately translated into the English language. However, the following research study has produced a comprehensively annotated literary translation of the first edition of Voltaire’s treatise, including detailed commentaries and an integrated analysis. In order to accurately represent Voltaire’s views about crime and punishment, the following study examined the historical background of Prix de la Justice et de l’Humanité, including its publication and the first edition of the treatise. In addition, Voltaire’s relationship with justice throughout his life as well as his literary style were also examined. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of Prix de la Justice et de l’Humanité is presented, which addresses principal themes in the treatise including corruption, freedom of speech and thought, the death penalty, rationalist thought, and social optimism. Keywords: Criminal theory, legal history, crime and punishment, capital punishment, French enlightenment, criminal law, rationalist thought, social optimism.
Instruire et plaire - l’implication idéologique de la littérature enfantine dans le débat sur l’éducation en France au XIXe siècle
(2021-02-19) Charderon, Hélène
‘To instruct and delight’: ideology and children’s literature in 19th-century France The dialectical tension between instructional and purely recreational, between didactic and imaginative, between socialisation and entertainment, is one that lies at the very heart of literary creation, especially that aimed at a younger readership. In 19th-century France, more than ever, children’s literature becomes invested with a dual mission to both entertain and instruct the young, as the emergence of new education laws creates favourable conditions for an expanding and increasingly diverse readership. Through a comparison of various texts, in terms of the light which they shed on the production of children’s literature across the full range of the period, this thesis sets out to examine the place of ‘education’ and ‘recreation’ within the polyphony of ideological discourses which criss-cross 19th-century educational thought. A corpus of sixteen works has been selected in order to reveal the educational impact of children’s literature in the form of short stories and romans d’apprentissage, and to highlight the extent to which such texts form an integral part of contemporary educational debates. An analysis of their underlying ideological discourse also reveals the potentially subversive nature of the genre.
La fabrique d’un roi: les représentations de Louis XIV pendant son enfance et sa première jeunesse (1638-1661) dans la fiction littéraire en France de la Révolution à Alexandre Dumas
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2016) Bennaili, Anissa
This doctoral thesis proposes a study of fictional representations of the young dauphin and monarch Louis XIV in literary fiction in France from the Revolution to Alexandre Dumas. It specifically examines the portrayal of the future Sun King from his birth in 1638 to the commencement of his personal rule over France, following the death of Cardinal Mazarin on 9th March 1661. The main aim of this work is to understand how, in the French collective imagination, the figure of the dauphin and the young king evolved and was shaped by writers from the Revolution to 1854. This work identifies the various historical sources used by eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights and discusses the networks of influence that can be found within their works of fiction. Furthermore, by comparing successive fictional portraits of Louis as a child, teenager and young man with the historical facts, as established by the most renowned and authoritative seventeenth-century specialists, it sheds light on the aesthetic, political and ideological choices made by authors in the first half of the long nineteenth century.
Du rayonnement a l’eclipse, l’image mediatique et institutionnelle de casimir delavigne (1793-1843)
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2014) Joassin, Marion J.M.
This thesis, entitled « From radiance to eclipse, Casimir Delavigne’s media image », throws light on the career of this now-forgotten author. It completes and continues the research begun with the Colloque « Casimir Delavigne en son temps » (October 2011). It brings to the fore Delavigne’s fame and the impact that his work had on the French public from 1818 to 1843. This study questions the perception of Delavigne and his work by his relatives and contemporary artists, and by the press of his time and of the years following his death. Contemporary newspapers are analysed to illustrate or explain what Delavigne embodied for the French public at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The importance of this poet and playwright called for study given his disappearance from most literary and cultural histories from the twentieth century on. This study will propose hypotheses which will enable us to understand how an author who was so famous could so quickly be forgotten. Chapter 1 analyses the intensity of Delavigne’s radiance and identifies the historical and political context of his time ; Chapter 2 identifies the cultural context of the time of Delavigne in order to situate him as an artist and understand his importance to French and/or European literary heritage. Finally, chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the different types of reception of Delavigne’s work. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to analyse in detail how the work of the artist and criticism interact while also giving us an overall view of the author’s career.
Seeking transcendence: death, rebirth and transformation in the poetry of Renée Vivien (1877-1909)
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2015) Hennessy, Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn in England in 1877, moved to Paris at the age of twenty-one, where she pursued a literary career. Between 1901 and 1909, when she died at the age of thirty-two, Vivien published over thirty volumes of poetry, several short stories, translations of Sappho’s fragments, and a novel. Vivien chose to write exclusively in French, and her proficiency in that language is evidenced in her adherence to the strict conventions of French prosody. She was also a Classics scholar, and her knowledge of Greek facilitated her translation of Sappho into French. Vivien was a familiar member of the lesbian community of Paris, known as ‘Paris Tout Lesbos’. Paris at the turn of the century was known for its relaxed moral attitudes, and lesbianism was fashionable amongst the bohemian and literary circles of the Belle Époque. However, while these circles enjoyed sexual and cultural freedoms, an undercurrent of misogynistic and anti-feminist sentiment prevailed in French society. Such misogyny found expression in the medical discourse of the period and was articulated in literature and the popular press. Vivien’s poetry and prose, influenced by decadent and symbolist writing, challenged and subverted the androcentrism of these genres, confronting their anti-feminist/lesbian bias. Contemporaneous criticism of her work, focused on her image as a doomed and tragic lesbian, infamous for her hedonistic lifestyle, while modern critics pointed to her Decadent influences as an example of the anti-feminist aesthetic at play in her poetics. This thesis however aims through a close analysis of Vivien’s poetry to demonstrate the proto-feminist rhetoric of Vivien’s writing, and through the prism of the themes of death, rebirth and transformation, to reveal Vivien’s quest for transcendence.
Liberté, égalité, sororité : a study of the theatrical works of Olympe de Gouges 1748-1793
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2012) Hennessy, Vivien
Marie Olympe de Gouges was born Marie Gouze in Montauban, France on the seventh of May 1748. Widowed at the age of eighteen, she left her native Montauban accompanied by her young son to pursue a career as a writer in Paris in 1766. Changing her name to Olympe de Gouges, she forged a new identity for herself as a political pamphleteer, social activist, revolutionary sympathiser and playwright. Throughout her time as a writer she courted controversy for her proto-feminist principles and uncompromising advocacy of the cause of the abolitionists. De Gouges is principally remembered for her political and feminist writings, however she wished above all to be considered as a femme de lettres. This thesis involves a detailed study of the complete dramatic works of Olympe de Gouges, and aims to increase awareness of an important area of the playwright’s literary repertoire which is deserving of greater critical attention. Olympe de Gouges was found guilty of ‘pro-royalist’ sentiment by the revolutionaries and was thus executed on the third of November 1793. Altogether it is believed that she wrote around nineteen plays, twelve of which remain for posterity, and it is these plays which are examined in this thesis under the thematic headings of liberté, égalité and sororité.
L’Homme Social selon Emile Zola: une Sociologie par la Littérature.
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2012) Ledent, David
Emile Zola (1840-1902), a nineteenth-century French writer whose name is synonymous with the school of literary naturalism, assembled a substantial corpus of fictional works in which a strong sociological perspective is immediately apparent to many readers. Before he wrote each novel, Zola used to carry out extensive preparatory studies which consisted of both documentary work and fieldwork observations. By taking these studies seriously, Zola aimed to construct his novels on the basis of accurate data, which is why he is often considered as a pioneer of the ethnographic approach. Indeed, Zola defined his own work as a practical sociology since he wanted his literary creation to contribute to the development of modern science. This thesis sets out to analyse the sociology which implicitly informs the Rougon-Macquart series of novels (1871-1893). Not only did Zola develop an ethnographic approach, but he also realized that the growth of modernity could be analysed as a sociological issue and was aware of the stakes involved for society. He displayed an acute sense of the réel and was among the first to formulate certain sociological problems which anticipated the key premises of French sociological thought as later developed by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). Thus we can demonstrate that Zola was instrumental in an intellectual evolution which starts with the French philosopher Auguste Comte and leads via Hippolyte Taine to Emile Durkheim. Zola brought to literature what Durkheim brought to sociology, namely specific methods and concepts for analysing the social world. Working from a perspective of sociological analysis through literary representation, the present study seeks to elucidate fully the implicit sociology discernible in the Rougon-Macquart novels.
A Study of French Suburban Discourse from Sociolinguistic and Literary Perspectives.
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2012) Nash, Ciara
This work seeks to investigate French suburban discourse from both sociolinguistic and literary perspectives. As part of a wider negative discourse pertaining to the banlieue, these areas have come under criticism from some parts of the media, as well as a number of scholars, for being sites of perceived linguistic impoverishment where the French language is being corrupted. This work aims to challenge these perceptions of the linguistic capital of les cités. This will be achieved through the in-depth study of two salient elements of French suburban discourse: verlan and Beur literature. Firstly, it will be shown that verlan is a positive lexical product of the banlieue as it is acts as a unifying linguistic code for the Beur community. It has positive implications for this demographic as it aids in the affirmation of a unique Beur identity. Secondly, a selected corpus of Beur literature will be studied, in order to reveal the literary capital of the banlieue. It will be advanced that this literature is a positive literary product of the French suburbs as it lends a voice to the Beur and wider banlieue community, thereby empowering them. It will be argued thus that the suburbs are domains in which the French language is used as part of a cathartic and creative process by the banlieue community. This work will advance that both verlan and Beur literature are instrumental in transforming the negative aspects of banlieue life into positives using the medium of the French language. Thus, the banlieue can be argued to be a site of much linguistic and creative capital.

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