The idea for Day for Night came to Francois Truffaut when he became "intrigued by the remains of a huge exterior set that had been erected several years earlier for an American production of Jean ...Giraudoux's stage play, The Madwoman of Chaillot, which deals with self-delusion and self-aggrandizement. He extrapolated from these scenic remains particular sites as scenic semes or signifiers. Here, Golub explores these "scenic remains" from Truffaut's movie.
Simone DeBeauvoir's She Came to Stay, Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game examine the problem that monogamy poses for the female in mid-twentieth-century ...France. Bove discusses Julia Kristeva's theory in examining the gendered patterns of opposition within the female protagonist in the works DeBeauvoir, Renoir, and Truffaut.
Heathcote examines violence in Honore de Balzac's "Les Marana" (1832-33) and Francois Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" (1962). An appraisal of these two works may show to what extent and to what effect ...violence can be gendered as male or female. Heathcote suggests that above all, the violence of women in Balzac and Truffaut shows that the 130 years that separate them have made little difference to the representation of gendered violence. In both Balzac and Truffaut seemingly empowered women are, paradoxically, indeed "screen women."
The Celebrity Hein, Catherine L
01/2006
Dissertation
The Celebrity is intended to be Part One of a five-part novel. Written out of a desire to heal my spirit of a great loss, it concerns the world of a seasoned television hostess in the early 1960's. ...Through its writing, I refamiliarized myself with the glamorous Los Angeles of that era. I enjoyed detailing the capricious twists of fate which typically inform both the rise and fall of success in the television industry. The central character, Wanda Fleming, is based on a composite of different personalities, including my own. My research built a stable historical foundation for her story. I freely explored various possibilities for her character, who by nature is quite contentedly neurotic. She becomes even more so as pressure builds in her career and personal life. My hope is that readers will look forward to Part Two.
The son of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the focus of numerous works of mid-century auteur theory, Jean Renoir continues to be a quintessentially French director for many scholars. When ...discussing Renoir's films, prevailing critical trends tend to elliptically link his politically oriented 1930s French films to his internationally produced nostalgic works of the 1950s despite Renoir's American citizenship and decision to remain a resident of Beverly Hills. As such, Renoir and his films are often used to study nation and nationalism, the popular front, social cinema and/or republican ideals in France. Yet such perspectives largely deny the significance of Renoir's 1940s Hollywood oeuvre. My dissertation uses a combination of research in the Jean Renoir archives, film theory and cultural studies to reread the production circumstances of Renoir's five Hollywood films of the era as evidence of his dynamic negotiation of two cultures. I examine his expanding connections to a network of expatriates, writers, actors and studios, some of which predate his emigration. Renoir's affinity for literature, both French and American, merits further attention as a vital creative bridge between cultures during his Hollywood career. The progression of these adaptive mechanisms in specific film projects makes the case for Renoir's French-based influences coexist with and comprise a central role in his American experience and vice versa. The systematic exploration of "Franco-American" identity in the American films asks broader questions of how and why blended cultural identities are denied in favor of positioning Renoir's work as belonging to only one side of a French/American binary. Renoir's navigation of Hollywood ultimately anticipates the fraught nature of cultural exchange within the increasingly global postwar landscape.
My dissertation shows how Saer's dialogue with five writers associated with the nouveau roman—the source of some of the most dynamic and provocative experiments with the novel taking place in Paris ...during Saer's time there—functions as a laboratory and generative site of ideas that make their way into his criticism and fiction. While other readings of his work locate him in an Argentinian context, my approach breaks new ground by situating him in a comparative framework. After considering some of the basic theoretical points of convergence between Saer's writing and the nouveau roman, in the second chapter I study the relationship between Saer and the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou according to the question of representation and the critique of Grillet and Jean Ricardou according to the question of representation and the critique of humanism. In the third chapter, I explore the connections between Saer and Nathalie Sarraute, paying careful attention to Saer's translation of Sarraute's Tropisms, which provides a window onto his creative process. Finally, I examine the contrast between Saer and Michel Butor with regard to the question of realism, and the link between Saer, Claude Simon and William Faulkner with respect to the creation of a unified literary world set in a marginalized rural locale. Whereas previous studies of post-Boom writers emphasize how they collapse the boundary between high and popular culture, my reading of Saer highlights his rigorous work with language and attention to place. This interpretation calls into question the dominant categories for reading Latin American writers in Europe and North America.
...curious mediation of linguistic and cultural transmission, the examples of psychoanalytic institutes and associations, of psychoanalytic identity-politics, have provided efficacious models and ...programs for intellectual groups, with international, not to say global aspirations, that would not (or could not) follow a fully explicit revolutionary political model. ...Global Freud" alludes to the evident "world-historical" procession of psychoanalysis, in tandem with Modernist culture, pursuing a particularly identifiable course, which goes from the Continent to England and North America, and then moves on to South America, and from there, virtually, everywhere nowadays, a presumed progress of psychoanalysis that is to a certain degree reflected by the contributions to the issue and the contributors, alike. ...by modernity, I mean the economic, technological, and administrative developments of global capitalism, from the Age of the Wars of Imperialism (beginning in 1870 and ending in the aftermath of World War II in 1945), then throughout the Cold War, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the End of History ideology of the transnational corporation in the period since 1989. ...as the German Freud scholars have begun to demonstrate in their studies of his notes, manuscripts, and textual revisions, the real Freud has yet to be made completely and effectively available, especially to an English-language readership.
