How does a woman writer memorialize her own traumatic history, when it happens to be part of a larger History dominated by male narratives (as far as Holocaust and slavery go), or when it is altogether silenced (as is the case for madness and institutionalization)? This work applies interdisciplinary memory studies to the gendering of trauma in eight contemporary historical and (auto) fictional narratives. The common point among these authors lies in their suffering from a triple alienation: as women, as dominated subjects in history, and as writers kept at the margins of the literary canons.

Following Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory," which demonstrates how marginalized collective memories interact productively instead of competing with one another, this study reads in conversation Black women writing about slavery (Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison), Jewish and non-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust (Charlotte Delbo, Sarah Kofman, and Cécile Wajsbrot), and (formerly) mad women writing about madness (Leonora Carrington, Emma Santos, and Unica Zürn). So far, the commonality between women's writings of slavery and of the Holocaust has barely been touched upon in French and Francophone literature, and their potential kinship with texts by mad women has not been studied at all. They resort to a set of shared tropes, in order to reclaim their stories: ghosts, metaphorical and historical infanticidal mothers, distorted lineages, and rewritten fairy tales and myths, which are used - albeit in different ways - by all of them, so as to debunk myths held by male narratives about "femininity."

Thus, in the process of re-appropriating the traumatic history they have inherited, or experienced first-hand, these writers blur gender boundaries by deconstructing the notion of "motherhood." If multidirectional memory emphasizes trauma as a link between cultures, it can thereby be furthered by being applied to gender studies, and extended to a realm of literature located outside of history, and yet, anchored in it: the writing of madness. A close study of how the memory of the traumatic past becomes literature in eight texts serves to emphasize how the circulation of recurring tropes among narratives dealing with different time periods and different types of traumas creates a resonance among these writers, allowing them to reclaim agency and giving rise to a transnational literary voice of the gendering of trauma. Ultimately, this project's aim is to create a multidirectional feminist trauma theory.

Current conceptions of queer poetry focus solely on poetry written by a queer poet or poetry written about a queer subject-matter. Consequently, they rely on primarily biographical and thematic readings of poetic texts. In this dissertation, I argue that a poem’s queerness does not derive solely from the queer identity of its author or the queer nature of its thematic content, and I call for a critical approach to queer poetry that supplements its conventionally biographical and thematic readings with more literary and theoretical readings. In order to rethink current conceptions of queer poetry, I examine the nature of both queerness and poetry, and I explore the ways in which the two intersect. I situate this exploration in the French literary tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a context marked by three cultural phenomena of particular interest – a revitalization of the lyric tradition, a burgeoning interest in non-normative sexual and gender identities, and the emergence of modernit� in the artistic domain. An examination of these intersecting phenomena provides a framework for exploring the intricate relation between poetry and queerness. On a discursive level, I demonstrate that the French lyric tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is shaped by, and shapes in return, expressions and conceptions of queerness. And on a more theoretical level, I develop the notion of “literary queering” to demonstrate how a poem’s queerness can also result from its subversion or transgression of literary conventions such as the structure of the love lyric paradigm, the nature of versification, and the relation between text and page. As a result, I show that the literary field of queer poetry is in fact much larger and more diverse than we currently assume, and that a more comprehensive critical approach to queer poetry involves novel applications for both poetic theory and queer theory.

Stendhal's conception of le naturel has long been defined in opposition to the theater: for the narrators and the authentic heroes and heroines of his fiction, there is nothing so vile as the histrionic personality who does not live life so much as perform it. But while most critics have interpreted the theatricality of Stendhal's fictional characters and that of his own authorial performance as an accidental lapse into the sort of hypocrisy he spends his oeuvre simultaneously denouncing, this dissertation argues that his naturalism was not an inadvertent "comédie de sincérité," as Valéry suggested, but rather a carefully constructed "Theater of Authenticity." This theater comprises three performances of authenticity: the social, the private, and the written. To each performance corresponds one part of the Stendhalian self, which simultaneously inhabits three roles: actor, spectator, and narrator. Before these performances were staged in his novels and short stories, they were both rehearsed and intellectually scrutinized in Stendhal's para-fictional writings--his "nonfiction," autobiographies, and private journals. I contend that these genres should be read as an atelier du roman--the literary space in which Stendhal worked out the règles du Je of the authentic self, and how these rules are most authentically transformed into literature. Unearthing this process of intellectualization dispels many Shibboleths of Stendhal's naturalism as well as of the concept of authenticity itself--namely, that both are predicated on the suspension of rational, analytical faculties in order to liberate the raw passion required to fuel spontaneity and improvisation. While authenticity has been understood to be a problem of modern subjectivity, I argue that it is first and foremost a crisis of literacy: a problem of self-consciousness in the relationship between subject and language, which may be traced back to the invention of the phonetic alphabet in Ancient Greece. This self-consciousness is a narcissism of the word rather than of the image, and the source of Stendhal's anxiety of authenticity is his fear of indulging in what he famously called "cette effroyable quantité de Je et de Moi." As such, Stendhal's para-fiction should also be read as an atelier du romancier, for they provide a narrative to the author's overcoming of this anxiety: after decoding the rules of authenticity, Beyle himself had to perform them in order to become Stendhal, the novelist.

At the start of the “post-truth” era, women writers in post-colonial France and post-Soviet Russia were searching for a strategy to respond to the crises of authority and authenticity unfolding around them. Linda L�, Gis�le Pineau, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Anna Starobinets exploit the ambiguity of literary madness to destabilize traditional sites of knowledge and work towards new conceptions of truth. All four women’s works have traditionally been approached as narratives of trauma, detailing the ravages of mental illness or cultural upheaval. This dissertation argues that they instead work to expose the irreconcilability of medical, sociological, and spiritual authorities, forcing readers to constantly question who (if anyone) can be considered trustworthy and which (if any) perspective can be declared reliable. The texts provide fictional reference points, like intertextual allusions and meta-literary framing, as the surest way for readers to anchor their assumptions. Linda L�’s autofictional text Calomnies and Gis�le Pineau’s autobiographical novel Chair Piment depict a Francophone world wracked with social fractures in the wake of decolonization and economic crisis: amidst the splintering chaos, literature acts as a tenuous web holding contradictory discourses in suspension. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s novella Vremia Noch’ and Anna Starobinets’ novella Perekhodnyi vozrast instead depict literature as a veil cast over the hollowed-out remnants of authority after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, each of these women’s works rejects any assumed conflation between knowledge and truth, and by extension an unquestioned relationship between authority and authenticity. In the wake of its successful dismantling of these sites, mad literature serves as a surprisingly promising step towards truth, rather than an obstacle to reaching it. Drawing on French philosopher Alain Badiou’s conception of the void as no-thing, I argue that madness in Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s oeuvre both models Badiouan subjectivization and encourages readers to approach truth as an axiomatic intervention. Utilizing Russian existentialist Lev Shestov’s work, I then approach Gis�le Pineau’s continuous engagement with despair and insanity as a way to reintroduce singularity and contingency to reader consciousness, pitting them against the constrictive forces of necessity. Both Petrushevskaya and Pineau tackle madness as something to be passed through via literature; L� and Starobinets, by contrast, follow philosopher Gilles Deleuze in their encouragement of endless engagement with dis-order. Linda L� draws on Russian muse Marina Tsvetaeva in her search for adequate truths, transforming autofiction into a schizo-analytic process. Anna Starobinets instead draws on Franz Kafka to trace contemporary obstacles to true Deleuzian creation, illustrating the infinite potentialities of meaning. In all four cases, mad literature is a crucial tool for producing truths that come before or outside frameworks of knowledge — its authenticity not yet, and perhaps never, authorized.

“Nostalgia film,” also referred to as “colonial nostalgia film” and “heritage film,” is a genre that offers audiences a romanticized representation of the French past, including (problematically) its legacy of colonialism. My dissertation, oriented around four case studies – of Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Điện Biên Phủ, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s L’Amant, and Trần Anh Hùng’s L’Odeur de la papaye verte – interrogates the relationship between sound, music, and “nostalgia” in this specific body of early 1990s French films set in colonial-era Vietnam. It offers a sustained critique of the relationship between the mise-en-bande and the narrative and representational frameworks of these films. It also considers the impact of this relationship in subsequent films, such as Trần’s Cyclo (1995) and Việt Linh’s Mê Thảo, thời vang bóng (2002).

The colonial conquests of the European nation-state and the ascendance of science and technology within European society characterize the modern era. Among those French writers who ventured into the non-European world, Eugène Fromentin, Victor Segalen, André Gide, and Michel Leiris saw how a politics of representation inheres in the literary task of describing the world peoples. In questioning the limits of their worldview and their aesthetic training, as well as the limits of European knowledge, these writers begin to articulate new forms of literary description. In their works, description emerges as a multi-tiered forum of representation in which epistemological and aesthetic thinking conditioned by an ethical principle shapes textual practice. Ethnographic textual production forms the outward limit of what these literary writers consider aesthetic. In their minor tradition, these writers move beyond the picturesque for more ethically minded descriptions of world peoples.

“Time to Cure” reveals that from the late nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, different notions of time and various time-keeping tools were instruments of change in French psychiatric theory and practice. During this period French alienists and mind scientists became preoccupied not only with how their patients and experimental subjects related to the increasingly widespread presence of clocks and watches and to the temporal constructs and pressures of modern life, but also with how they might deploy time-keeping tools themselves to serve the still elusive goal of curability. Using a wide variety of sources from course books and clinical reports to cinematography and photography, each chapter of this dissertation explores a different facet of how French mental health practitioners used time to re-envision psychiatric classification, diagnosis, treatment duration, the spatial organization of psychiatric hospitals, and lastly, the observation of their patients’ inner mental lives.

By looking at different aspects of mental health practice and research, including charting techniques, reaction time measurements, and the interpretation of “temporal delusions,” “Time to Cure” queries how the rise and proliferation of precision time-keeping instruments, the seductive power of speed, and new ideas about the temporal trajectory of mental illness were intertwined in France from the 1880s to the 1930s. It asks: how did mental health practitioners and researchers fashion time into a device, tool, measure, and metaphor with the aim of chipping away at the thorny problem of psychiatric curability? This study equally examines how the ability to accelerate processes in science and technology has influenced the expectations and experiences of mental illness and treatment.

Meditating on how what “counts” as cured is highly dependent on context, this study demonstrates that it is through the framework of temporality that the criteria for, and limitations of, curability become visible in starkest relief. Finally, by placing the relationship between time and psychiatric cure center stage, this history connects to contemporary concerns about the pressures of productivity and profit for medicine more broadly.