French - Theses, Dissertations, and other Required Graduate Degree Essays

Eugene lonesco's plays, have stirred controversy among his critics. Amidst this controversy, the playwright's own views on art stand out as an important critical reference. Inspired by lonesco's writings, this study attempts to shed a new light on his work by exploring the concepts of grotesque, term that captures the paradoxical nature of his plays. This study then continues by analyzing the stage representation of grotesque, along with the philosoptiical postulates that derive from the author's ongoing quest for the absolute. This quest is revealed not only in his plays, but, towards the end of his life, in his nonfigurative painting and drawing.

The exploration of the construction of the masculine identity in Québécois literature has gained popularity over the last few years; however, the current research on this topic highlights an urgent need to redefine this concept. The aim of this project is to examine the relevance of the murder of the father as a signifier in the development of the construction of the identity of the son in the following contemporary Québécois plays: Le Faucon by Marie Laberge, L’Impératif présent by Michel Tremblay, and Littoral by Wajdi Mouawad. The current analysis suggests that the father figure should be seen as an influential factor in the construction of the masculine identity and that masculine identity in Quebec has for a long time been considered in a derogatory way.

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Four analyses of the forms du, de la, de 1* , des and dg were compared in order to evaluate the insights they were able to provide into the so-called partitive forms. i ?f Grevisse's Le Bon Usage was chosen as an example of a traditional analysis which uses multiple criteria of classification, meaning, structure and function. The first full structural analysis of the noun system in French, Gramma ire structurale du fran^ais by Jean Dubois, was chosen as an analysis in which only the syntagmatic relationships of the speech chain are taken into account in setting up the various systems in the language. The treatment of the partitive article by Gustave Guillaume was chosen as an analysis which claims to show the operation of the mental processes which underlie the observable phenomena in the speech chain. Finally an article by Kaurice Gross, "Sur une regie de 'cacophonie1 ", which develops a suggestion made by Chomsky for a T-rule relaying to the partitive, was chosen as an analysis claiming to show the operation of processes which relate the underlying and the superficial structures of the language. Comparison of the four analyses revealed that it was 'the idea of language process as it is embodied in T-rules that gave the neatest account of the distribution of 'partitive' de in relation to du, de la, de 1', and des. It was the requirement of generality of application of T-rules .that gave the only motivated description of the formation of the partitive as a combination of precosition de and the generic article le. It was the application of one or both of two deletion rules that linked a wider range of phenomena than could be related by the other types of analyses.