Browsing by Subject "French popular culture"
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Item Rachel, the circulation of the image, and the death of tragedy(2012-12) Bethel, Marnie Elizabeth; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Garval, Michael D; Wilkinson, Lynn; Johnson, Michael; Cauvin, Jean-Pierre; Coffin, JudithAlthough it is frequently suggested that the idea of celebrity, as opposed to fame, is a construct of twentieth-century popular culture, many of the originating mechanisms and characteristics of modern celebrity have their roots in the more distant past. In France, the Industrial Revolution and the resulting mechanization of the media in the early to mid-nineteenth century fostered the processes of publicity. The invention of photography, the explosion in circulation of newspapers, and the emergence of cultural criticism gave rise to a new sense of both the importance and the relatability of people in the public eye. Elisa Rachel Félix (1821-1858), known professionally as “Rachel,” was the undisputed star of the French state theater, the Comédie-Française, from 1838 until shortly before her death. She was in many ways the first exemplar of the tropes of celebrity in French popular culture. Not only was she greatly admired for her talent in performance, especially in the classical tragic repertoire of the Golden Age of French playwriting, but she was also a pioneer in what Tom Mole has called “the hermeneutic of intimacy,” the perception on the part of the public that the accessibility of images of the performer creates a sense of connection and sympathy between artist and audience. This dissertation will explore the varieties of media through which Rachel’s career and life were publicized and the competing currents of her celebrity identity: the extent to which the star was understood as an exceptional woman versus her identification with her public. Depictions of Rachel in traditional arts, such as sculpture and painting, competed with her portrayal in such modern media as photographs, newspaper columns and caricatures, either enhancing her closeness to her fans or emphasizing her fundamental difference. The image of celebrity which Rachel helped to create endured after her premature death and contributed mightily to a foundational shift in the emphasis of media culture in France. Coinciding as it did with the heyday of Romanticism and the rise of realism in the arts, the cult of celebrity contributed strongly to the death of the tragic genre.Item Re-charting French space : transnationalism, travel and identity from the postcolonial banlieue to post-Wall Europe(2011-05) Gott, Michael Robert; Sherzer, Dina; Tissieres, Helene; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Johnson, Michael; Loselle, AndreaContemporary French identity issues are often conceived spatially in popular imagination and political discourse. France and French identity have been mapped into a series of imagined exclusionary spaces through media representations and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that artists in the fields of film, rap music and fiction are actively yet often indirectly intervening in French identity debates by reframing the question of “integration” and by demonstrating that not only can one be simultaneously French and “other,” but that French identity is always already more complex and transnational than prevailing discourses of “imagined” identity will admit. This is done most effectively, I contend, by avoiding the clichéd and reductive spaces and spatial categories that inflect the debate. The works I examine employ travel and motion to move beyond the discursive ghettos such as beur or banlieue cinema or “minority” music and fiction. While often less overtly political these responses are more effective than the more typical banlieue narrative of clash and confrontation with power. Taking examples from cinema, I argue that the road movies I address are effective weapons of the weak precisely because they avoid the traps inherent in representing the banlieue. My analysis demonstrates that the discursive ghetto is not always a bad thing for a filmmaker because referring to representational stereotypes can open the possibility of more readily “trapping” the viewer and therefore forcing him/her to actively participate in the process of decoding the author’s positioning. Often works attempting to contest spatial exclusion run the risk of simply falling into entrenched binary conceptions of society, reinforcing what the viewer already thinks they know about life in the suburbs or as a minority in general. Looking beyond cinema to music and literature, I demonstrate how artists are mobilizing narrative of space and identity to re-chart France with “hyphenated” perspectives, from African and Algerian to Portuguese and Pied-noir.