Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

French

Advisor

Maxime Blanchard

Committee Members

Maxime Blanchard

Bettina Lerner

Sam Di Iorio

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | French and Francophone Language and Literature | French and Francophone Literature

Keywords

contemporary French literature, neoliberalism, Marie NDiaye, Marie Darrieussecq, Linda Lê, Virginie Despentes

Abstract

This dissertation operates at the intersections of textual analysis, political theory, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics to investigate the prevalence of uncanny imagery in ten examples of contemporary fiction, while also interrogating the notion of the uncanny as a category of analysis. Entitled “Unrepresentable Objects: Neoliberalism in the Contemporary Novel in French,” it examines a group of novels by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Marie NDiaye, and Linda Lê, published in France between 1993 and 2017. These novels share an aesthetic of hauntedness and breakdown, incongruous affect, and a continual presence of the uncanny; they depict a world split from history and unable to comprehend its present, an impression intensified by baffling narrative gaps and unsettling reenactments of historical forms of oppression. In each novel, the persistence of structures of power like patriarchy, racism, or colonialism continue to haunt and shape the present, but are seemingly distorted and evacuated of historical context.

In the dissertation, I frame the strangeness of these novels as an observation of neoliberal life in France, treating neoliberalism both as an intensified iteration of capitalism and, following Michel Foucault, as a normative governing rationality that has come to provide the structure and terms for all other spheres of human conduct as well. Though arguably the term for the dominant global culture of the nineties and early aughts, neoliberalism is variously defined and characterized by many theorists as mystifying or even unrepresentable. Over three chapters, I argue that the troubling relationships, blurred genres, narrative lacunae and uncanny aesthetics of these novels may be attempts at articulating this situation. I also examine the ways in which recognizable frameworks for understanding the world, including literary genres, identity markers, political formations, or forms like the family, find themselves distorted by neoliberal rationality, resulting in a sense of discombobulation within the texts and for readers.

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