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Dissertation Information for Elizabeth Ercell Covington

NAME:
- Elizabeth Ercell Covington

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1998)

ADVISORS:
- Debora L. Silverman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Robert Wohl
- Emily Apter

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Egotistical spectator: Rachilde (1860-1953) and the fin-de-siecle novel

Abstract: For over sixty years the writer Rachilde (1860-1953) produced novels, plays and short stories which earned her a loyal readership in fin-de-siecle France. Considered "Mademoiselle Baudelaire" by Symbolist critics but a mere Decadent pornographer by detractors, Rachilde defies simple placement within either genre. An avid practitioner of her generation's theatrical, artistic conceits, Rachilde was an occasional Bohemian, a sometime cross-dresser and journalist, and always a proponent of the "cult of ego" that made Parisian aesthetes infamous. Rachilde's prose and development of a distinctive literary persona made her a precursor of "modernism." Her radical independence hearkens back to the Enlightenment heroic subject, yet reaches forward to the era of women's emancipation despite the fact that she pointedly rejected feminism. Rachilde presided over one of the last French literary salons at the Mercure de France for half a century.

Rachilde contested rules of conduct and behavior within her culture, living and embodying an egotistical individualism. The central problematic of this biography and cultural history, is that this refusal to conform can be linked to vaster political, cultural and social processes, including the restructuring of Enlightenment notions of individualism throughout the French Third Republic. Rachilde defied convention by cultivating innovative identities through personal enlistment of medical pathologies and sexology, feminism, consumerism, reactionary politics, and the secularization of French Catholic culture. These evasive strategies of identity allowed Rachilde to circumvent some essentialist constraints of a woman's existence. Yet her obstinate adherence to some Enlightenment relics of "individualism," the notion of the "abstract" individual, for example, which was gendered exclusively as masculine, imprisoned her within a defeating tautology. Her prose and life are muddled mixture of avant-garde theatricality, strategic use of Decadent language to displace hierarchy, gender transgression, wildly anarchical and reactionary politics, and astute social criticism.

MPACT Scores for Elizabeth Ercell Covington

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-08 10:41:34

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Students under Elizabeth Ercell Covington

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None