Writing in French "et non autrement," 1529-1592 Chenoweth, Kathryn creator 2010 vi, 335 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010) Krause, Virginia Director Benmaïa, Réda Director Conley, Tom Reader Brown University. French Studies sponsor theses This dissertation examines the emerging cultural question of vernacular writing during the mid-sixteenth century in France. Combining cultural history, literary studies, and critical theory, it explores how French writers across discourses and disciplines redefined the significance of vernacular writing. The introduction situates the sixteenth-century problematic of French writing historically and establishes the dissertation's theoretical grounding in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida (Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, De la grammatologie). It questions the narrative of the "rise" of the vernacular that dominates understanding of this period, proposing instead a dynamic model of "movements of appropriation" at work between texts, writers, and languages. The first chapter, focusing on Geoffroy Tory's Champ fleury, looks at the role of print culture in the development of vernacular writing. Examining the rhetoric of Tory's text, it argues that the printer-typographer issues a "call" to future French writers by laying down a discursive framework within which a desire for French is to be satisfied through writing. The second chapter explores texts of vernacular grammar and law appearing subsequent to Tory's call. Tracing the emergence of an ideology of monolingualism in French writing, this chapter focuses on the grammars of Louis Meigret (1550) and Ramus (1572), as well as the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts issued by François I in 1539. This chapter argues that the meta-linguistic nature of these texts produces a new relationship to language in writing. The third chapter explores the "affective mapping" produced in poetic vernacular advocacy of this same period, concentrating on the notion of the "langue maternelle" and the efforts of the Pléiade group of poets. Chapter Four looks at how one of these poets, Joachim Du Bellay, turns away from the patriotic stance of his famous Deffence, et Illustration de la langue françoyse toward a more resistant form of French writing his collection of sonnets Les Regrets. Chapter Five considers how the singular language of Michel de Montaigne's Essais marks an attempt to de-institutionalize French writing, in view of another idiom more properly the writer's "own." vernacular Tory Villers-Cotterêts Du Bellay Montaigne Derrida WritingNative languageFrench languageRenaissanceDerrida, JacquesFrance--Villers-Cotterêts RPB 20110926 engEnglish10.7301/Z0ZK5DW4In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations