In The Stranger, a novel by Albert Camus, and in “Funes the Memorious,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the homodiegetic narrators have a significant effect on the referential aspect of their personal experiences. Chronologically these remembered experiences are positioned before the moment when they are narrated. The act of remembering is thus a form of subsequent narration. In both texts, memory is a project rather than an object because it is recounted and not found. In the sense that it is told, memory is necessarily a creative act and thus not faultless because the story of an experience is not the experience itself. The memories in The Stranger and in “Funes the Memorious” are not reconstituted but narrated. The peculiarity of the two texts lies in the fact that the narrators take an external position when describing their own past, emphasizing the imperfect aspect of the narrators’ memory. With a narratological approach to the texts and a Sartrean interpretation of memory, I study the effects of focalization on the act of remembering. By explaining the relationship between focalization, memory and the narratee, I show that the act of remembering is not a repetition of past events or experiences …

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of history and culture on the passage of the comic book to the animated film. Although the comic book has both historical and cultural components, the latter often undergoes a cultural shift in the animation process. Using the Smurfs as a case study, this investigation first reviews existing literature pertaining to the comic book as an art form, the influence of history and culture on Smurf story plots, and the translation of the comic book into a moving picture. This study then utilizes authentic documents and interviews to analyze the perceptions of success and failure in the transformation of the Smurf comic book into animation: concluding that original meaning is often altered in the translation to meet the criteria of cultural relevance for the new audiences.

Teaching a foreign language using task-based language teaching (TBLT) has garnered a lot of attention and has been the object of worldwide scientific studies for the last thirty years. Few of these studies, however, include an evaluation of this method by the teachers themselves, or are conducted by them directly. My thesis, centered around the notion of task-based language learning, a teaching method recommended more and more though sometimes still snubbed, relies on my professional experience as a teacher of secondary level FLE classes in the United States and on the analysis of reference studies conducted in this field. I have adopted the methodology of research-action with the goal of offering a pedagogic intervention. First I identify certain hurdles encountered by high school foreign language teachers. After this introduction, I evaluate the methods and didactic principles that stood out to lead to a teaching philosophy centered around communication, such as task-based language teaching. The second part of the thesis presents some important studies that evaluate the pros and cons of this approach. The next section examines in turn each of three tasks offered as contrast against the traditional model consisting of presentation, practice and production, known as "PPP." Finally the …