When discussing gay literature in the French, contemporary sphere, one of the most up
and coming and prominent authors is Édouard Louis. His works’ focus on the realism and
violence of the working class offers a critical and necessary perspective of the gay experience in
modern-day France. While recent in their creation, Louis’ works follow a connecting thread that
is inseparable from other autofiction novels that have a narrator with same sex attractions such as
Annie Ernaux’s Ce qu’ils disent or rien and Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims. Often commonly
discussed as French LGBT literature, these autofictional works that extend from Gide to Eribon
to now Louis demonstrate how the proposed societal dualities, limitations, and hierarchies
described by philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler affect homosexual
performativity. Louis’ first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published on January 2, 2014,
offers another illustration of this analysis. It specifically describes the metaphysical
(metaphysical being the relationship between the outer stimuli and internal perspective) effects
and constraints of current poverty on homosexual performativity. By analyzing En finir avec
Eddy Bellegueule through this theoretical framework of power and poverty, this thesis adds a
theoretical and intersectional nuance to the narrative voice that current literature focusing on the
novel’s landscape mentions but does not reflect on. I argue that it is important to attach an
autofictional timeline that is necessary to promote and apply future ontological doctrines to this
genre.

The following creative project defends that, whether intentionally or not, mental illness and substance abuse are inevitably romanticized in young adult media and discusses the dangers of this romanticization. This project is divided into three parts. The first part consists of psychological evaluations of the main characters of two popular, contemporary forms of young adult media, Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger and Euphoria by Sam Levinson. These evaluations use textual evidence and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) to determine what symptoms of psychopathology the characters appear to display. The second part consists of a self-written short story that is meant to accurately depict the life of a young adult struggling with mental illness and substance abuse. This story contains various aesthetic techniques borrowed from the two young adult media forms. The final part consists of an aesthetic statement which discusses in depth the aesthetic techniques employed within the short story, Quicksand by Anisha Mehra.

With the dissolution of the old forms of power has come a new heteronomy: that of the screen. The individual is in stasis, caught between the old forms of control and the new, but unable to imagine a better, liberated future. What is responsible for this interregnum? The answer lies in analyzing these new forms of control, their effects on the subject, and the material, historical processes behind them. This paper looks specifically at social media and how it has come to limit autonomy and commodify human experience and personhood. Drawing from Theodor Adorno’s Theory of Pseudo Culture, it seeks to describe the ways in which social media both erodes and administers subjectivity. Culture, now subject to the economic imperatives of capitalism, no longer contributes to the development of individuality. By referencing Karl Marx’s Capital and C. Wright Mill’s “The Competitive Personality”, this paper describes how social media expands commercial imperatives outside of the bounds of the workplace and into everyday life. The paper concludes by drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man in order to describe how social media neutralizes oppositional sentiments. Even the seemingly spontaneous expressions of dissent found on social media become a conservative force, stymieing real world organization through the repressive desublimation of revolt. In addition to understanding the dominating effects of the screen, this paper seeks to map the contours of neoliberal subjectivity.