Digital Commons Network^™

Dialogic Faiths: Multi-Genre Expression In Religious Narrative, Rosemary L. Demos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As persuasive or expository texts, religious conversion narratives tend towards monologic language, and texts that advocate one particular creed or institution often reflect the unity of faith through linguistically totalizing methods. This study, however, examines the dialogic interactions found in certain religious narratives. The texts included in this analysis recount unusual conversion outcomes: not to formally established church institutions, but rather to a heightened religious experience and in some cases a call to leadership in establishing new social orders. In these texts, the dynamic between personal and communal religious experience is tense, sometimes precarious; the difficulties of engaging in social …

Falling Forward: Continuity And Change In The Poetics Of Eden, Julie L. Gafney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation suggests that late fourteenth century vernacular poetry in Middle English takes up the idea of a secular Eden by which various non-normative theorizations of time and self are made possible. The invocation of a rich and multifarious Eden may be effectively understood through its relationship to the psychoanalytic theorization of origins by which Eden’s powerful potentiality for therapeutic or at least revelatory growth is inherent in its availability for processes of cyclical return. The present study will attempt to redress the tendency to treat Eden only as a fall and thereby gain a better understanding of the modes …

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

Con Cuydadosos Descuydos Descubiertos: Una Aproximación A La Obra De José Camerino En El Marco De La Novela Del Siglo Xvii, Beatriz G. Acrich Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When Cervantes publishes his collection of Novelas Ejemplares in 1613, he introduces a type of composition that lacked academic prestige and was not in any way regulated. Although Italian and Spanish writers had already dabbled with brief narrative fictions, it is the author of El Quijote who pushes the new genre in which he skillfully articulates the literary traditions. The success of his collection is immediate; numerous editions of his novellas in various Spanish cities are testimony of the bases which the author was setting, and he rapidly begins to be imitated. The readers enthusiastically receive and consume the short …

Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications And The Poetics Of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is …

On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one …

“Über Die Liebe”: Love And Sex According To Eduard Von Keyserling, Caroline Urvater

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is built around an annotated translation of Eduard von Keyserling’s 1907 essay, “Über die Liebe.” The author’s citations are often made from memory and consequently, are not always entirely accurate. This fact is discussed and inaccuracies are corrected.

Chapter One begins with an overview of the historical background of the Keyserling family. It includes biographical material that describes the author’s life and experiences, and introduces his illustrious forbears. It also points to the writers and philosophers who influenced the author’s thinking.

Chapter Two, a review of the literature, discusses some of the dissertations, articles and books that were …

Crossing Boundaries: The Transnational Third Space Of Contemporary Chinese-Francophone Writers, Paula S. Delbonis-Platt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, a group of Chinese writers who pen their works in French, their adopted language, have garnered prizes in France and received international acclaim. The transnational voices of these writers have drawn attention to Chinese history, literature, and human-rights issues, as well as to their own diverse intersections with French culture. The four Francophone-Chinese writers studied—François Cheng (b. 1929), Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Dai Sijie (b. 1954), and Shan Sa (b. 1972)—constitute themselves as subjects at least partially through their Chinese birth and French citizenship or residency and through the production of literary works that range …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Il Dilemma Del Prigioniero. Luciano Bianciardi E Il Disincanto Del Moderno, Ilaria Muzzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of my study on the works of Luciano Bianciardi is to expand upon his complex and conflicted relationship with the modernity of the new mass communication society emerging in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on his career and several important areas of his work in particular. Bianciardi’s confrontation with modernity is ambiguous and challenged because it originates from the result of a dialectic between his intense, innate and conflicted roots in his hometown area of Maremma, his traditions and values and his fatal attraction to the new society and new mass culture. This can be compared …

Interfictional Identities: Transformation And Dissimulation In The Early Modern Period, Yael Nezer Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interfictional Identities develops the concept of interfictional transformations. In these transformations, characters in early modern texts adopt new identities rooted in previous literature. Specifically, Interfictional Identities explores how four early modern moments of interfictional transformation—of Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Pyrocles in Sidney’s New Arcadia, of Uriel da Costa in A Specimen of Human Life, and of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel—produce both literary and literal hybridity. One wonders why, in these works, writers and playwrights such as Shakespeare, Sidney, Da Costa, and Cervantes favor interfictional transformations over mere allusions to classical literature, …

The Queen's Feud: Women And Kinship In Malory's Morte Darthur, Elsa K. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of blood feud on the knights of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur is clear and has been well studied. Likewise documented is the shift to an institutionalized political system focused on individual chivalry after the founding of the Round Table. This study focuses on the feuds and political changes, which also swept up the women in and around the Round Table including Nynyve, Lyonesse, Guenivere, and Morgawse. Individual chivalry gives women significant independence in action and changes the values they are celebrated for, but their family connections are always considered as primary motivations. The women of …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the theme of melancholia in the writing of currently and formerly incarcerated African American men during the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Melancholia, with its rich history in literature from ancient times to the present, is discernable in the works of many people with prison experience. In their writing, melancholia is expressed primarily as a loss and as a disconnection with time, as well as an empowering creative force. The work of Jarvis Jay Masters and R. Dwayne Betts reflects the paradox of melancholia: just as it shows the depressive element of the condition, …

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …