Digital Commons Network^™

Moralizing The Rape Of Philomela In Late Medieval Commentary, Daniel M. Armenti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the reception of the Philomela narrative from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6.424-674 by medieval commentators and authors, and how European academics during the 12^th-14^th centuries interpreted its central theme of rape. Through their engagement with the story of Philomela’s rape and her ingenuity in expressing her experience, medieval commentators and writers constructed a space in which they could propose diverse approaches to sexual violence, justice, and victimhood and survival. The commentaries, translations, and adaptions of Philomela’s narrative produced by medieval writers found their precedent in the episode from Ovid’s text, in which he dismantled the erotic …

From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological …

Providence Lost: Natural And Urban Landscapes In H. P. Lovecraft's Fiction, Dylan Henderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

S. T. Joshi, the preeminent scholar of weird fiction, considers H. P. Lovecraft a “topographical realist,” noting that, in his later fiction, Lovecraft creates realistic and painstakingly detailed settings. In “Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction,” I explore the significance of Lovecraft’s topographical realism and trace its evolution through Lovecraft’s career. I argue that Lovecraft’s early fiction, the tales, that is, that he wrote from 1917 to 1924 under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany, pays little attention to the natural landscape, though Lovecraft does, in story after story, allude to fabulous, …

The Economy Of (Dis)Honor In The Americas: A Transnational Rupturing Of American Literature Through Faulkner, García Márquez, And Silko, Clayton Neil Cobb

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Honor is misunderstood within popular culture, but it is also misunderstood within academic contexts. This is due to a decoupling of the term from its long historical significance, a significance that must not be ignored. That is because honor in the Americas is a structure of the hemisphere’s colonial legacy, its manifestation in the cultural fabric a result of the invasion of the continents by European settlers and colonizers. In the case of history, philosophy, and social science, the study of honor is beginning to undergo appropriate theorization to recognize that legacy; however, within literary studies disciplines, critical understanding of …

Shame And Its Other Family Members In Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater And Everyman And Pierre Lemaitre's Au Revoir Là-Haut, Shahrzad Izadpanah

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is going to provide a comparative study of three novels: Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and Everyman(2006) by Philip Roth and Au revoir là-haut(2013) by Pierre Lemaitre. Although at first glance these three works seem to bear little or no resemblance to each other, certain crucial parallels can be drawn between and among the dominant themes in these novels. This study considers how death, loss, and their implications affect the main characters: Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, the nameless character in Everyman, and Édouard Péricourt in Au revoir là-haut. How bodily decay and trauma affect …

Between A Harmless Game And A Bittersweet Disease: Forms Of Nostalgia In Post-Socialist Central And Eastern Europe, George A. Condrache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis focuses on novels, essays, films, and popular culture miscellanea representative of Central and Eastern Europe, in the attempt to explain how nostalgia developed in this area since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a major - and, for many, unsettling - historical shift, thus, perhaps not surprisingly, nostalgia for the former communist regime does not lack in popularity. Due to the region’s turbulent past cum present, millions of Eastern Europeans have migrated westward; homesickness is only one of the feelings they share. The region is also a cauldron for far-right ideologies, …

The Exemplary Spartacus: Reception, Adaptation, And Reconstruction, Benjamin Franklin Howland

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My project, “The Exemplary Spartacus: Reception, Adaptation, and Reconstruction,” focusses on various representations of the gladiator Spartacus. I assert that Spartacus has almost exclusively been and continues to be an exemplary figure, with an extensive and connected literary tradition, working as an empty signifier in differing temporalities and localities. I draw specific attention to a core issue in the study of Spartacus, namely, the plethora of modern representations of Spartacus in various genres, and the continuing influence these representations exert through their blurring of the historical figure with local themes and ideologies. Each draw from the same ancient sources, infusing …

永恆逃逸的差異 : 以《流言》、《易經》及《小團圓》為例論張愛玲與重複, Lok Tung Choi

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

王德威曾提出張愛玲重複（Repetition）、迴旋（Involution）、衍生（Derivation）的文學譜系。張氏化一為二，使「流言」代替「吶喊」、「重複」代替「再現」、「迴旋」代替「革命」。張愛玲在文學體系中被「包括在外」的狀態足顯學者無從將之置入的焦慮。自《小團圓》、《雷峯塔》及《易經》三部自敘小說相繼出版後，是張以「重複」書寫為自己立幡招魂。

本論文借用吉爾．德勒茲（Gilles Deleuze）有關差異（Difference）及重複（Repetition）的哲學概念分析、對讀張愛玲的作品。德勒茲指出差異為人類感知經驗的基本原則，故差異必然存在；而重複注定為一種自覺的、悖理式的「運動」——創造必然是重複而非再現，重複著不能被重複的。創作並非複製原本的記憶，而是原本的記憶蘊含的情感力量內化，顛覆自身，「重複」著作品，始終強調著異質性（heterogeneity）。

本論文提出異質性是張氏被現代文學「包括在外」的根因，而異質性屬於「差異」的領域，「重複」才是張愛玲的文學定位。本論文強調自傳小說的虛構性，避免逸事索隱的閱讀策略。本論文分四章，前三章以人物為錨點分析重複，包括：教授、友人及母親，然後討論自我複寫的意義。以早期散文集《流言》、英文自敘小說《易經》及中文自敘小說《小團圓》為研究文本，觀照其中差異，以德勒茲式的閱讀檢視張氏的自我複寫的三種意義。

Games And Play Of Dream Of The Red Chamber, Jiayao Wang

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the games derived from Cao Xueqin’s novel Dream of The Red Chamber during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1880s-1920s) through its various literary and textual representations. In brief, the games create a sense of otherworldliness for players to imagine their mode of being in a space that is set apart from the daily grinds of the historical transition. Dramatic and literary sources have been a constant motif or theme for traditional games in China. However, it was after the publication of Dream of Red Chamber that the characters, the themes and motifs of the novel …

Digesting Gender: Gendered Foodways In Modern Chinese Literature, 1890s–1940s, Zhuo Feng

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate Han Bangqing (1856–1894), Lao She (1899– 1966), and Su Qing’s (1914–1982) works to study the literary representations of how people purchased, prepared, shared, and ate food in different social contexts allowing them to adapt to new gender norms. I contend that the intersection of food, gender and literature stages the process through which people reconciled different and sometimes conflicting gender norms through their everyday eating practices. When encountering new cooking and eating practices in these literary works, people reflect upon their past lives and, wittingly or unwittingly, begin to accept different gender norms, and modify …

Pushing The Limits Of Black Atlantic And Hispanic Transatlantic Studies Through The Exploration Of Three U.S. Afro-Latio Memoirs, Julia Luján

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation project I intend to push the boundaries, by placing them in dialogue with each other, of both the Black Atlantic and the Hispanic Transatlantic Studies while exploring the cultural production of two groups that are generally excluded from the scholarly research done on the African Diaspora: U.S. Afro-Latinos and Afro-Argentines. While Black Atlantic Studies focuses on the Anglophone world and Hispanic Transatlantic Studies focuses on the Spanish-speaking world, they both ignore the two groups mentioned above as they complicate the boundaries of these fields by sitting at the intersections of race, language, and location.

Furthermore, I explore …

A Parrot Perched On A Rifle: Military Interpreters In The Korean Conflict 1945-1953, Hyongrae Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents an overview of interpreting during the Korean War by examining shifts in the positionality of interpreters during the preparatory, engagement, and conclusionary stages of the conflict. Here, the preparatory stage refers to the U.S. military occupation of south Korea (1945-1948), the engagement stage refers to period of active military engagement between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and its allies against the Republic of Korea and the United Nations Command (1950-1953), while the conclusionary stage refers to the Korean Armistice Negotiations (1951-1953). Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Moira Inghilleri’s (2005a) influential argument that interpreting takes …

Translating Anxiety In The Poetry Of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Julianne Zala

Masters Theses

Maya Abu al-Hayyat (born 1980) is a Palestinian poet who thematizes motherhood, love, war/revolution, grief, and political hypocrisy in her poetry. In the context of Palestinian literature, she fits within a tradition of Resistance Literature, yet redefines it. Given that al-Hayyat has not been widely translated into English, this thesis presents 33 translations of her poems taken from her three poetry collections: Mā qālathu fīhī (Thus Spake the Beloved, 2007), Tilka al-ibtisāma-- dhālika al-qalb (This Smile, That Heart, 2012), and Fasātīn baytīyya wa ḥurūb (House Dresses and Wars, 2016). Throughout these three collections the …

The Twilight Of The Absolute: Russian Symbolism And The Romantic Project, Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation project, The Twilight of the Absolute: Russian Symbolism and the Romantic Project, scrutinizes and interrogates the premises of so called “influence studies” by examining one tangled instance of cultural interaction—the relation between early German Romanticism (the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Schelling) and the second wave of Russian Symbolism (Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov). In the scarce secondary literature that touches upon this complex literary-historical problem, Russian Symbolists are often unproblematically represented as proud “neo-Romantics,” passive recipients of the Romantic intellectual legacy. The major claim I advance in my thesis is that Jena Romanticism, …

The Fatale Monstrum And The Nasty Woman: Gendered Political Representations Of Cleopatra Vii And Hillary Rodham Clinton, Emma Baker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the use of gender expectations in representations of two historically significant and politically powerful women: Cleopatra VII and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though their situations were in some ways quite different, each of these women crafted her public image carefully, using both masculine and feminine gender expectations to represent herself as a powerful, capable leader and as a strong, caring mother. Their political enemies similarly drew on both masculine and feminine gender norms in order to represent these women both as dangerous, emasculating, monstrous figures who had to be conquered and as weak and incapable of leadership. The …

Bodies In Shame: Writing Trauma And Affective Unsettlement In Post-Genocide Rwanda Fiction, Cole A. Carvour

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis analyzes Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements and Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda. I argue that both authors write trauma by employing both a dominant realist style and the trauma aesthetic with attention to the embodied experiences of genocide victims and survivors in both styles. In doing so, each author contributes to impeding indifference surrounding the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Furthermore, I assert that one effect of writing trauma is that of affective unsettlement or affective travel, or the registering of psychic and physical shame and other related affective responses in the …

The Deconstruction Of Patriarchal War Narratives In Svetlana Alexievich’S The Unwomanly Face Of War, Liubov Kartashova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the Soviet construction of womanhood resulted first in females’ active participation in World War II and then in the silencing of women’s war experiences by fabricating a reality in which women’s trauma did not exist. Such a deprivation of women’s agency led to female soldiers’ confusion of identity, experience of shame and consequential self-censorship. In The Unwomanly Face of War (У войны не женское лицо, 1985), Svetlana Alexievich acknowledges these neglected experiences and traumas, and creates a space in which women’s stories have a right to exist. Applying Jean Elshtain’s theory on the lack of attention …

Embodiment Of Creative Thought And Visual Logic In Bookmaking: An Example Of Intermediality In Word-Picture Adaptation, Diana Bychkova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This interdisciplinary study discusses word-picture translation for book illustrations and brings together visual art, book/illustration history, the materiality of the book, literature, and library science. The focus is on communication between the creator, the work of literary and visual art, and the receiver. Theories that observe verbal-visual relations appear typically disconnected from the practical aspects of bookmaking and publishing. In bridging practice and theory, I have developed my own method of word-picture interpretation that can be applied to any adult fiction text.

The thesis discusses the outside and the inside of illustration-making, presents the methodology and theoretical framework, explores such …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

The World’S Greatest Hero: An Examination Of Superhero Tropes In My Hero Academia, Jerry Waller

Master's Projects and Capstones

In this paper the author explores the cross-cultural transmission of genre archetypes in illustrated media. Specifically, the representation of the archetype of American superheroes as represented in the Japanese manga and anime series, My Hero Academia. Through examination of the extant corpus of manga chapters and anime episodes for the franchise, the author draws comparison between characters and situations in the manga series with examples from American comic books by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. By skillfully incorporating foundational themes of American superhero comics into the shonen manga genre, My Hero Academia joins a growing collection of media that draws …

Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier

College Honors Program

This thesis examines the relationship between gender and heroism in the Beowulf tale and two of its modern retellings. It includes an exploration of the medieval gender roles of the original epic using Seamus Heaney and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations. This thesis also addresses the ways in which some characters disturb gender binaries and social roles — especially in the case of Grendel’s mother. The second and third chapters focus on two retellings of the Beowulf text respectively: John Gardner’s Grendel , told from the perspective of the monster Grendel; and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife , which is …

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

The Pathology Of Passion: Lovesickness In Medieval Iberian Literature And Medicine, Janelle Elizabeth Neczypor

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the changes in love literature and notions of lovesickness in Iberia between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how alterations in medieval portrayals of lovesickness reflect larger transformations in medicine, politics, and the medieval worldview. Early didactic literature treats love as a hygienic habit that must be learned through guides illustrating proper and improper love, while fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts often depict love as an illness to be cured and avoided. During the High and Late Middle Ages, plagues and illnesses, medical translations into Latin and Romance languages, and the rise of university-educated …

Final Master's Portfolio, Allison Coad

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Each of the pieces in this portfolio represent the culmination of years of work; I spent hours and hours researching and exploring ideas about narrative and reflection over the course of my graduate program. Additionally, it is my hope that this collection demonstrates my abilities as a writer, reader, literary critic and scholar.

Self · Ish: Examining And Reshaping Filipino & Filipinx Identities Within The Continental United States And Hawai’I Via Post-Colonial Literature, Kiana Anderson

Senior Theses

This thesis explores a conversation between the “self” and Filipino culture to examine the ways the Filipino diaspora exists in literature amongst colonization and trauma. Through literary texts spanning across time and geographical locations, like Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, I interrogate the cultural and psychic meanings associated with the concept of home within the context of these hybrid histories. By examining the neo-canonical literature of some of these authors, I interrogate their sense of self, voices and visions via the languages, symbols, cultural frameworks and emotions that are prevalent within the literary …

La Representación Del Conflicto Armado Interno En Los Rendidos, De José Carlos Agüero Y La Distancia Que Nos Separa, De Renato Cisneros, Manuel Andrés Zelada Pierrend

Theses and Dissertations

Este trabajo analiza la forma en que el Conflicto Armado Interno peruano (1980-1999) es representado en las obras Los rendidos y La distancia que nos separa, de José Carlos Agüero y Renato Cisneros, respectivamente. Ambos autores son hijos de actores que participaron en dicho conflicto: Agüero es hijo de miembros del grupo subversivo Sendero Luminoso y Cisneros, de un general del Ejército peruano. Dada la naturaleza testimonial de las obras estudiadas, las cuales describen la relación entre padres e hijos durante el Conflicto Armado Interno, nuestro objetivo es analizar de qué manera este aparece y afecta dichas relaciones. Nuestra hipótesis …

The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …