Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Through The Spaceship’S Window: A Bio-Political Reading Of 20th Century Latin American And Anglo-Saxon Science Fiction, Juan David Cruz
Through The Spaceship’S Window: A Bio-Political Reading Of 20th Century Latin American And Anglo-Saxon Science Fiction, Juan David Cruz
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation consists of a bio-political reading of a wide variety of Latin American, American, and British works of science fiction, written from 1919 to 1989. In this project I have analyzed how works of science fiction in different historical and geographical contexts deal with issues such as eugenics, racism, fear of the alien, the threat of nuclear global conflict, etc. I have made a conscious effort to demonstrate that Latin America has been part of global phenomena such as the Cold War, and has produced a wide and rich corpus of science fiction works that deal with these global …
From Choc En Retour To Nomadisme En Fleche, Paul T. Mcelhinny
From Choc En Retour To Nomadisme En Fleche, Paul T. Mcelhinny
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis seeks to analyze and expound upon Aimé Césaire’s theory of history, choc en retour from Discours sur le colonialisme and situate William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and André Schwarz-Bart’s La Mulatresse Solitude (and to a lesser extent Le Dernier des Justes and Go Down, Moses) within this theoretical framework; which presents the Holocaust as the culmination (“retrun shock”) of four centuries of colonial violence – from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries – perpetrated by Western powers such as France and the United States. While Césaire’s application to Schwarz- Bart’s texts is more standard – with his two novels explicitly …
Caressing Radical Alterity: For A Queer Ethic Of Embodiment In Contemporary Films And Literature, Marc Demont
Caressing Radical Alterity: For A Queer Ethic Of Embodiment In Contemporary Films And Literature, Marc Demont
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation offers an analysis of the caress through the dual lens of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I argue that the caress reveals the queerness and ambiguities of perception and that this gesture must be understood as an ethical gesture of opening toward otherness. I discuss different accounts of the caress (Levinas, Irigaray) and expose the misogynistic and/or homophobic bias at work in these theories of the caress. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of touch and other notions that he develops (Flesh, intertwinement, intercorporeality, encroachment, etc.) allow a redefinition of the caress that avoids Levinas and Irigaray’s pitfalls. In a reading …
The Quixotic Picaresque: Tricksters, Modernity, And Otherness In The Transatlantic Novel, Or The Intertextual Rhizome Of Lazarillo, Don Quijote, Huck Finn, And The Reivers, David Elijah Sinsabaugh Beek
The Quixotic Picaresque: Tricksters, Modernity, And Otherness In The Transatlantic Novel, Or The Intertextual Rhizome Of Lazarillo, Don Quijote, Huck Finn, And The Reivers, David Elijah Sinsabaugh Beek
Theses and Dissertations
The Quixotic Picaresque is a conflation of the narrative modes exhibited in Lazarillo de Tormes and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Mancha. This study examines these early modern Spanish novels and their American reincarnations, namely Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s The Reivers. Accordingly, this essay explores the correlation between Spain’s transition from feudalism to a modern mercantile society and the United States’ transition from an agrarian society based in slavery to a modern industrial nation within the cultural contexts of the four aforementioned novels. These novels make up part of the intertextual rhizome …
Flannery O’Connor’S Art And The French Renouveau Catholique: A Comparative Exploration Of Contextual Resources For The Author’S Theological Aesthetics Of Sin And Grace, Stephen Allen Baarendse
Flannery O’Connor’S Art And The French Renouveau Catholique: A Comparative Exploration Of Contextual Resources For The Author’S Theological Aesthetics Of Sin And Grace, Stephen Allen Baarendse
Theses and Dissertations
Flannery O’Connor described herself as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of a modern consciousness” (HB 90). What makes her such a fascinating author is that she was almost uncannily sensitive to what Charles Taylor has analyzed in his large study A Secular Age as the fraught spiritual cross-currents of late modernity. Decades before Taylor described the modern secular social imaginary as a haunted space, O’Connor wrote in an essay that “if the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christhaunted” (MM 44). She interpreted the freak “as a figure of our essential displacement” (45). What Taylor works out about the …
Piglia And Russia: Russian Influences In Ricardo Piglia’S Nombre Falso, Carol E. Fruit Diouf
Piglia And Russia: Russian Influences In Ricardo Piglia’S Nombre Falso, Carol E. Fruit Diouf
Theses and Dissertations
In his work Nombre falso (False Name, 1975), leading Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia (1941-2017) presents a double tale composed of the story of a search, and of the supposed results of the search: the short story Luba. According to the narrator, the short story is written by influential Argentinian author Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), but it is in fact a distorted copy of Russian writer Leonid Andreev’s (1871-1919) The Dark (T’ma, 1907). Piglia mixes real life with falsification to create his work, changing elements of the life of Arlt and modifying Andreev’s story. In this work, I revisit Piglia’s text, paying …
Archival Resistance: A Comparative Reading Of Ulysses And One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Maria-Josee Mendez
Archival Resistance: A Comparative Reading Of Ulysses And One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Maria-Josee Mendez
Theses and Dissertations
Much of the comparative scholarship on the works of Gabriel García Márquez assumes the position that he was most significantly influenced by the works of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. However, beyond the citation of techniques shared extensively by other Modernists and dependence upon superficial comparisons between texts, the connections between García Márquez and these writers frequently remain tenuous. I suggest that to privilege Faulknerian or Hemingwayan readings of García Márquez is to overlook his position as a postcolonial Latin American novelist; I therefore consider in relationship with García Márquez the Irish writer James Joyce. Both writers participate in what …
Beyond Life And Death Images Of Exceptional Women And Chinese Modernity, Wei Hu
Beyond Life And Death Images Of Exceptional Women And Chinese Modernity, Wei Hu
Theses and Dissertations
The turning of the twentieth century witnessed the dramatic transformation of Chinese society. In searching for a modern nation, Chinese women, in many political and literary works, were portrayed as both the emblem of China’s problems and the crucial solution. Despite growing scholarly interest in the entanglement between Chinese nationalist and feminist discourses, much remains to be explored, especially from the perspective of how Chinese people approached their own past and tradition. My project will approach these discourses via the question of women from the non-Western perspective by exploring the images of “exceptional woman” (nü haojie 女豪傑) in literary narratives …
Familial Betrayal And Trauma In Select Plays Of Shakespeare, Racine, And The Corneilles, Lynn Kramer
Familial Betrayal And Trauma In Select Plays Of Shakespeare, Racine, And The Corneilles, Lynn Kramer
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation I will argue that familial betrayal is a central element in sixteenth-century British tragedy and seventeenth-century French tragedy. Family relationships help to define who the characters are and provide a point of identification between the audience and the play. This identification, as Aristotle argues, is necessary for the arousal of pity and fear and thus creates the possibility of catharsis. Fear is a key component of psychological trauma. This is the main link between Aristotle’s theories and modern trauma theory but there are other overlapping ideas that form a basis as to why old tragedies still resonate …
The Development Of ‘Meaning’ In Literary Theory: A Comparative Critical Study, Mahmoud Mohamed Ali Ahmad Elkordy
The Development Of ‘Meaning’ In Literary Theory: A Comparative Critical Study, Mahmoud Mohamed Ali Ahmad Elkordy
Theses and Dissertations
This research project studies different approaches to the question of meaning in literary texts in medieval Islamic critical traditions and modern Western literary criticism. Based on a comparative analysis, the dissertation attempts to explain each theory in its own terms, to find the commonalities and differences of the handling of such a question by literary theories, to establish a dialogue between the theories to understand them better and in wider terms. Thus, the dissertation also analyzes some texts by looking at them through the lenses of different theories.
Evil Men Have No Songs: The Terrorist And Literatuer Boris Savinkov, 1879-1925, Irina Vasilyeva Meier
Evil Men Have No Songs: The Terrorist And Literatuer Boris Savinkov, 1879-1925, Irina Vasilyeva Meier
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation is devoted to the works of the legendary terrorist mastermind Boris Savinkov (1879-1925), who planned notorious political assassinations at the turn of the twentieth century even as he took part in the leading literary circles of his day. This work situates Savinkov in what Mikhail Bakhtin defines as a “chronotope,” a time-space module that I label “Revolutionary Apocalypse.” I compare the development of revolutionary myths of martyrdom in Revolutionary Russia for both Savinkov and his contemporary Maria Spiridonova to analyze the redefined notions of love, truth, and sacrifice among the Russian intelligentsia that turned these Russian revolutionary terrorists …
The Trialectics Of Transnational Migrant Women’S Literature In The Writing Of Edwidge Danticat And Julia Alvarez, Jennifer Lynn Karash-Eastman
The Trialectics Of Transnational Migrant Women’S Literature In The Writing Of Edwidge Danticat And Julia Alvarez, Jennifer Lynn Karash-Eastman
Theses and Dissertations
While a considerable critical field has developed around US Latino writing, due to the historical, cultural and sociolinguistic barriers between the two nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, critical investigations of these migrant literatures are often not bridged, but rather isolated into respective Haitian-American and Dominican-American designations. My comparative, critical framework defines the interactions between gender, culture and the diverse spatial coordinates from the island of Hispaniola, the Atlantic and the United States. The carefully differentiated objects of study that I articulate in each chapter offer a desirable interdisciplinary orientation inclusive of gender theory as well as cultural studies. …