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Diasporic Strangers In The Mirror: Ever-Evolving Identity And The Immigrant Experience, Meriam Metoui

Theses and Dissertations

This text explores the disparity between immigrant parents and their American born or raised children and show the chasm of misunderstanding between generations navigating different national and cultural contexts found in novels such as The Joy Luck Club, The Namesake, Americanah, and Everything I Never Told You.

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Short Stories Of Latin America From Antilles To Southern Cone, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

The study of the short story genre in Latin American literature. Literary currents in 20th century, from the Vanguards to The Boom, fiction of post dictatorships, exile, and entry into the 21st century.

The Subject Of Jouissance: The Late Lacan And Gender And Queer Theories, Frederic C. Baitinger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Subject of Jouissance argues that Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis, far from being heteronormative, offers a notion of identity that deconstructs gender as a social norm, and opens onto a non-normative theory of the subject (of jouissance) that still remains to be fully explored by feminist, gender, and queer scholars. Drawing mostly on the later Lacan, The Subject of Jouissance shows that by locating the identity of the subject in the singularity of its bodily mode of enjoyment (that Lacan calls “jouissance”), and not in the Imaginary illusions of the ego, nor in the Symbolic social structures, Lacan fosters thinking …

Working Lives: Artistic Solidarity In Revolutionary Peru (1960–1980), Jose R. Chavarry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the discourses and experiences of cultural work as a form of intellectual and artistic solidarity in Peru during the 1960s and 1970s. Amid the broader Latin American and global spirit of revolution, anti-imperialism and Third World liberation, in Peru these decades saw a radical transformation in society where rural and urban masses rose against a traditional political and socioeconomic system that maintained colonial structures of domination and oppression of marginalized populations. In an attempt to rein in this desborde popular, as it became known, the nationalist and populist Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces and a …

Una Enunciación Intersticial: La Poética Del Destierro De Carlos De Rokha, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Una enunciación intersticial: la poética del destierro de Carlos de Rokha

The era of the Chilean vanguard, in early twentieth century, is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest and study. In particular, the popular uprisings of 1938 and significant advancement of women in cultural and social terms are pivotal, yet it was also the stage of state-sanctioned repression and violence, and in the ensuing decades, persecution of activists and marginalized individuals. My study of the work of the surrealist poet, Carlos de Rokha (1920-1962), highlights the close relationship in the creation of the literary canon with the definition of a …

“Whispers Out Of Time”: Memorializing (Self-) Portraits In The Work Of 
John Berryman, John Ashbery, Anne Carson, And Nan Goldin, Andrew D. King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis documents four distinct post-WWII North American writers and artists—the poet John Berryman, the poet John Ashbery, the classicist and writer Anne Carson, and the photographer Nan Goldin—who expanded traditional definitions and practices of portraiture. Their works—The Dream Songs, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Nox, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (and “The Cookie Portfolio”)—developed new ways of representing human subjectivity and the self that integrated the influences of Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, but were not defined by these movements. In an era when notions of autonomous art and human identity became fractured, they picked up the …

Reversing Borrón Y Cuenta Nueva: The Curative Power Of Family Memory In The Novels Of Loida Maritza Perez And Nelly Rosario, Ivonne Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I examine two novels, Geographies of Home by Loida Maritza Perez and Song of the Water Saints by Nelly Rosario, written by Dominican American authors, to determine how they present identity with relation to family history in conjunction with an analysis of my life and the circumstances that have helped define my identity. I explore how the characters in the texts are affected by the loss of family history, the role that gaze and family memory play in reclaiming that which is lost, and how these all shape identity. The families in the novels seem destined to lead desolate lives; …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.