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University of South Carolina

Theses and Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

2017

Arts and Humanities, Comparative Literature

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From Choc En Retour To Nomadisme En Fleche, Paul T. Mcelhinny May 2017

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 May 2017

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 May 2017

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 …


Archival Resistance: A Comparative Reading Of Ulysses And One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Maria-Josee Mendez Jan 2017

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 Jan 2017

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 …


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 Jan 2017

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 Jan 2017

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 …