Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist the formula …

Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems …

From Dispossession To The Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity In Cobra, El Obsceno Pájaro De La Noche And The Unnamable, Sandra Paola Preciado

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The following text engages the concepts of the grotesque, the self, and language through a reading of three novels: Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche. The novels introduced here find themselves in the position of contributing to the theory of the self, of language and the grotesque through their own experimentations with these concepts, and whose method and creativity align with particularly critical movements in theory, including but not limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Just as theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and René Descartes engage with …

Organizations Of Knowledge About The Orient In German And British Romanticism 1780-1820, Naqaa Abbas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the various literary modes in which German and British Romantic literature and culture organize knowledge about Islam and the Middle East. I explore how the Orient exceeds and troubles the “place” it is given in a historical and geographical classification systems. I argue that many Romantic writers challenge the constructedness of the Oriental narrative during their time, thus questioning what really constitutes knowledge and the limits of knowledge. In this context, I re-evaluate Edward W. Said’s socio-historical generalizations regarding Orientalism as a form of Western control over the East. While studies on Romantic Orientalism have focused on …

The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis argues that the interior space of each individual mind has infinite potentiality to do or create x new reality in one’s life via possible worlds. I use Lawrence Durrell’s short story “Zero” (1939), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as literary representations of how readers outside of the literary text share an unbreakable bond with universal space. I discuss the infinite potentiality of the finite being, and the experiential data in the process of entelechy, or epistemological maturation of the mind. I bring Leibniz’s theory of the continuum of infinitesimals …

Le Détective Biblique: Daniel, "Le Festin De Balthazar" Ou Une Histoire Souterraine Du Roman Policier, Rebecca Josephy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La problématique de cette étude s’ancre dans un constat : à la fin du XIX^e siècle et au cours du XX^e un épisode biblique dans le Livre de Daniel, mieux connu sous le titre « Le Festin de Balthazar » apparaît dans un nombre significatif de romans policiers, y compris le tout premier texte de la série Sherlock Holmes, Une étude en rouge. Que pourrait expliquer cette occurrence fréquente dans un nombre aussi canonique d’œuvres du roman policier ? « Le Festin de Balthazar », pourrait-il être considéré comme un ancêtre lointain de ce genre littéraire ? …

"I" Am Not "I" Anymore: Negation, Doubling And Identity In Roman Polanski's The Tenant And Max Frisch's Stiller, Parastoo Alaeddini

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a comparative study of Roman Polanski 1976 pyschological thriller The Tenant and Max Frisch’s 1954 novel Stiller. It explores the multi-layered and multivalent nature of the director’s film and the author’s novel by analyzing them through various theoretical lenses. While focusing on the (re)construction and destruction of the protagonists’ identities, it unfolds the multiple levels of meaning pertinent to various literary and cinematic motifs, including the double, suicide, projection, and fiction making. The first chapter explores the dynamics of the conflict between the societal and personal identities of the protagonists. The second chapter highlights the defense mechanisms- …

Les Passerelles De La Réécriture: Des Transpositions De "Soundjata" Aux Autoadaptations D'Ousmane Sembène, Elhadji Moustapha Diop

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Le présent travail porte sur une série de questions liées au transfert de formes narratives et expressives, d’un médium à un autre, d’un texte ou contexte à un autre. On suit un parcours se déclinant en deux mouvements : parti d’une discussion des théories de l’adaptation, de la réécriture, et des recherches sur la littérature orale, on en arrive à l’étude des pratiques effectives de la transposition et de l’autoadaptation. La Première Partie, « Discussions Théoriques », est consacrée à la littérature critique sur l’adaptation, y compris ses récents prolongements postmodernes et postcoloniaux. Dans la Deuxième Partie, « Études …

Cosmography And Topography: A Comparison Of André Thevet’S "Les Singularités De La France Antarctique" And Jean De Léry’S "Histoire D’Un Voyage Faict En La Terre Du Brésil", Driton Nushaj

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The works of Thevet and Léry reveal the emergence of ethnographic genres in the 16^th century as debates about religion coincided with rediscovered Greek epistemological methods and principles. A spirit of contestation based on Catholic and Huguenot rivalries motivated the two authors to write down their own historicized accounts of their travels to Fort Coligny – a French colonial outpost in Brazil – during the 1550s. Both authors describe the Tupinamba “savages” in two distinct modes of writing: topography and cosmography. I argue that Léry writes a topography of the Tupi following the distinction made by Michel de Montaigne …