Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

The Sensible Body Of The Female Reader, Anoosheh Ghaderi

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …

The Subversive Power Of Signifying And The Ambivalence Of Modernity In Richard Wright's Native Son, Lahoussine Hamdoune

Dirassat

Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) is more often than not dealt with as a distinguished instance of African-American protest literature being lacking in terms of literariness and narrative techniques. While it is true that protest literature’s overemphasis on the socio-political is usually costly, at least as much as the authenticity of the characters and the literariness of a literary work are concerned, the many readings of Native Son looking at it almost exclusively within this frame hardly do justice to the work. A return to Henry Louis Gates's theory of Signifying posited in his seminal book The Signifying Monkey: …

The Representation Of Moroccan Otherness In Edith Wharton's In Morocco, Khadija Belhiah

Dirassat

Edith Wharton's In Morocco, written in 1920, is considered one of the classics of American travel literature. It is Wharton's account of her one-month journey through Moroccoin1917.In this book, which relies on colonial French historiography, Wharton explores Morocco and its people, recording her encounter with and impressions of a non-Western culture. She describes Moroccan cities and architecture, provides accounts of religious ceremonies and ritual dances, and depicts the Sultan's palaces and the "mysterious» world of his harem. As a travel narrative dealing with Morocco, Wharton's In Morocco is representative of Orientalist discourse and is informed by an intent to see …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Comparative Cultural Studies

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.

Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …

Surplus Rebellion, Human Capital, And The Ends Of Study In Chile, 2011, D. Bret Leraul

Faculty Journal Articles

This article traces a dual representational crisis, at once mimetic and political, coursing through Chile’s 2011 movement and its post-Transition conjuncture. It aims to reconfigure the archive of 2011 in order to release its radical potential from the obfuscating solutions offered by the alliance of its dominant academic and journalistic reception and Chile’s elitist, liberal democracy, and to understand why in 2016 –five years since 2011 and a decade since the outbreak of student unrest– Chilean people continue to defy the state.Through a close reading of an anonymous pamphlet defending the violent, masked protestors known as encapuchados, I argue …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

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 …

Uncharted Space: The End Of Narrative, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

In the twentieth century painters, playwrights, and novelists began to produce non-representational works that eschewed narrative and were entirely devoted to an achromatic colorscape. Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative overturns critical exegesis that interprets these works as negative or as the «end» of art by offering a new way to think about and to articulate works devoid of narrative and color. When understood from a different critical perspective, art and literature produced at the end of narrative challenge our traditional ways of interpreting all art production. Nominated for Rene Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

The Heart Of Light: Rights, Justice, And Representations Of History And Conflict In The Congo, Nion T. Mcevoy Jr.

Senior Projects Spring 2012

In this paper I explore different representation of history and conflict in the Congo, through the lens of the Kony 2012 video released by Invisible Children. I look at the means and ends of representations, and what they tell us about rights, and justice.

La Représentation Du Politique Dans La Littérature Gabonaise, Jean René Ovono Mendame

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

From which viewpoint do Gabonese writers relate to the realities of the political and social policies of their country and what place do political players occupy in their works? Why do they hesitate so much to denounce the problems of their society? Why is there such a pronounced silence within their literary works? This article raises these delicate and complex questions. The report produced on the evolution of Gabonese writing affirms that writers’ silence is the product of self-censorship. They are condemned to fear saying anything, not only because of potential reprisals, but because they are, for the majority, political …

La Traversée Des Savoirs Dans Le Roman Africain, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The African novel refers to a socio-political as well as a literary History, but does so with guile, expressing this History from an angle. Referring constantly to the social and human sciences, to the point of competing with them, the novel vacillates between dependency and autonomy. It thus proposes a specific knowledge of society, its functioning, and the individuals who constitute it. However, its true intention is not to copy the world, nor even to imitate its life, but to provide a miniaturized replica of both, and set itself up as a vast metonymic duplicate of a certain universe.