Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …

Strange Genre-Related Loops In A Novel-Short Story: The Tension Between The Genres And Their Cultural Context, Orna Levin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The goal of the current study was to examine the strange genre-related loops in the novel The Short Story Master, by Maya Arad (2009), through the tension between the two genres represented in the text and their cultural contexts. The plot of the novel tells of the professional and personal crisis of the master of the short story, who failed in his mission to write a novel. The text hints to the reader that the central conflict that moves the plot along is neither romantic nor existential, but rather genre-related, and thus the entire work is a manifestation of …

Visión Del/De Lo Marroquí En Isaac Chocrón, Hassan Amrani Meizi

Dirassat

The subject of this article is to study the vision of Morocco in the novel Rempase en caso de incendio by Isaac Serfaty .and to know character’s of Hispano-American which extends beyond the modernist literary tradition.

Review Of The Altruists, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

A book review of the debut novel by Andrew Ridker.

Review Of Such Good Work, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Agency And Political Engagement In Gide And Barrault's Post-War Theatrical Adaptation Of Kafka's The Trial, Yevgenya Strakovsky

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Agency and Political Engagement in Gide and Barrault's Post-war Theatrical Adaptation of Kafka's The Trial" Yevgenya Strakovsky considers the political themes of André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault's Le Procès (The Trial, 1947), the first theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess (The Trial, 1914). Strakovsky demonstrates that Le Procès, written and staged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, levels a critique against the passive complicity of citizens in unjust persecution in both its script and its staging. The paper also considers the elements of Kafka's prose that lend themselves to …

Todas Las Muertes De Lázaro, Diego Murcia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

TODAS LAS MUERTES DE LÁZARO es una novela negra que habla de corrupción, ansias de poder, ambición y decepción. En este libro, el tema de la muerte es una excusa para hablar de todo un paí­s, El Salvador, y sus contradicciones a través del cinismo, el humor y el escepticismo. Su personaje principal, El Pí­tbul, es una representación del desamparo generalizado que el ciudadano común tiene de las instituciones del Estado. Este detective se embarca -por orden presidencial- en una búsqueda misteriosa que le requiere dar con un amo del disfraz. A medida que el investigador se interna en los …

Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Published in Colombia in 1989, but neglected until the author’s later distinction, Laura Restrepo’s first novel, Isle of Passion, focuses on historical facts, as well as on the issues that arise when the impact of events is articulated in official discourse. This study—drawing from Walter Mignolo’s idea of decolonial theory—explores how Restrepo’s attempt to rewrite history following “an-other logic, an-other language, an-other thinking” contributes to the decolonization of knowledge, being, community interests, and cultural heritage. The novel’s plot centers on a minor event in international history: the territorial dispute over the island of Clipperton, which was encountered by an …

Gérard Bessette (1920-2005): A Monstre Sacré In French Canadian Literature, Steven Urquhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines Gérard Bessette’s relative marginalization in French Canadian literature by means of rereading his first novel, La Bagarre (1958) in terms of its monstrous aesthetic and its rapport with subsequent novels, notably Le Semestre (1979). Bessette’s first novel allows us not only to understand the deviant nature of his aesthetic and its evolution, but also how it relates to his individualistic and transgressive position with the French Canadian literary institution in which he embodies a monstre sacré, an author and a character of sorts, who is at once revered and cursed.

Writers, Rebels, And Cannibals: Léonora Miano’S Rendering Of Africa In L’Intérieur De La Nuit, Magali Compan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Léonora Miano’s first novel L’Intérieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing.

This article considers the interviews …

Agustín Gómez-Arcos, Eyes Open, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The last time I saw Agustin Gómez-Arcos was July of 1997. He was in the midst of an extended summer sojourn at the home of his friends Miguel and Pilar in Tarragona. I remember wandering with him through the streets of this Catalan coastal city, accompanied by Miguel and Pilar's young sons. With Agustín as our guide we toured the city's Roman ruins, and he showed us his favorite mosaics at the local archeological museum. Agustín, as I remember him, was filled with vitality, delighting in the everyday activities of summer, buying fresh strawberries and tomatoes at an outdoor market …

Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form…

Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …

Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this article I study how Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador proposes to deconstruct indigenist narrative and promotes the assimilation of Indian cultures under the model of modernity. In this sense, the novel El hablador is written as a discourse of conquest in which the construction of the self—through the evocation of various oppositions—represents an allegory of modern nation. I begin my article with the analysis of the notion of discourse of conquest, as well as one of its most reiterated images of power, the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. I follow this with an analysis of the oppositions through which the representation …

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

Cardinal's The Words To Say It: The Words To Reproduce Mother, Eilene Hoft-March

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Words to Say it, an autobiographical novel by Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, earned praise for the accuracy with which it documents a classic psychoanalysis. Quickly sketched, the plot seems to suggest that the separation from an overpowering mother is effected by paternal language and phallic law—the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. In its reconsideration of the Oedipal, this essay explores Irigaray's idea of the ambiguities of separation from mother and the possibility that the story of (feminine) subjectivity begins with the mother, begins with affiliation and affirmation even as it speaks of separateness. From this …

The Conspiracy Of The Miscellaneous In Foucault's Pendulum, Ken Kirkpatrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like Name of the Rose, Foucault 's Pendulum grows out of and comments on Umberto Eco's theoretical work. Eco's decision to turn to a conspiracy, rather than a straight detective format for his second novel fits with his recent concern about how interpretative communities function in a period of divisive, diffuse critical theory. Yet Foucault's Pendulum does not merely amplify or dramatize his position; rather, it undermines it by becoming excessively involved in generating conspiracy. It is a satire in which the thing satirized proves more interesting and engaging than the satirical position. Nevertheless, Eco does raise concerns about …

Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In pursuing the relation of Sea of Lentils (1979) to the Spanish American literary canon, I argue that while Benítez-Rojo's novel did not fall into the category of the already canonized—and therefore was spared a parricidal gesture of the Post-Boom writers—neither did it belong amidst the previously marginalized texts. I suggest that Sea of Lentils concentrates its internal critique of language and representation around the process of remembering in a manner that is radically at odds not only with the "traditional" historical novel, but with the official voice of the ascendant testimonio as well. Moreover, the notion of memory as …

Ideology And Structure In Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De La Memoria, Gustavo Pellón

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article studies the most recent novel by Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli from the point of view of its polyphonic structure. Santo Oficio is compared to one of its models, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and the respective modern and postmodern aesthetics ofboth novels are discussed. Giardinelli's approach in this ambitious novel is contrasted with that of major authors of the Latin American Boom. A family tree of the Domeniconelle family, the protagonists of Santo Oficio, is included.

Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps the most rewarding critical approach to the novels of Juan Benet is one that encompasses the irrational and seeks to reveal the mysterious— one that can be closely identified with the notion of the fantastic. The view of the fantastic developed in the present study is based on a synthetic modification of the precepts of Todorov and Rabkin, and places emphasis on the hesitation of the reader when confronted with a diametric reversal of the laws of the text. Both the literary theory and prose fiction of Benet can be closely linked to the fantastic: the former through Benet's …

Politics And The New African Novel: A Study Of The Fiction Of Francis Bebey, W. Curtis Schade

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From its inception African fiction has been strongly marked by political themes. In the late 1950's the virulent satire of Mongo Béti and Ferdinand Oyono stated the case against the denigration of African values inherent in all aspects of the colonial system. Their style and message subsequently gave way to novels focusing upon the drama of the transition of power at the moment of Independence. Whether optimistic or disillusioned, many of these novels featured real events and people, often thinly disguised, and sought to give an «inside» picture of that historical moment. Other tendencies developed in the late 60's, most …

Sembène Ousmane's Xala: The Use Of Film And Novel As Revolutionary Weapon, Kenneth Harrow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sembène Ousmane's Xala was written as a novel and made into a film in 1974. It is a biting attack upon the newly risen bourgeois class that has ascended to power and wealth in Senegal since independence. The ideological framework of Xala rests upon Marxist assumptions adapted to and modified by the circumstances in Africa. The distinctively Senegalese features which mark Sembène's portrayal include Muslim and traditional religious beliefs which form the basis of the class oppression and the sexism depicted in Xala. They also supply the title to the work since xala means impotency in Wolof, and it …