Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

The Romani People In The European Cultural Imagination: Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée And Virginia Woolf, Nadya Siyam

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly literature on Roma is scarce compared to other racial groups as a lack of academic interest, financial limitations, and other social and political factors has constrained it. This resulted in a cross-cultural circulation of misinformation about Romani people and the reproduction of Romani myths and stereotypes in fiction. This project aims to analyze selected literary works on Gypsies from three Eastern and Western European countries and two periods to unpack the cultural and political roots of Romani literary misrepresentation. This research employs a range of theoretical frameworks chosen to put the Gypsy protagonists under maximum spotlight without unnecessary repetition, …

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

The Faustian Deal: What Is Good And Evil?, Jaclyn Elmquist

English Honors Theses

How is the “deal with the devil” is portrayed in contemporary films? This essay compares how the original Faustian deal informs modern-day portrayals. Thus, I examine how devils were first represented in early works such as The Faustbuch, Mary of Nijmegen, and Goethe’s Faustus. These depictions and their historical context provide the basis for my research. I compare these works to the films, Rosemary’s Baby, Wall Street, and Sweet Smell of Sucess. In the mentioned films, the main characters make deals with a devil or demon for wealth, success, or fame. I explore how the Faustian character of each film …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

Translatio Materiae: Spenser, The Humanists, And A Poetics Of Matter, Victoria Florio Pipas

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In this paper, I propose that sixteenth-century humanist descriptions of Rome’s decay, together with paradigms of translatio imperii and studii, shaped Edmund Spenser’s poetic conceptualization of matter. I identify a new translatio in Spenser’s corpus, translatio materiae—matter’s movement or change—born from Spenser’s contact with Joachim du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1553). Translatio materiae runs through Spenser’s corpus as depicted matter’s resurrection from states of decay into material afterlives as narrative object or poetic device. Where early humanists, with recourse to the division between earthly mutability and heavenly permanence, lament Rome, Spenser favors matter’s potential for …

Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The legend of King Arthur and his knights of the round table is one of the best-known stories in the Western world. Generally people tend to associate Arthurian legend with fifteenth-century English writing or French romances, but in reality, Arthurian legend has its origins in Brittonic oral tradition. Merlin, specifically, represents the concepts of Brittonic paganism and wildness more than any other Arthurian character. The changes made in the character and the narrative of Merlin, from Brittonic legend to Latin writing and then to French romances, reflect a political and cultural shift in Britain and France. An examination of Merlin …

The Translator-Function: Translating Bande-Dessinée For The Anglophone Reader, Ryan C. Gomez

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis focuses on the question of translator roles in literary theory. I characterize these roles between positions that have traditionally been described by literary and philosophical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. By examining the products of translation (French-language bandes-dessinées and their English translations), and considering critical literary and translation theories, I demonstrate the unique position held by translators and their work through the proposal of what I call the translator-function (modeled after Foucault’s author-function). The principal aim of this thesis is to problematize preconceived ideas about translators and to examine the unique position of the …

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 …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

Children Of A One-Eyed God: Impairment In The Myth And Memory Of Medieval Scandinavia, Michael David Lawson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using the lives of impaired individuals catalogued in the Íslendingasögur as a narrative framework, this study examines medieval Scandinavian social views regarding impairment from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Beginning with the myths and legends of the eddic poetry and prose of Iceland, it investigates impairment in Norse pre-Christian belief; demonstrating how myth and memory informed medieval conceptualizations of the body. This thesis counters scholarly assumptions that the impaired were universally marginalized across medieval Europe. It argues that bodily difference, in the Norse world, was only viewed as a limitation when it prevented an individual from fulfilling roles that …

Postcolonial Trauma In The Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, Rosario Pollicino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a …

Maidens In Maizes: Johnson, Grimms, D'Aulnoy, Hannah M. Johnson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College. A German Studies and Written Arts joint project, with a collection of original fairy tales as well as an in-depth analysis of female agency, female mutilation, religious influence, and language within the fairy tales of Grimms and Madame d'Aulnoy.

Desire In The Bildungsroman: Construction And Pursuit Of An Ideal Self Through The Ideal Other, Ethan Watson

Honors Theses

The Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” has remained popular since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. I examine this novel, as well as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Walter Moers’s Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, focusing specifically on the relationships between the three male protagonists and the women that they encounter throughout their lives. Using the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary critic René Girard, and feminist philosopher Judith Butler, I draw parallels between and contribute to the scholarly conversation of all three works (or in the case of Moers's recent fantasy, Rumo, begin …

Development Of A Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, And Cosmopolitan Lines Of Inquiry To Reveal The Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, And Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Ciamparella

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach …

Signor Mio Carissimo: A Theatrical Analysis And Translation Of Michelangelo’S Love Letters To Tommaso Dei Cavalieri, Miles Edmonds Messinger

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts and The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

El Spill De Jaume Roig. Estudio De Relaciones Semióticas Con La Picaresca, Raul Macias Cotano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spill is a literary work written in the Catalan dialect of Valencia in 1460 by Jaume Roig, a prestigious doctor whose personal and public life is well known. The book presents numerous parallels with Lazarillo de Tormes, the 1554 novel written in Spanish (or “Castilian”) that has traditionally been considered the start of the picaresque genre in Spain. These similarities are so striking that it makes critics wonder if Spill may be a precedent of Lazarillo de Tormes. This dissertation studies the possible relations between those two books. The similarities are mostly thematic, for which the lens …

Violence And Edification In 19th Century Fiction: An Analysis Of The Novels Of Charles Dickens And Leo Tolstoy, Caroline Fassett

Honors Theses

This Thesis argues that violence is essential to the structures and plots of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities and of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is particularly essential to the edification, or the moral and intellectual improvement, of principal characters in these four novels. Additionally, this Thesis contends that this edification is both anticipated and reinforced by the novelists’ incorporation of counterparts whose demeanor and/or narrative overtly mirror that of the principal characters.

To support this argument, I bring the theory of Thomas Carlyle into conversation with the novels of Dickens …

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 …

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …

Documenting The (Un)Documented: Diasporic Ecuadorian Narratives In Southern/Mediterranean Europe, Esther A. Cuesta

Doctoral Dissertations

For several decades, Ecuadorian, U.S. American, and European social scientists have studied Ecuadorian migration to the European Union. Yet little academic research has been devoted to the comparative study of literary and filmic representations of diasporic Ecuadorians. This disparity between social science and literary studies research is especially evident in scholarship published in English, a gap this dissertation proposes to fill. I investigate the discourses, cultural production, representations, and self-representations of diasporic Ecuadorians in Southern/Mediterranean Europe, specifically in Spain and Italy, where the largest diasporic communities of Ecuadorians in the European Union reside. I focus on a selection of works …

Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, And Perception In European Literature, 1860-1900, Janice Y. Zehentbauer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses upon the ways in which nineteenth-century physicians in the emergent field of neurology conceptualized and catalogued the neurological condition, migraine, and the ways in which European literary texts reimagined and interrogated such medical classifications. A recognized condition for hundreds of years, migraine in the nineteenth century became pathological; migraineurs became a “nervous” modern figure that haunted medicine and literary fiction. Anxieties regarding the construction of fragmented vision, bodies, gender, and consciousness render the migraine figure a relevant symbol for the modern era. The nineteenth-century medical treatises by Jean-Martin Charcot, Edward Liveing, and Hubert Airy reveal that a …

Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation - An Exploration Of The English Version Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kajsa Paludan

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This thesis sets out to explore the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States by examining the substantial changes made to Men Who Hate Women, including the change in the book’s title in English to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. My thesis focuses in particular on changes in the depiction of the female protagonist: Lisbeth Salander. Unfortunately we do not have access to translator Steven T. Murray’s original translation, though we know that the English publisher and rights holder Christopher MacLehose chose to enhance Larsson’s work in order to make the novel more interesting for English-speaking …

Funny Or French: How Humor Varies Across Cultures, Audrey Mefford

Honors Theses

This paper examines the works of four cartoonists (Saul Steinberg, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Roz Chast, and Claire Bretécher) in order to determine similarities and differences between French humor and American humor. It incorporates compiled data from each of the above artist's lifetime works, as well as knowledge from the fields of cartoons and comics, sociology, and cross-cultural psychology, to answer the question "What is funny?" in each of these two disparate cultures.

La Muerte, La Memoria Y La Filosofía Existencial En La Literatura Testimonial Pos-Dictatorial De Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún Y Jacobo Timerman, Andrew Mcnair

Senior Theses and Projects

What effect does the ubiquity of death in a traumatic experience have on an individual's memory and soul, and how is this manifested in one's written testimony? Through the analysis of their philosophical introspection, the testimonies of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, Jorge Semprún's Literature or Life, and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number meditate on the atrocities they experienced during Levi and Semprún's incarceration under the Nazi regime in Europe between 1942 and 1945, and Timerman's imprisonment under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The …

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Gothic Cosmos: Instances And Implications Of Medieval, Sameeah Muhammad

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.