Comparative Literature Commons^™

Virgil's Shipwreck: How A Roman Poet Made And Unmade The Epic In The West, Jesse Bryan Burchfield Russell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We are still feeling the effects of the Second World War sixty-seven years after its conclusion. Much of post-war thinking has attempted to sort through the roots of the totalitarian ideology that developed in Europe and caused such massive destruction. Marxist and Frankfurt School critics have demonstrated that the roots of Fascism go deeper in the West than the twentieth century and are part and parcel of the West’s combination of technology and myth. Additionally, Post-Colonial critics have pointed out that the horrors of this war were also perpetrated throughout Europe’s colonial endeavors and have undertaken the task of deconstructing …

Trans-Atlantic Circulation Of Black Tropes: Èsù And The West African Griot As Poetic References For Liberation In Cultures Of The African Diaspora, Jean-Baptiste Meunier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, under the direction of Dr Pius Ngandu Nkashama explores the spread of African rhetorical tropes in the Atlantic world. Building on Henry Louis Gates theory of Signifying, I use the West African God of fate Èsù and the West African cultural figure of the griot as cultural referents for the persistence of African tropes in the New World and their subsequent dissemination throughout the Atlantic world. Analyzing those two West African referents and their connections to New World cultures such as Afro-Brazilian capoeira angola, hip hop and African-American poetry, I attempt to demonstrate the centrality of the trope …

Bibliography For The Study Of Text And Image In Modern European Culture, Natasha Grigorian

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

The Strange Career Of The Biblia Rabbinica Among Christian Hebraists, 1517–1620, Stephen G. Burnett

Department of Classics and Religious Studies: Faculty Publications

The Rabbinic Bible became a standard reference tool, above all for Protestant Hebraists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It contained not only the Hebrew Bible text, but also Aramaic-language Targums (periphrastic translations of the biblical text, mostly dating from before 500) and Jewish biblical commentaries written between ca. 1100 and 1500. To use these works required that a Christian Hebraist know not only the language of the Bible, but also Targumic Aramaic and medieval Hebrew, which was rather different from biblical or mishnaic Hebrew. For Christian scholars who mastered these languages and were able to read these different texts, …

Carribean Folk: Engendering The Color Politics Of Claude Mckay's Banana Botttom (1933), Charmaine Dacosta

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2012)

Quidditas

Lesley Skousen

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

The Signifying Power Of Pearl, Jane Beal

Quidditas

The spiritual language, Ovidian love stories, and use of liturgical time in Pearl all invite allegorical interpretations of the poem. While there is clearly a literal, elegiac sense to the poem, there are also allegorical meanings. This makes perfect sense in light of the tradition of four-fold scriptural and literary interpretation in the Middle Ages, which the Pearl-Poet clearly used to understand biblical parables and compose his poetic masterpiece. The poet’s use of metaphoric language, memory of the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice and Pygmalion and Galatea, and astute interweaving of parables from the church liturgy alongside invocations of the …

Capturing The Imagination Of A Distracted Audience, David Paradis

Quidditas

We compete for students’ attention. Surrounded by smart phones, tablets, and laptops, we compete for their attention, sometimes in the classroom but definitely outside of it. To combat this deluge of distractions, assigned readings must contain attractive content. The challenge can be particularly acute in pre-modern history classes, partly because the language and the content of primary sources, even when translated into clear, modern prose, is often unfathomable to readers accustomed to reading Sparknotes or Wikipedia. One potential solution to this challenge is Maurice Keen’s Outlaws of Medieval Legend (rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2001).

Approaches To The Atonement In The Mystery Plays, Adam C. Wolfe

Quidditas

The English Corpus Christi plays were a vibrant expression of late medieval Christianity, but they did not survive the Reformation. Many Protestant reformers opposed religious drama altogether, but there were some attempts by reformers to edit the plays and recast them in a Protestant mold, attempts which were ultimately unsuccessful. This paper examines one such attempt and finds that the problem went far beyond obvious references to, and representations of, specifically Catholic beliefs. Focusing on representations of the Atonement in the York and Towneley plays, I found at least four distinct theological approaches to this central concept of Christian theology, …

The Big Green Mama-Mind-Fuck Machine, Byron W. Cross

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

PREFACE

"so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens."

-W. C. Williams

The Big Green Mama-mind-fuck Machine was born in a debris field of violence, of conflict. I write mostly from an autobiographical place and a debris field is the perfect way to describe the careful stitching together of my experiences, taking a memory and extracting the emotional boom it left behind. I take the piece and spin it in zero gravity, carefully examining it. For this reason, writing an Ars Poetica without "I" would be an impossibility for me. So, after …

"What Shall We Use To Fill The Empty Spaces?": Displacement In Frank Norris's Mcteague, Jennifer Bugna Lambeth

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Author's abstract: McTeague, Frank Norris's Naturalistc text written in 1899, depicts the corruption of a California couple due to influences outside of their control. In positioning Trina McTeague as a woman unable to identify with either of the two major feminine ideologies of the day, the Angel in the House and the New Woman, this paper examines her identity as conflicted because of this lack of autonomy. Her failure to identify herself leads to a mental break that is reflected in the domestic spaces she inhabits. The places she lives each become smaller and dirtier reflecting her diminished mental capacity. …

(Re)Forming Italians: Children's Literature In Italy, 1929-1939, Marisa Giorgi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the centrality of children's literature under Fascism as a tool to bring about the ultimate goal of forming the "new" Italian. This project examines the relationship between children's literature, the creation of culture and the transmission of ideology in Fascist Italy. I chose the period 1929-1939 because this decade encompasses the years the regime actively sought consolidation of power and consensus, as well as the years of the fascistization of Italian schools. These novels are conduits of fascist ideology veiled as adventure stories, historical novels, bildungsroman or romantic fiction for children and young adults and deserve …

Short Story Cycles Of The Americas, A Transitional Post-Colonial Form: A Study Of V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, Ernest Gaines's Bloodline, And Garbriel Garcia Marquez's Los Funerales De Mama Grande, Benjamin Sands Yves Forkner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of three short story cycles which are representative of the genre in the Americas: Miguel Street (1959) by V.S. Naipaul, Los Funerales de Mama Grande (1962) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bloodline (1968) by Ernest Gaines. I analyze each of these cycles in depth concentrating on the structure, the order of the stories, and unifying elements such as characters, themes, internal symbolism, place, language and events, in order to demonstrate that these short story collections are indeed short story cycles. I examine these cycles in light of the two themes or factors out of which …

Southern Bellas: The Construction Of Mestiza Identity In Southern Narratives, Wendy Aimee Braun

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project analyzes representations and self-representations of Mestizas living in areas of the Deep South that lack a significant Latino presence. Incorporating a range of media, I take a comparative approach to Southern cultural narratives and propose a re-reading of these works through an examination of identity formation and cultural negotiation. By centering the Southern Mestiza, this dissertation advances concepts of intersectionality to address the role of region, as well as race and gender, in the representation and experiences of women often overlooked in Southern and U.S. Latino studies. The Introductory chapter summarizes the theoretical framework for the study, including …

Revisiting History Through Crime Fiction: Shiono Nanami’S Scarlet Venice In The Renaissance Trilogy Of Murder, Ikuho Amano

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

In her Renaissance Trilogy of Murder (1988), Shiono Nanami (塩野七生, 1937- ) rejuvenates the classical genre of historical crime fiction, dismantling a canonical outlook of late Renaissance Italy. As historiographer of Ancient Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and the Mediterranean naval epic, Shiono achieved literary stardom in Japan in the 1980s, and has been internationally known for her pragmatist approaches to history and contemporary politics. Her writing has reassessed established history from the non-Western and non-Christian viewpoints. Most notably, her magnum opus, Rōmajin no monogatari (Res GestaePopuli Romani—Tales of the Romans) (published 1992-2006) tirelessly describes the empire’s politics, beginning …

Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.

Introduction To New Trends In Iberian Galician Comparative Literature, María Teresa Vilariño Picos, Anxo Abuín González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Possibilities And Limits Of Comparative Literature Today, Darío Villanueva

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Possibilities and Limits of Comparative Literature Today," Darío Villanueva traces the itinerary of comparative literature over the last fifty years comparative literature in its various stages. The first of these confronted two options seen in a way as irreconcilable: the almost exclusive connexion with literary history or its identification with the theory of literature. Villanueva outlines the consolidation of the "new paradigm" which overcomes those contradictions, thanks to the methodological cooperation between comparative literature and the systemic theories of literature, and thanks, as well, to a return to philology as an adequate practice of reading. In addition, …

Literary Geography And Comparative Literature, César Domínguez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Geography and Comparative Literature" César Domínguez analyzes the relevance of political and linguistic frameworks for comparative literary historiography in the context of the European Union. Domínguez's discussion is based on the notion of geoculture whose theorization from Immanuel Wallerstein's perspective presents paradigms of interest to comparative literature. The idea of literary geography is conceived as a unit for analyzing diverse stages of the interliterary process. Thus, within the framework of the current renaissance of Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur, the phenomena of the literatures of (im)migration, exile, and literary diglossia represent challenges for the contextualization and …

About Literary Systems And National Literatures, Elias J. Torres Feijó

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "About Literary Systems and National Literatures," Elias Torres J. Feijó offers a polysystemic analysis with examples from the Iberian Peninsula. He argues that a community's literature can be understood as a) the gathering of so-called literary activities, which take place in a social space or b) something that identifies certain characteristics of a part or the whole of the members in a given social space. For his analysis, Torres Feijó employs Itamar Even-Zohar's notion of polysystem because it allows us to interpret each system generated by members of a given community and its delimitation, differentiation, and integration …