Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Wailing Of The Streets: Novelistic Form And The Everyday In Voyage In The Dark And Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, Tutkunur Vatansever

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In 1911, before the increased attention to everyday life in critical theory, György Lukács contemplated the concept of trivial life and its relation to literary form. The recent theories of everyday life like that of Blanchot – emphasizing its formlessness and defiance of subjectivity – invite us to address the variance in the modernist novelistic form in the framework that Lukács outlined. In Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys and Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both published in the 1930s, the pain and suffering of everyday life on the streets diffuse into the form of …

Victimhood And Its Perversion: Masochistic Narratives And Cultural Identity In Cold War Central Europe, Katja Perat

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an analysis of the recurring trope of female masochism in Central European literary postmodernism. It investigates five foundational novels, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, written between 1961 and 1986: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Repetition, and Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The dissertation argues that these texts deploy representations of female masochism in order to frame the relationship between culture and subject-building, against the background of the region’s borderland status within the cognitive map created by the Cold War. Despite the fact that …

“Between The Bitter And The Sweet”: Longing And Intimacy In Sappho’S And June Jordan’S Love Poems, Kp Kaszubowski

2022 Symposium

“Between the bitter and the sweet”: longing and intimacy in Sappho’s and June Jordan’s love poems.

June Jordan (1936 - 2002), Jamaican-American poet, activist and educator is most known for her political poetry while the breadth of her work spans many themes. At the core of her work, she writes with a lyrical genius that shows her readers how important it is to see the core human emotions of longing and intimacy through the personal “I.” This essay draws the lines between the breadth of contemporary poet Jordan’s love poetry and the fragments of the originator of the love lyric: …

Peering Across The Filmic Cultural Boundary: An Analysis Of Societal And Gender Representation In Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) And Sholay (1975), Aditya Singh

Undergraduate Theses

In contrast to mainstream and blockbuster movies, art house and independent films are usually rooted in a particular sense of self, of culture, or of beliefs. While they may not enjoy the level of exposure or profit as their bigger budget counterparts, they are often more likely to resonate with an audience due to their more personal, less-commodified brand of storytelling. Often, when international film industries are attempting to remake foreign films, they look to these independent, original efforts, since it is unlikely that the big budget movies can be remade due to oftentimes monetary constraints alone.

There has existed …

Small Nations Writ Large: Notions Of Cosmopolitanism In Fin-De-Siècle Scotland And Flanders, Koenraad Claes

Studies in Scottish Literature

Compares relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Scotland and Belgium, through the Scottish critic William Sharp's response to the "Belgian Renascence," to the magazine La Jeune Belgique, to Flemish authors writing in French (notably the playwrights Van Lerberghe and Maeterlinck, the novelist Eekhoud, and the poet Verhaeren), contrasting that movement with the later pro-Dutch-language magazine Van Nu en Straks, and illustrating how the local and global overlapped in the rivalling cosmopolitanism of fin-de-siècle Belgium and the late-19th-century avant-garde.

Cosmopolitanism And The Scottish Working-Class Writer: John Parkinson/Yehya-En-Nasr And Islam In Ayrshire, Kirstie Blair

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the grassroots cosmopolitan and international literary interests of Scottish working-class writers, through the writing of the Scottish poet and convert to Islam John Parkinson or "Yehya-en-Nasr" (1874-1918), in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, in the monthly The Islamic World and the weekly newspaper The Crescent, as a journalist in Rangoon, and in book form, notably his Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, n.d.), arguing that Parkinson's "Muslim cosmopolitanism" and his local Ayrshire identity and contexts were inextricably intertwined.

Data-Driven Decision-Making: Using Counterfactual Predictions To Allocate Scarce Homeless Services Fairly And Efficiently, Amanda Rose Kube

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic techniques in general, provide two crucial abilities with the potential to improve decision-making in the context of allocation of scarce societal resources. They can flexibly and accurately model treatment response at the individual level, potentially allowing us to better match available resources to individuals. In addition, they can reason simultaneously about the effects of matching sets of scarce resources to populations of individuals. This thesis leverages these abilities to study algorithmic allocation of scarce societal resources in the context of homelessness. In communities throughout the United States, there is constant demand for an array …

Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Medieval alchemy was an overwhelmingly masculine practice, and its instruction books reflect the exclusivity of its practitioners. This article examines the use of secrecy and masculine discourse in a sixteenth-century Latin alchemical handbook, the Liber aureus, to demonstrate that there exists an erotically charged tension between authors and their readers. Alchemical instruction books like the Liber aureus draw upon this tension in the service of a particular kind of gatekeeping that creates hierarchies of both knowledge and alchemical practitioners. By investigating secrecy and its provocative effects both within and beyond this manuscript, I argue that alchemical instruction books’ secretive …

Sandstorm Spring 2022, Leslie Malland

Sandstorm: A Journal of Arts and Letters

Full Manuscript

The Past And Present: Issues Of Male Patriarchy Throughout Historic Literature And Dominance In Media Today, Leah Moore

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Women’s subjugation to the objectification of men is a traced theme throughout the history of Western culture. In this thesis, the attributes of the male gaze will be explored via the patriarchal pioneers of literature: Dante to Petrarch to Shakespeare. The solidification of the male gaze takes place during the late middle ages as Dante Alighieri writes an infatuated love for Beatrice throughout La Vita Nuova and Inferno, demonstrating the virgin-whore dichotomy with Francesca. Similarly, Francesco Petrarch’s poetry of Rime Sparse describes the objectification and dismantling of woman for erotic pleasure and patriarchal power. The shift from early to …

La Mutación Del Pensamiento: Las Repercusiones Filosóficas Y Literarias De Friedrich Nietzsche En La Obra De Miguel De Unamuno., Raúl E. Garriga

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first two chapters of the thesis contain a detailed study about the appropriations of two 19th century philosophical concepts that Miguel de Unamuno took from Nietzsche. The first chapter covers the idea of expulsion interna that the Basque philosopher attributes to Nietzsche and how that indication is systematized in a literary theory about writing that eventually will end up altering both of Unamuno’s essays and novels during this period. The second chapter also starts in the final years of the 19th century but is focused entirely on the dynamic concept of the “sobre-hombre” that Unamuno has used since 1896. …

The Criterion (2022)

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

Pushing At The Seams: French Zines & Bricolage As A Liberatory Act, Shayna M. Davidson

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the contemporary literary value posed by independently produced French fanzines. French fanzines represent a convergence of textual and graphic narratives, echoing la bande dessinée in many senses. I argue that the liberty of form and expression utilized by the fanzine creator permits a more nuanced iteration of life-writing. The circulation of texts amongst informal economies based in social networks suggests that creators are able to explore narratives of self-hood that do not conform to neoliberal market-oriented categories of identity. Furthermore, the influx of digitally stored and distributed French fanzines confounds their traditional categorization as ephemeral text-objects; as …

Searching For Hades In Archaic Greek Literature, Daniel Stoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No single volume of mythological or philological research exists for Hades. In the one moment Hades appears in archaic Greek literature, speaking for only ten lines, Hermes stands nearby. Thus, to understand and journey to Hades is to reckon with Hermes’ close presence. As I synthesize research by writers from several different disciplines, may some light be brought into the depths. May we analyze Hades’ brief appearance in archaic Greek literature, examining how what I define as the “Hermetic” emits from his breath in the one moment he physically appears and speaks.

From Acolyte To Apocalypse: Defiance Vs. Conformity In Things Fall Apart, Zoë Kales, Ethan Marunde

Student Research

No community, or person, is perfect. In fact, that is why the search for paradise is ubiquitous in both literature and real life. So, when the British colonize and destabilize the inevitably flawed village of Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, two camps form: those who defy the changes, and those who embrace them. To Okonkwo, the rise in “acolytes”—or followers—of the new religion brought by the colonizers is on par with apocalypse. In this presentation, we first detail the novel’s context, including a history of colonization in Nigeria and the life of Chinua Achebe. Next, we examine Okonkwo’s …

“Young Adult Books Don’T Realize They Have That Power”: Reader Response To Ideology In Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Zane Emīlija Sarma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to find out how readers interact with novels in the Young Adult dystopian genre. I will examine the ways in which readers resist the dominant patriarchal ideological discourses in the YA dystopian novel and how readers submit to this ideology. Through an interaction with the text, the reader produces oppositional, negotiated, or preferred meanings. I will argue that readers’ response to ideology in the YA dystopian novel is affected by their active participation in reader communities such as the Bookish community online.

YA dystopian fiction was highly popular in the early 2010s, but the …

The Valiant Woman, Ann Louise Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1600, Hosokawa Tama Gracia perished under mysterious circumstances. She was a noblewoman married to a powerful daimyo, the daughter of a traitor, and a Kirishitan convert during the “Christian Century” in Japan. In life, she was both dutifully subservient and tenaciously bold. In death, she was fodder for propaganda, and in the hands of European writers her life story was re-written for specific narrative purposes. The most striking of these artistic transformations is her depiction as a Christian martyr in the late seventeenth-century Latin Jesuit drama Mulier fortis. The music for this drama was composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt …

"Is He Not A Maker Of Parables?": Restorative Poetics And Magical Realism In Ezekiel 40–48, Matthew Wells Sapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The thesis demonstrates that Ezek 40–48 functions as a unified narrative of restoration and that it is profitable to understand its fantastic realism and postcolonial rhetoric as early precursors to the modern magical realism genre. The tools of narrative criticism are utilized to exegete the literary features of Ezek 40–48 and uncover its poetic elements and rhetorical thrust. After this analysis, Ezek 40–48 is viewed as a precursor to modern magical realist texts in a comparative study with Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, paying special attention to the thematic emphases …

Kritika Ng Kritika Ng Post-Kolonyalismo: Ang Abstraktong Unibersalismo Ni Vivek Chibber (Critique Of A Critique Of Postcolonialism: The Abstract Universalism Of Vivek Chibber), Ramon Guillermo

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Halos magkasabay ang panahon ng pagsibol at pamamayagpag noong dekada ’80 ng “Post-colonialism” (PC) sa Kanluraning akademya at ng Pantayong Pananaw (PP). Kasabay rin ng dalawang penomenong pang-intelektwal na ito ang naganap na pangkalahatang paghina ng Kaliwa dulot ng pagguho ng “Pader ng Berlin” noong 1989. Masalimuot ang ugnayan ng PC at PP sa Marxistang tradisyon ngunit malinaw na maibibilang ang dalawang ito, sa kontekstong Pilipino, sa mga intelektwal na sanhi ng krisis ng Marxismo sa larangang akademiko sa Pilipinas. Bilang tugon sa ganitong sitwasyon, magkasunod na inilathala ang dalawang kritika mula sa Marxistang punto de bista ng PC (Chibber …

First Person Narration In Postwar British Women’S Fiction, Julia Mccoy

English Student Scholarship

Julia McCoy ’22
Majors: English and Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Hogan, English

A study of postwar English novelists Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson, looking particularly at the way these writers use first person narration in their works. Both writers explore how women’s identity can be ‘written into being’ against external pressures and authorities that seek to define women’s ‘proper’ role.