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Loving 바리데기: A Traveler's Guide To Anthologizing The 여성 시인, Tiffany Hyunkyung Chang

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis retells the folktale of the Korean shaman goddess 바리데기’s (Paridegi) as my journey through Korean literature. It follows Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon’s typology of the three deaths that 바리데기must experience to become a shamanic goddess and mediator with Death. I map these three deaths (the Death of Losing Your Name, the Death of Diaspora, and the Death of Immortal Crossings) onto the three stages of my development as a second-generation Korean American literary scholar, translator, and artist. Through connecting my personal journeys with the disciplinary concerns facing comparative literature, Asian American studies, Asian area studies, and Korean …

Star Power: An Analysis Of Digital Astrology Content As An Instrument Of Political Tractability, Aliza Phillips

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In an essay from 1953 titled, The Stars Down to Earth, Theodor Adorno performed an exacting analysis of the weekly horoscopes published in The Los Angeles Times to illuminate the latent authoritarianism embedded in the rhetoric of astrology. One of Adorno’s primary arguments is that an insidious form of political tractability is forged through the simultaneous determinism and individualism of astrology. Seventy years after The Stars Down to Earth, the genre of short-form astrology videos has skyrocketed in popularity across social media platforms. This essay offers a series of close readings of digital astrology videos to theorize both …

Transcreation In World Of Warcraft’S China Localization: Echoes Of Poetry Across Two Worlds, Yilu Ren

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The official trailer for the globally popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) World of Warcraft Patch 5.2: The Thunder King featured an original English poem, subsequently translated into 10 other languages. All versions retained a poetic form, with the one release in mainland China creatively borrowing the tetrasyllabic verse style akin to that used in Shijing, the first anthology of Chinese poetry. This unprecedented adaptation of a literary genre in the localization of a non-literary video game product blurred the conceptual boundary between Lawrence Venuti's binary notions of foreignization and domestication in translation theory.

Viewed in light of …

Displaced Ukrainian Writers After 2014, A Postcolonial Perspective, Sophie Ivanka Shields

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This paper analyzes post-2014 Ukrainian displacement literature from a postcolonial perspective. I argue that Ukrainian writers, displaced with the 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine and/or 2022 full-scale invasion by Russia, transform literature into a tool of cultural resistance against Russia, forging a postcolonial Ukrainian identity in their works that unites those displaced since 2014. I particularly focus on two long-form works by displaced writers: the novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2019) by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, who was displaced in 2014 from Donetsk to Kyiv and again in 2022 to Pittsburgh, USA on the City of Asylum Exiled Writer and …

Mending Wounds: A Reparative Feminist Analysis Of The Japanese Film Series Guinea Pig, Mikayla Walker

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Guinea Pig (ギニーピッグ) is an anthology series of six body horror films created and released in Japan from 1985 to 1990, all connected by a common theme of bodily experimentation and destruction. The series has maintained a controversial legacy due to its portrayal of intense misogynistic violence. However, upon closer examination, the films reveal subtle moments of patriarchal critique when viewed as a cohesive unit. Using Cynthia Freeland’s framework for creating feminist readings of horror films and Eve Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, this research aims to highlight those moments of subversion in order to create a more progressive feminist …

Self-Effacement In Christian Mysticism: A Case Study Of Teresa Of Ávila And Simone Weil, Zihan Zhang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The neoliberal society we live in encourages a constant maximization of the “project of the self.” The tradition of Christian mysticism, centered on self-denial and passivity, provides an alternative understanding of the self. In this essay, I draw testimonial and theoretical accounts of mysticism from the autobiography of a 16th-century Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila, and essays from a 20th-century French philosopher, Simone Weil. By bringing these two authors in conversation, I hope to illuminate three aspects of self-effacement in the Christian mystical tradition. I first start with discussing the idea of labor as a means to prepare for self-annihilation …

Remix The Manuscript: Transcription Tools Dataset 2.0, Michelle Warren, Arielle Feuerstein

Other Faculty Materials

The document posted here is an annotated dataset of digital tools for transcribing handwritten manuscripts. Release 2.0 was created in 2022-23 by Arielle Feuerstein as part of the ongoing project "Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments.” The file attached here contains the dataset as completed on June 28, 2023 along with credits for prior contributors.

Postcolonial Hauntology Of Modernity: Exploring Legacies Of Enlightenment Thought In The Understanding Of The 'Human' Through Intertextualities In Heart Of Darkness And Hunter X Hunter, Pumho Karimi

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

The thesis explores how Enlightenment Thought defined a certain idea of being human through intertextual motifs observed in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness and Yoshihiro Togashi's Japanese manga Hunter x Hunter. Such a comparative analysis is premised on the idea that the historical context that inspires the plot in both texts are interlinked i.e., the colonial context in the Congo under Belgian rule mined the uranium that was used in making the atomic bomb that struck Japan in 1945. As such, using a postcolonial biopolitical framework, the intertextual motifs are analysed to argue how Enlightenment Thinking became a haunting …

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …

Ephemeral Elsewheres: Locating Narratives Of Resignation, Resistance, And Refusal In The Poetry Of Black Cuban And Black Brazilian Women, Aidan Keys

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay dissects the language of Latin American revolution and nationalism to locate the body of the black woman and the appropriation of her image. In two seemingly incommensurable radical movements—the Cuban Revolution (1952-1959) and the Brazilian Unified Black Movement (1978-)—the contributions of Black women are unevenly recognized. Reading the poetry of cubanas Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera and brasileiras Sônia Fátima and Esmeralda Ribeiro, this essay claims that in both contexts, the Black woman is marginalized to a geographic “elsewhere.” Expanding on this term, coined by scholar Carol Boyce Davies, this essay further identifies temporal and ephemeral “elsewheres.” The …

"I Am Not Alive": A Bionian Reading Of Life And Death In Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert And Tynianov's Podporuchik Kizhe, Andres Meraz

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay investigates the themes of life and death in Balzac’s novel, Le Colonel Chabert (1832), and Tynianov’s novella, Podporuchik Kizhe (1927). In these works, life and death are as much socio-political and legal constructs as they are organic or ontological states—that is, the chronological, biological beginning and ending of a “life.” In other words, life and death become conceptual spaces into which one may enter, or from which one may be excluded. Additionally, this essay asserts that while the approach taken in one text may to be a kind of conceptual inversion of the approach taken in the other, …

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 …

“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay identifies an early modern aesthetic that mobilizes the mundane to make a point about the world or the grandiose. Through a close reading of the poetry in the travelogues of the 17th-century Ottoman Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), this essay identifies, theorizes, and historicizes early modern Arabic circumstantial verse—what the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé calls vers de circonstance. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” this essay shows how the poetry in Nābulusī’s travelogues fits within, and sometimes advances, their linear narrative. If poetry is expected to transcend the chronotope in which …

The Idyllic Houses Of Collective Trauma Reading Home And World War Ii In Ian Mcewan’S Atonement And Jenny Erpenbeck’S Heimsuchung, Victoria Wirtz

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay investigates the themes of home, homeland and belonging in Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung. Both works encourage critical reflection on the nostalgia for Home, in exposing that the idea of such is all too often based on an ideological concept and social exclusion. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘Idyllic Chronotope', I identify the houses of both narratives as spaces that allow for the uncorrupted preservation of their families' values and traditions. However, as the concept of ‘home’ is embedded in their owners’ belief in national supremacy, their residencies are revealed as realms of collective, social …

“For Now We See In A Mirror, Dimly”: Dialectical Wholeness In Oshii Mamoru’S Ghost In The Shell, Mari Aida

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay argues that Oshii Mamoru's 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell, while indicating possible alliances with the political interests of cyberfeminism, ultimately advocates for the oppositional agenda of dialectical wholeness. Foundational texts of cyberfeminism, such as Donna J. Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," have criticized narratives of isolation and a return towards a primordial wholeness implicit in Euro-American scientific culture. In the context of these texts, the cyborg symbolizes a departure from such narratives and guides the political project of reimagining epistemological boundaries. However, despite its apparent alignment with such projects, Ghost in the Shell dramatizes and …

This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus' Gender In Translation And Performance, August Guszkowski

Independent Student Projects and Publications

This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus’ Gender in Translation and Performance explores the possible interpretation of the character of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae as genderqueer, specifically nonbinary. The project consists of a translation of the Bacchae from Ancient Greek into English which pays special attention to instances where Dionysus’ character is treated as somewhere between or outside of the traditional male-female gender binary, including placing emphasis on the god’s “effeminate” appearance and ability to influence other people to act across gendered lines. The groundbreaking translation refers to Dionysus with they/them pronouns rather than the traditional he/him and embraces this surprisingly well-evidenced reading …

Out Of The Gutter, Into The Gram: A Comical Message And A Digital Medium, Tala Majzoub

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

By analyzing three different comics on Instagram by the Lebanese political cartoonist, the Art of Boo, this essay argues that comics generate political meaning through emulating the medium of Instagram on the one hand, and by inviting the audience to become active participants on the other. Although a lot has been written about digital activism and political cartoons in the Arab world, little has been theorized about what makes this form of political artistic expression and dissent powerful on digital platforms. By drawing on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, this essay demonstrates that the medium of comics operates as a …

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

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 …

Woolf As Window: A View Into Martín Gaite’S Treatment Of Alienation In El Cuarto De Atrás, Elizabeth Cornick

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In this article, I explore the Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite’s affinity with Virginia Woolf’s modernism. In particular, I analyze the modernist theme of alienation so prominent in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that Martín Gaite expresses in her novel El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room). To do so, I provide historical analysis of Woolf’s and Martín Gaite’s respective cultures to contextualize the ways in which the writers treat modernization as an alienating condition of modernity in the novels. I focus on Woolf’s depiction of estrangement experienced by the characters Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe from To the …

Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data In Medieval Manuscript Studies, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. We describe the website’s lifecycle as well as our progress so far in creating a new dataset for the Brut corpus, “Re-Imagining History,” part of the ongoing project “Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of …

Spaces For Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions In Preciado’S Testo Yonqui, Caroline King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This article examines the possibilities and limits of gender becomings in Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie). A genre-fluid “body-essay,” his text theorizes a departure from gender through contemporary medicine. Following Preciado in his self-administration of testosterone, the book labels today’s reality a “pharmacopornographic era,” a new iteration of Foucault’s biocapitalism. After designating Preciado’s self-generated transformations as becomings, I explore how the book’s heterotopic spaces––including its genre––facilitate Preciado’s forward-moving gender identity. A Foucauldian term, heterotopia has not yet been applied to Testo Junkie, however it offers insight into the book’s potential to motivate individuals to …

Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren

Other Faculty Materials

Remix the Manuscript is a digital humanities research project centered around a single medieval manuscript, the Dartmouth Brut Chronicle (Rauner Codex MS 003183). This ongoing experiment with digital tools uses this one example to explore one broad question: How are the digital tools available today determining what we will know 100 years from now about things that happened 1000 years ago?

Sites Of Interpretation In The “Gaza” Of Johannes De Alta Silva, James Johnson

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This essay places the reader at one of three sites of interpretation in Johannes de Alta Silva’s “Gaza,” located at the levels of 1) story, 2) frame narrative, and 3) reader. Identifying these levels as distinct spaces within which interpretation unfolds, I examine the level of the reader to demonstrate how the text explicitly shapes the reader’s role. Composed c. 1200 CE, “Gaza” is one of ten stories in Alta Silva’s Dolopathos, which forms a part of the larger medieval tradition known as The Seven Sages. Drawing upon concepts from narratology (Genette, Prince) and the phenomenology of reader response …

Banal/Queer/Spectacular: Reframing Blue Is The Warmest Color, Sophie Frank

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In this essay, I interrogate visual representations of a lesbian love story in Jul’ Maroh’s graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude and its film adaptation by director Abdellatif Kechiche, La vie d’Adèle : Chapitres 1 et 2. By studying the diegesis of each work’s opening scene, I reveal that the graphic novel embodies Barthes’s concept of a writerly text, or one that requires its reader to produce its meaning, while the film, as a readerly work, constructs a passive viewing experience for its audience. I argue that each author’s narratological approach exemplifies the particular manner in which they …

Interlingual Morphology And Wakean Topology, Stephen Valeri

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

As an example of limit literature (literature that exhausts the entirety of what is possible in a given form), Finnegans Wake has been an inspiration for the theories of figures like Kristeva and Derrida to reveal the structural and linguistic operations of texts generally. In defamiliarizing the processes of word formation, the Wake compels us to attend to morphology’s structuring role in a work. My project focuses on Phillipe Sollers and Stephen Heath’s French translation of part of the concluding section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to observe how the attempt to approximate Joyce’s interlingual morphology in translation contributes to …

Modern Theoretical Approaches To Medieval Translation, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This chapter explores some of the ways in which modern literary theory opens insights into medieval European translations. Rather than drawing a distinction between theoretical approaches that apply to medieval studies and those that do not, I will explore a few examples that might in turn inspire readers to their own insights. It is my hope that over time readers of this Companion to Medieval Translation will posit many more modern theoretical approaches to medieval translation than can be suggested here. We might even imagine that some of the particularities of medieval European theories of translation could themselves be codified …

Situating Digital Archives, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This essay is the introduction to an essay collection about the Middle English Prose Brut manuscript purchased by Dartmouth College in 2006. I consider how the competing pressures of access and preservation condition scholarship in medieval studies. I suggest several analogies between the digital humanities in general, digital philology in medieval studies, and the historical practices of medieval writers: hacking, dark archive, and prosthesis.

The Dartmouth Brut: Conservation, Authenticity, Dissemination, Deborah Howe, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This essay describes the conservation process of the Dartmouth Brut manuscript: Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library, MS 003183. The format alternates between the observations and descriptions of the conservator, Deborah Howe, and those of medievalists Michelle Warren. The essay includes photos of Deborah's process in making a fragile fifteenth-century manuscript useable in the twenty-first century.