Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

A Genealogy Of Victimhood: Empathy And Memory In Recent German Fiction, Catherine E. Mcnally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses literary representations of empathy and altruism in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novel Widerfahrnis. These novels demonstrate continuities and discontinuities between German literature of the postwar, reunification and contemporary contexts.Analyzing expressions of empathy by Erpenbeck and Kirchhoff’s protagonists, I locate them in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature (1945-1968), particularly Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass and Böll’s early postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed …

Imagining A Home For Us: Representations Of Queer Families In Contemporary Japanese Literature, Patrick Carland

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses popular works of fiction written or produced near or after 1989 in Japan and examines the roles that sexual orientation, gender and 20^th century social and discursive history have had on the conceptualization of familial relations in postwar Japan. This thesis will analyze the means by which writers and artists during the 1980s and 1990s have engaged discourses of family in their works and will argue that these writers explicitly use queer (hereby defined as non-heterosexual and/or non-gender conforming) individuals and narratives to question, reshape and propose alternatives to culturally received images of heterosexual marriage and …

La Influencia De Boccaccio En La Literatura Catalana Medieval (1390-1495). Un Estudio De La Imitación Literaria En Bernat Metge, Bernat Hug De Rocabertí Y Joan Roís De Corella, Pau Cañigueral Batllosera

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of the works by Giovanni Boccaccio on Catalan medieval literature. The influence of Italian literature in medieval Iberian writing is traditionally understood as a key component of a wide-ranging cultural process of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the tre corone, played a crucial role in that process. Boccaccio, in particular, became a model for the writing of a variety of literary genres, from misogynistic poetry to chivalric romances. His works, both in Latin and Italian, featured in the most remarkable libraries of the period …

Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …

Deconstruction Of The Sacred, Ontologies Of Monstrosity: Apophatic Approaches In Late Modernist Cinema, Scott D. Vangel

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I compare apophatic[i] approaches including those associated with Christian mysticism, early postmodern thought and the literature of Gothic monstrosity through their collective emergence in late-twentieth century modernist cinema. I identify confluences between these and related theoretical strains with regard to metaphysics, ontology, ethics and mimesis. The dissertation is structured around concepts relative to limit-experience including death’s impossibility, the gift and phenomenological excess culled from texts such as Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort (1999), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (1961), Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre (1980), and Jean-Luc Marion’s De Surcroît: Études sur …

The Language Of Sustainability, Maija Ploof

Student Showcase

This paper seeks to address the importance of understanding the ambiguous term "sustainability" through the study of humanities, chiefly literature. Additionally, the paper explores the emerging genre of climate change fiction, or "cli-fi" and its potential role in presenting the issues of both ecological and human sustainability to a global audience, using Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide as a primary example. As a basis for the theory that literature can affect a sustainable future, I also examine the importance of language in shaping both perception and protection of the environment. Language creates familiarity, which in turn creates consciousness. Literature …

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …

Literatura En Las Coordenadas Del Cambio: Premio Casa De Las Americas Literatura Para Niños Y Jovenes (1975-2012), Gloria-Maria Cuesta-Gonzalez

Masters Theses

The cultural dimension of the Cuban Revolution (1959) has an unquestionable reference: Casa de las Américas, international symbol of Cuba in the field of the arts. Of its multiple artistic expression, we have put our focus in the literary prizes with which this institution recognizes children’s literary creation, and our working hypothesis is that Casa de las Américas has played an essential role in the development and consolidation, in the Latin American context, of a genre that even today in day is considered minor. The goal of our study is therefore to investigate and analyze the reasons offered for that …

From Main To High: Consumers, Class, And The Spatial Reorientation Of An Industrial City, Jonathan Haeber

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Consumer culture’s spatial dynamics have rarely been examined. This study will use a methodology of “triangulation” – a term borrowed from Geographer Richard J. Dennis – to explore the characteristics of consumer culture among the working classes in a single industrial, planned city (Holyoke, Massachusetts). Each facet of the tripartite method – literary, cliometric, and geographical sources – will be used to conclude that consumer capitalism fundamentally changed the spatial character of Holyoke’s working class communities. A time period roughly from 1880 to 1940 has been selected because novels about Holyoke in this period help augment an understanding of the …

Flowers, Trees, And Writing Brushes: Extraordinary Lovers In The Otogi-Zoshi Kazashi No Himegimi And Sakuraume No Soshi, Haley R. Blum

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis presents translations of Kazashi no himegimi and Sakuraume no sōshi, two tales belonging to the genre of medieval Japanese narrative known as otogi-zōshi, and of the subcategory known as iruimono (tales of non-humans). Chapter 1 provides context, beginning with a brief history of otogi-zōshi and a description of residual challenges in its research, including the parameters of the genre and problems with its nomenclature. This is followed by a discussion of the typical physical formats of these tales, Nara ehon and emaki, and a brief history of iruimono and plant symbolism in otogi-zōshi completes the …

Towards A Posthumanist Reenchantment: Poetry, Science And New Technologies, Marta Del Pozo Ortea

Open Access Dissertations

This interdisciplinary study analyzes the work of two contemporary writers in Peninsular Spanish literature, Agustín Fernández Mallo and Javier Moreno, using the the posthumanist stance that considers the epistemological and ontological continuum and inseparability of contemporary cultural practices. This thesis delves into the interrelationship of their respective work with three main aspects of the 21st century reality: the omnipresent world of images in our culture, the scientific paradigm and the use of new technologies. The study of their work has led me to propose the birth of a new literature that 1. articulates the “pictorial turn” by recognizing how the …

No Círculo Do Uroboro: Articulações Identitárias Na Narrativa De Milton Hatoum, Cecilia Paiva Rodrigues

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the four novels published to date by Milton Hatoum, a contemporary Lebanese-Brazilian author from the Amazon region. There are a great number of critical readings of his work that foreground the postmodern dissolution and fragmentation of the self, of human relationships, and also of national identity. In contrast to such approaches, I propose what I call a reading of hope. I argue that Hatoum is at the forefront of a shift in sensibility in Brazilian literature, one that simultaneously demonstrates certain aspects of postmodernism, but also breaks with other elements of it. In order to illustrate this …

How Should I Act?: Shakespeare And The Theatrical Code Of Conduct, Ann E. Garner

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater’s …

Drops Of Blood On Fallen Snow: The Evolution Of Blood-Revenge Practices In Japan, Jasmin M. Curtis

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Blood revenge – or katakiuchi – represents one of many defining principles that characterize the Japanese samurai warrior; this one act of honorable violence served as an arena in which warriors could demonstrate those values which have come to embody the word samurai : loyalty, honor, and personal sacrifice. Blood revenge had a long and illustrious history in Japan – first, as the prerogative of the gods in the Kojiki, then as a theoretical debate amongst imperial royalty in the Nihongi, and at last entering into the realm of practice amongst members of the warrior class during Japan’s medieval period. …

Con-Scripting The Masses: False Documents And Historical Revisionism In The Americas, Frans Weiser

Open Access Dissertations

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less viable. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. These literary texts, or what I label "con-script," are not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematize their own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a …

Genre And Transgenre In Edo Literature: An Annotated Translation Of Murai Yoshikiyo's Kyōkun Hyakumonogatari With An Exploration Of The Text's Multiple Filiations., Yumiko Ono

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In conjunction with raising some questions regarding “genre” in Edo literature, the purpose of this thesis is to introduce a complete annotated translation of Kyōkun hyakumonogatari 教訓百物語 (One Hundred Scary Tales for Moral Instruction) by the Shingaku teacher Murai Yoshikiyo 村井由清 (1752-1813). Published in 1804 and reprinted several times, this text was intended as a guide to self-cultivation and ethical living based on Shingaku 心学, a philosophico-religious movement of great importance in the latter half of the Edo era. The translation is complemented with a transcription into modern script based on publicly available (online) digital images of an 1815 xylographic …

Tainted Gender: Sexual Impurity And Women In Kankyo No Tomo, Yuko Mizue

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis consists of research on women and Buddhism in light of a medieval Japanese Buddhist tales collection called Kankyo no Ｔomo. This collection reveals the predicament in which women in medieval Japan found themselves. As the focus of sexual desire (towards them and by them), they were also inherently polluted due to their connection with blood (kegare).

Formation Of The Xikun Style Poetry, Jin Qian

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

No abstract provided.

The Pursuit And Dispelling Of Holy Heterosexual Love: From "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" To Wu Zi, Li Li

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My thesis is going to include three sections as follows:

1.A brief biography of Zhang Jie 张洁 (1937 - ).

Zhang Jie began to publish in the post-Cultural Revolution era, and became well-known in the early 1980s for her fictional depiction of the problems of the urban intellectual women attempting to resolve conflicts between love and career, love and marriage, and ideals and reality.

The main part of this section is going to be the deep influence of her eventful fatherless life experience, traditional Chinese culture, as well as that of former Russian literary masters, especially Chekhov and Tolstoy, on …

Intersections Of Age And Gender, Laura Quilter, Liz Henry

Laura Quilter

No abstract provided.