Comparative Literature Commons^™

Short Story Long: Towards A Poetics Of The Novel Stories, Sarah Meyer

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Bodies On The Line: Border Crossing In The Fiction Of Ernest Hemingway And Salman Rushdie, Rachel Northrop

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Why John Stuart Mill Cannot Dismiss The Poet Of Culture, Nelson Tuero

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Uncloseting The Harlem Renaissance: A Look At The Movement Through A Queer Lens, Mionnay Mckee

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Ptolemaic System And The Ramifications Of Hierarchical Thinking; The Impact Of Medieval Literature, Mark-Allan Donaldson

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Force Of Imagination And The Limits Of The Rational In Polidori, Stoker, And Weird Fiction, Eric Mattina

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Allergic To Sunflowers, Dana Rae Vessio

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

El Marqués De Villeroy, Oráculo De La Razón De Estado. Una Traducción Española Con Escolios De Pedro Van Der Hammen, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

The translations of French historian and politique Pierre Matthieu fostered the circulation of ideas on the best practices of government and stimulated the introduction of political theories such as reason of state, political prudence and sovereignty at a moment when all Europe struggled to reconcile the interests of state and religion. Matthieu´s Remarques d’Estat et d’histoire sur la vie et les services de Monsieur de Villeroi (1618) were translated in 1624 by Pedro van der Hammen, and adapted to the particular Spanish context. In this paper we study how the translation and the illustrations by van der Hammen combine the …

Moria De Erasmo Roterodamo. A Critical Edition Of The Early Modern Spanish Translation Of Erasmus’S Encomium Moriae. Ed. Jorge Ledo And Harm Den Boer. Leiden: Brill, 2014, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Confronting Moral And Literary Perspectives In 'La Fuerza De La Sangre', José Nayar Rivera Méndez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to argue that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra used literary and artistic models to create the hybrid novella "La fuerza de la sangre" (The force of blood) in order to deal with moral and legal issues related to the representation of rape and subsequent marriage of the victim to the rapist. An explicit aim of Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares is to mix the useful to the entertaining, and he intended to elaborate forms of fiction that could transcend moral dilemmas. The legal and moral implications of marriage as the best restitution after a rape, and the …

Cuckolds And Codpieces: Early Modern Anxieties In Male Potency, Doris Barkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is an exploration of male potency through a close examination of the tropes of the cuckold and the codpiece as presented in English dramatic works of the early modern period: I examine codpiece and cuckoldry discourses side by side, to see how one informs the other, and to perceive to what extent masculinity is affected and communicated by these discourses. My purpose here is to explore early modern views of masculinity, marriage, and sexuality through various theoretical frameworks, from Freud to Foucault.

My study argues that while the codpiece may emphasize or articulate sexual power and virility, that …

Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices, Anita Pinzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work thematically analyzes literary texts written in the Italian language by Albanian migrants in the last three decades. This recent body of works is here defined as Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature. It is analyzed in its literary and theoretic specificities, while being placed in the larger contexts of both Italian Migration Literature and Italian Literature. Four major themes -- namely memory, borders, language, and body -- are analyzed through relevant critical theory in the areas of autobiography, post-colonial studies, Mediterranean studies, gender studies, and translation studies to show how Albanian-Italian literature lives at the intersection of multiple literary and theoretical …

Sisters In Sublime Sanctity: Schiller's Jungfrau, Euripides's Iphigenia Plays, And Joan Of Arc On The Stage, John Martin Pendergast

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schiller reinvented the image of Joan of Arc in his play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, with consequences that affected theatrical representations of Joan for the rest of that century and well into the twentieth. Regarding representations of Joan of Arc to be found in Shakespeare or Voltaire as unworthy of her nobility, Schiller set out to create a more powerful character who suffers at the hands of fate but changes history by sheer force of will. He took as his allegorical model the characterization of Iphigenia made famous by Euripides in …

Modern Era Centaur: The Fusion Of Art And Religion, Isabel Sobral Campos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, "Modern Era Centaur: the Fusion of Art and Religion," focuses on art's ability to assume other social functions outside its domain. It deals with a variety of artistic practices that take on overt religious roles or are otherwise implicitly grounded in a religiously inflected stance. I argue that the religious impulse of the modern era greatly motivates the poetic and visual aesthetic innovations in the European and American avant-garde. Framed through the thinking of Blaise Pascal, Emmanuel Levinas, and Niklas Luhmann, I show how proto-modernist poetics such as that of Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson articulate similar religious …

Counting The Blades Of Grass: Series, Punctum, And The Averted Gaze In W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Lane Glisson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

W. G. Sebald's novel The Emigrants presents an oblique view of the suppressed history of the Nazi era, through the lives of four emigrants from Germany. Sebald's unique manner of weaving biographical material, evidence, and photographs into his fiction, creates a misty world, neither fact nor fiction, in which the reader is never certain what is true or counterfeit. A series of recurring motifs and visual themes run through all the stories. This work examines how new forms of understanding arise in the spaces between The Emigrants' themes, punctuated by recurring imagery. It examines the nineteenth and twentieth century …

El Arconte Del Archivo: El Personaje De Urrutia Lacroix En Nocturno De Chile De Roberto Bolaño, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

Esta lectura se enfoca en lo que se omite de la historia chilena, aquella conflagración de cultura contra barbarie, su legado de opresión. En el contexto de la obra de Bolaño, la literatura del continente cobra un significado que rompe con las ideas tradicionales de los fundamentos de la nación, para revelar la opresión colectiva y aquí, en particular, se revela al narrador como personaje en tanto su papel dentro de la novela y de la historia, su conciencia homofóbica y racista dentro del paisaje literario.

The Labyrinths Of Venice: Environment And Identity In Anna Pavignano's Novel "Venezia, Un Sogno" And Other Works In Literature And Film, Viviana Torrero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of the translation of Anna Pavignano's novel Venezia, un sogno and of an essay presenting a comment and critical analysis of the work.

The essay itself is divided into the following sections:

--An introduction to my translation of Venezia, un sogno and a reflection on my choice of Venice as a setting and background for my dissertation work.

--An introduction to the author and a description of her previous works.

--A discussion on the theory of translation and its challenges.

--A comparison between Venezia, un sogno and other literary and cinematic works set in Venice with a …

The Mystification Of Christian Salvation: On The Anxiety Of Redemption In Renaissance Poetry And Drama, Kimberly Paige Ambroziak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"The Legend of the Red Crosse Knight," "Doctor Faustus," "Hamlet," and "Samson Agonistes" are secular poetic explorations with a common idea: the possibility of Christian salvation. These examples of the redemptive quest seem to reveal the uneasiness of salvation which is representative, if only broadly, of the atmosphere in which their authors were writing. More specifically, the intention of this study is to reveal the possibility and nature of Christian uncertainty as it is firmly rooted in the early modern period. As Christian doctrine proves protean from its beginnings in the first century to Protestant tracts in the sixteenth, these …

Neoliberal Dystopias: Postmodern Aesthetics And A Modern Ethic In Four Pairs Of Plays By Argentine And Irish Playwrights (1990-2003), Noelia Diaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is an exploration of eight plays, four from Argentina, four from Ireland, comprehending the period between 1990 and 2003. Both countries share a strong tradition of national theatre that, from its beginnings, was closely intertwined with the development of the nation state. Theatre functions in Argentina and Ireland as a medium through which representations of what it means to be Irish or Argentine have been explored, questioned, and contested. It is the aim of this project to examine how the apparently non-political and ahistorical theater of the playwrights I will examine is indeed a response to a contextualized …

Middle Eastern-American Literature: A Contemporary Turn In Emerson Studies, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

I, Stereotype: Detained In The Uncanny Valley, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In "I, Stereotype," Seo-Young Chu applies Mori's theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the "yellow peril." Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has interacted with and shaped Orientalist and techno-Orientalist stereotypes (as well as the stereotype-as-a-perceived-type-of-person more generally). In the process, Chu explores what it means to find one's ethnic group detained in the uncanny valley, what it means to use stereotyping as a time-saving technology …

Specters Of Kurdish Nationalism: Governmentality And Counterinsurgent Translation In Turkey, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

This essay examines translations of the Kurdish epic poem Mem û Zîn into Turkish, tracing the logics behind these state-sponsored translations and examining how acts of translation are also efforts to regulate, translate, and erase Kurdish subjectivities. I argue that the state instrumentalizes Mem û Zîn’s potent nationalist currency in order to disarm present and future claims of Kurdish national autonomy. Using translation as a counterinsurgent governmental tool, the state attempts to domesticate Kurdish nationalist discourses even as it reproduces them, thereby transforming Kurdish nationalism into a specter of itself. Attending to this specter, however, allows us to see how …

Why Are Grimms' Fairy Tales So Mysteriously Enchanting?, Ana Neophytou

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Paradoxes Of Female Authorship In Samuel Richardson‘S Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, Jane Austen's Emma And Henry James' The Portrait Of A Lady, Ewa Barnes

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Colonialism In Moll Flanders And The Belle’S Stratagem, Tamara Kathwari

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Inventions Of Truth, Deidre Bird

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Variations On A Theme: Contemporary Memorials To Harriet Tubman, Elise Anne Geltzer

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.