Comparative Literature Commons^™

Performance Arteries: From The Street To The Salon, Zoella Lin

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis concerns itself with navigating what it means to build community during a time of uncertainty. Specifically, it is an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry in Les Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris alongside his figure of the flâneur as a way to understand the aporia of the modern world (modernity) as a way to inform how instances of connection can occur. The first chapter suggests that a close reading of Baudelaire's poetry gives us insight into what it means to live in this present moment by looking at how Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur navigated the rapidly changing world of …

Embodied Horror: Women And Medical Authority In Video Games, Jocilynn Denise Colombo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Through a critical analysis of interactive horror, this paper argues that video games can function as ethical diagnostic narratives that uniquely expose systemic failures surrounding women’s bodies and medical authority. Focusing on Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011), I examine how these games render harm legible through player participation. By requiring players to move characters through hostile environments and make decisions within systems that simultaneously grant and restrict control, these games foster identification and complicity by positioning players directly within the structures they critique.

While feminist horror scholarship—notably from Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed—has explored societal anxieties …

The Transparent Crypt: Temporal Stratification, Materiality, And The Affective Archive In Jenny Erpenbeck’S "Kairos", Mallory Wooldridge

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

For Germany, the process of reckoning with the past is not a new one. Termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the post-war period and envisioned as a project extending beyond the academy into public consciousness, “dealing with the past” was first envisioned in response to the Nazi regime and its horrors. While already a disjointed project in the Nazi context, the question of how reunified Germany reckons with the former German Democratic Republic’s past remains unresolved.

In her 2021 novel Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck proposes a different model of historical consciousness. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s post-war theory of working through the past ( …

Wood Lands: Forest As Site Of National Memory In Germany And Italy, Clarissa Melendez

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Arguing that the rich symbolic associations of trees become a medium to synthesize shared identity during a country’s formative moments, this paper theorizes the image of the forest as a site of national memory. By tracking representations of the natural landscape during nation-building to representations that attempt to recover and reclaim dignity postwar, this paper lays bare the potential of the national symbol to transform as history progresses. The paper’s author reads three genres–fairy tales, a novel, and a work of public art–from three authors–the Brothers Grimm, Italo Calvino, and Joseph Beuys–across time to interrogate the role of the forest …

The Fangs Of Philosophy: Religious Experience As A Persuasive Device, Lukas A. Dunford

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

The philosophical systems of Plato and Lucretius use the religious experience to compel readers into their distinct philosophical versions of reality. This compulsion is necessary for philosophy. This study’s three philosophical systems reappropriate this experience from the existing structures of religion to violently produce conviction in readers. The religious experience is not window dressing over the arguments of the philosophical systems, but a necessary component that reorients the audience into a new discursive reality. Ultimately, the philosophers we examine will show how the knowledge structure of philosophy becomes able to grip the audience, consuming them into its reality – how …

Sacred Bodies And (A)Historical Testimony: Han Kang's Human Acts, Jenny Yoojin Oh

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

The 1980 Gwangju Uprising is a significant event in contemporary South Korean political history. In the decades following, "Gwangju literature" has provided an avenue for representation, narrativization, and encounter with the event. South Korean author Han Kang is another writer of the Uprising, and her 2014 novel Human Acts returns to the site of injury in order to open up the event to the larger histories of sovereignty, civil conflict, and war that it localizes in Gwangju, 1980.

This thesis seeks to leverage the way the novel draws upon the sacred and the religious to call upon Gwangju. I argue …

"Beyond Was Blossom And Death": Speculative Futurities, Anne Suh-Yun Rhee

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Toni Morrison’s Paradise and K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, exploring the relationship between the utopic impulse in art and the field of speculative fiction. I coin and propose the usage of the term “speculative gesture” as a conceptual tool to identify tactics, motifs, and impulses running throughout these two texts that gesture towards the potentialities for constructing alternative futurities. In Chapters 1 and 2, I identify speculative gestures in Paradise and Bestiary, respectively. In Chapter 3, I delve into a comparative analysis of six speculative gestures from these two novels. Building on the …

Between Word And World: Textual Space In Modern Sephardic Literature, Inci Cetin

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In the context of modern Sephardic literature, this paper defines “textual space” as the narrative’s self-conscious arrangement of its own textual elements such as time, space, and language to negotiate a position vis-à-vis the nation-state that is neither fully subsumed within nor completely outside of it. Textual spaces neither conform to the nation state’s borders even though they write from it, nor to nationalist temporalities as they continue a narrative thread that reaches back to 15th-century Spain. Through Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (2012) and Mario Levi’s Istanbul Was a Fairytale (1999), this paper investigates how textual spaces are deliberately …

Violent Tenderness, Aimilia Amalia Matthildi Tsopela

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis concerns itself with a single question: “What is love?” Specifically, it constitutes an account of love as a failed failure. The first chapter proposes a conceptualization of love as a subject-to-subject relation, through sustained engagement with the work of Alain Badiou. Specifically, the nature of the love relation as an intersubjective construction is articulated through a critique and reworking of Badiou’s conceptualization of love as an evental phenomenon. The second chapter explores the failed failure of love in relation to language, wherein the lovers’ discourse is understood to be linguistic play, operating according to the principles of Bataillean …

Theatricality Of The Ephemeral: Media Of Surplus And Spectatorship In Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) Palace-Style Poetry And Hou Hsiao-Hsien’S A City Of Sadness (1989), Yingyi Wang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay focuses on the mediation of spectatorship experience by “ephemeral media” in Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) palace-style poetry and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film A City of Sadness (1989). Drawing from Alexander Galloway’s “the interface effects” in new media studies, I investigate how the diegetic “ephemeral media” in these two texts, such as dust, candlelight, silence, and writing, function as opaque interfaces that complicate spectatorship. I examine spectatorship experience from the angle of ephemeral media by looking at how they direct spectators’ attention from the world of representations to processes of mediation. Transplanting Xiaofei Tian’s notion of the “surplus” in her …

Ritual As Resistance: Orality, Identity, And Soviet Kazakh Childhood In Sayin Muratbekov’S The Smell Of Wormwood, Dana Akhmerova

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes The Smell of Wormwood (1967), a short novel by Soviet Kazakh author Sayin Muratbekov, set in a Kazakh village during World War II. The narrative centers on Ayan, a nine-year-old orphan with a physical disability, who copes with trauma and marginalization by becoming a storyteller for the village children. Focusing on the role of Kazakh folklore—particularly storytelling and initiation rituals—I explore how these cultural forms shape the novel’s characters, structure, and central conflict. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s theories of ritual, I argue that Ayan’s storytelling creates an informal liminal space through which the …

Beware The Wandering Woman: Depictions Of Female Spatial Transgression In Athenian Public Dramas Of The 5th And 4th Centuries Bce, Anne E. Mcgrath

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This paper explores how ancient Greek literature and culture construct autonomous, mobile women as threats to the ideological and spatial order of the polis. Referencing mythological precedents and closely reading Classical texts, I propose the category of “excepted women” to address the threads of female transgression woven throughout this extensive literary corpus. Focusing on figures who transgress imposed spatial boundaries, I examine how such women are positioned as disruptors of gendered norms and civic stability, thus reflecting deep cultural anxieties about female agency and movement into spaces coded as masculine. The paper engages theoretical frameworks from Althusser and Butler to …

Modern Bodies: Globalizing Media Cultures And The Representation Of Ideal Beauty, Michelle Sun

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This project aims to examine how the image of the “modern body” is constructed, imagined, modified, and sustained by globalizing media cultures in France, Japan, and the US—investigating how factors of race, age, health, class, and gender overlap and intersect to create a vision of “ideal” beauty across different times and spaces. Previous research has focused on particular topics, such as the rise of cosmetic surgery in East Asia or the politics of modern American beauty parlors. However, my goal in this project is to evaluate these diverse studies through a broader and more comparative lens, analyzing examples of French …

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 …

From History To Memory: Comparative Discourse Of Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé And Michelet's Histoire De La Révolution Française, Jose F. Lopez Cochachi

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

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 …

Questioning Modernity’S Episteme: A Comparative Literary Analysis Towards Planetary Spiritualism, Pumho Karimi

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

How do the modern era’s sociopolitical and technological developments, from the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, influence our contemporary 21st century views on truth? How do they relate to the technological, sociopolitical, and ecological predicaments faced in the 21st century? My project, through comparative literary analysis, offers a critique of modernity by paying attention to its imperial and colonial character and how it establishes its epistemological power to define what is fact and truth at the expense of other ways of knowing, seeing and being that offer potential solutions to 21st century predicaments. I argue …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Chatgpt Transcript For Read The World, Michelle Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This document records experiments with ChatGPT answering a common colloquial question, recording multiple answers to the prompt "What in the world is reading?"

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 …

Extreme Translation: Six Medieval Lessons For Everyone, Michelle Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bound To A Mast: Matelotage And The Queer Contract In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night And The Tempest, Agnese Palumbo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Analyzing the language of a 1699 matelotage contract and locating that same terminology in Shakespeare’s maritime plays, this essay argues that there is a thematic and genealogical link between the contractual forms of homosocial union that existed during the premodern and early modern periods and the bonds shared by male characters in those plays where a “sea change” occurs. First, the essay delineates a history of matelotage and of contractual bonds; then, it establishes this homosocial dynamic as an additional point of inquiry for male relationships in Shakespeare. Critical attention has largely overlooked this queer contract, and prioritized a focus …

From Nihilation To Redemption: Profanations And Overlaps In Claudio Magris’ Danube, Nicola Mazzotti

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the novel Danube by the Italian writer and scholar Claudio Magris and focuses on its depiction of the political potential inscribed in the Danubian territory. With his journey along the river, the narrator of the novel attempts to unveil the materiality of this territory and the agency of the river, thus deconstructing cultural and political claims aimed at their appropriation. First, the essay investigates the use and representation of 'sources' made by the narrator, both as origin of the river and cultural artifacts. It is shown how the narrator performatively traces the origin of the river back …

Colonial Translation Turned Vietnamization: Phạm Quỳnh And The Discourse Of Transculturation, Camellia Pham

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Vietnam during French colonialism (1861-1945) was a site of hybrid enunciations that displayed tensions with multiple languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, French) and multiple scripts (classical Chinese, Nôm script, Quốc Ngữ, and French) while existing under the influence of various powers (the Nguyễn feudal dynasty, the French colonial government, and the nascent Democratic Republic of Vietnam). The array of choices reflected a state of confusion in which every decision made by Vietnamese translators was inherently political. This eccentric hybridity is well exemplified in translations by Phạm Quỳnh 范瓊 (1892-1945), a late Nguyễn dynasty monarchist and early French colonial collaborator.

My paper …

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 …