Comparative Literature Commons^™

Eco-Narratology And Contemporary American Fiction, Kyle Henrichs

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze contemporary American novels via ecocritical and narratological reading strategies to highlight how novelists approach environmental crises through various narrative strategies. The novels I analyze allow me to provide several instances where contemporary American novelists explore environmental crisis with narrative. I argue that the formal, structural choices contemporary American novelists make depend on the environmental problems they portray. Furthermore, I argue that each novel uses, to one degree or another, realist aesthetics—but makes a marked departure from realism to address environmental concerns. These novels show us how we got to where we are environmentally, but they …

Un Mundo Para Julius Y La Tradición Del Bildungsroman, Christian Omar Doig Ruiz

Theses and Dissertations

El siguiente trabajo analiza las relaciones entre la novela Un mundo para Julius (1970), de Alfredo Bryce Echenique, y la tradición del género conocido como novela de aprendizaje o bildungsroman. Como pretendemos demostrar, el libro del autor peruano sostiene un complejo cuadro de relaciones con tal tradición, de la que Un mundo para Julius aparece como un fiel continuador al mismo tiempo que propone una recreación diferente de las características típicas de ese género. Para realizar nuestro propósito, primero indagamos en la evolución de la también llamada novela de formación, desde sus orígenes europeos hasta su traslación a la literatura …

La Muerte Y La Espiritualidad En El Poemario Hora Última, De José Bergamín, Óscar Santos Pradana

Theses and Dissertations

La poesía de José Bergamín no ha sido suficientemente estudiada en la literatura delsiglo XX, así como tampoco se ha estudiado las otras facetas de su obra en prosa. Centrado en su último poemario Hora última, este estudio aborda los temas de la muerte y la espiritualidad porque son los conceptos clave para comprender el estilo y el universo poéticos de Bergamín en su última poesía, que no ha sido analizada desde este punto de vista temático ni con profundidad hasta la fecha. Las dualidades y las paradojas nutren la combinación de la muerte y la espiritualidad plasmadas en sus …

La Representación Del Conflicto Armado Interno En Los Rendidos, De José Carlos Agüero Y La Distancia Que Nos Separa, De Renato Cisneros, Manuel Andrés Zelada Pierrend

Theses and Dissertations

Este trabajo analiza la forma en que el Conflicto Armado Interno peruano (1980-1999) es representado en las obras Los rendidos y La distancia que nos separa, de José Carlos Agüero y Renato Cisneros, respectivamente. Ambos autores son hijos de actores que participaron en dicho conflicto: Agüero es hijo de miembros del grupo subversivo Sendero Luminoso y Cisneros, de un general del Ejército peruano. Dada la naturaleza testimonial de las obras estudiadas, las cuales describen la relación entre padres e hijos durante el Conflicto Armado Interno, nuestro objetivo es analizar de qué manera este aparece y afecta dichas relaciones. Nuestra hipótesis …

Historical Dissidence: The Temporalities And Radical Possibilities Of American Comics, Jeremy M. Carnes

Theses and Dissertations

Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate panels of a given comic. More contemporary scholars of the form have followed Eisner and McCloud, foregrounding the causative logics that create narrative progression in the comics form. Yet, these approaches implicitly rely on dominant, western logics of temporality in the construction of narrative in comics.

This project considers how comics form actually relies on various temporalities and thus …

Guides And Guidance: Subverting Tourist Narratives In Trans-Indigenous Time And Space, Shanae Aurora Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a study of the ways in which Indigenous writers and theorists suggest we decolonize the sites of knowledge production through our pedagogical and methodological practices. Ultimately, my dissertation is about the power of story and finding the necessary strategies to change the narratives that do harm in our daily lives. I focus on the sites of knowledge production because these are the institutions and practices with which I am the most familiar. The purpose of this work is beyond metaphorical as I strive to forefront the narratives that change the ways in which settler-Indigenous relationships are formed …

La Novela Contemporánea Sobre La Guerra Civil: Metaficción Historiográfica, Cainismo Y Contra-Discurso En Muertes Paralelas, De Fernando Sánchez Dragó, Íñigo Huércanos Esparza

Theses and Dissertations

En el año 2006, Fernando Sánchez Dragó publicó Muertes paralelas, una obra sobre la Guerra Civil Española que fue galardonada con el Premio Fernando Lara de Novela. Sorprendentemente, pese a haber recibido un importante premio literario y pese a estar centrada en uno de los temas más recurrentes entre la crítica literaria actual, la novela ha pasado del todo desapercibida para la academia. El presente trabajo pretende ser un estudio de los aspectos más importantes de la misma: en Muertes paralelas, Sánchez Dragó es el narrador-investigador que reconstruye el pasado de su padre—fusilado en septiembre del 36—, el de su …

Poetics, Not Pragmatics: Understanding Metaphors In A Poetic Context, Savannah Marciezyk

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to explain why the leading theories of metaphor fail when applied to metaphors which appear in poems. The ability to understand the true meaning of a metaphor in conversations relies on understanding speaker intention and extralinguistic context. This paper argues that because such material is not available to the reader of a poem, theories which rely heavily on pragmatics to explain metaphors cannot be successfully applied to metaphors which appear in poems. This paper makes use of the views on metaphor by John Searle and Paul Grice, and discusses how meaning is constructed in …

El Fenómeno Patria, De Fernando Aramburu: Una Nueva Narrativa En Torno Al Terrorismo Vasco, Ana María Casas Olcoz

Theses and Dissertations

La irrupción en el panorama literario español de la novela Patria (2016), de Fernando Aramburu, ha supuesto un fenómeno editorial de proporciones inimaginables: en los dos años que han pasado desde su publicación, ha vendido más de 700.000 ejemplares en un total de 28 ediciones. Al contrario de lo que algunos críticos han comentado, se trata de una novela que continúa una tendencia literaria previa, iniciada con Cien metros de Saizarbitoria en 1976, que toma como argumento el terrorismo de ETA durante los llamados “años de plomo”. La diferencia de Patria con estas novelas es que, independientemente de su calidad, …

“De Hidalgo A Narcotraficante”: Breaking Bad Como Reinterpretación Del Mito Quijotesco., Jesus Alberto Garcia Bonilla

Theses and Dissertations

El presente estudio pretende analizar las conexiones existentes entre la serie Breaking Bad y la novela Don Quijote de la Mancha, con el objetivo de demostrar que dicha serie puede ser entendida como una reformulación de la novela. Para llevar a cabo este objetivo, primero se expondrán algunas de las características que nos permiten considerar ambas obras como textos que reflejan la ruptura de sus respectivas sociedades. Después se trazará un hilo conductor que conecte tanto la estructura como algunos de los personajes que aparecen en ambas obras. El estudio se apoyará en la teoría del monomito propuesta por Campbell, …

Commuters, Wanderers, And 'International Mongrels': Resistance And Possibility In Post-Immigrant Literature, Leslie Singel

Theses and Dissertations

The recognizable motifs of the immigrant tale have been upended, as the traditional

narrative has been adapted to capture the multitude of directions, individuals, nations, and paths

of the twenty-first century migrant. In four chapters, I examine selected works from the authors

Colum McCann, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to argue for a new

designation, “post-immigrant literature.” Post-immigrant literature treats critically the themes of

loss, regret, and forced assimilation from perspectives shaped by post-colonial, post-modern and

post-identity politics thinking. Rather than narratives stressing the limitations imposed by

deterministic social forces, post-immigrant texts posit more agency, and anxiety, …

El Poder Y Sus Mecanismos En La Novela Cuatro Por Cuatro, De Sara Mesa: Una Interpretación Social En La España De La Crisis, Maria Ayete

Theses and Dissertations

En este trabajo se propone una interpretación en términos sociales de la novela Cuatro por cuatro (2012), de Sara Mesa, a partir del análisis del poder y sus relaciones en el texto. En primer lugar, se establecen los elementos teóricos base para el posterior estudio de la obra. Estos elementos se definen y desarrollan según las reflexiones sobre el poder realizadas por Michel Foucault. En segundo lugar, se analiza el espacio ficcional del colegio y las relaciones que en él se establecen según los presupuestos teóricos anteriores, para argumentar la comprensión de dicho espacio como espacio carcelario y de sus …

Weird Modernisms, Alison Nikki Sperling

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes “the Weird” as a pervasive theme across literary Modernism. Drawing from early versions of weirdness in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) and from the magazine’s most famous writer, H.P. Lovecraft, I demonstrate that the weird must not be limited to tentacular horrors present in supernatural fiction of the period. Instead, I argue weirdness is a category bound to non-normative experiences of material embodiment. Drawing from feminist materialisms, queer theory, disability studies, and nonhuman theories, this project develops a concept of the Weird that is more expansive and ultimately more ethically engaged with otherness and bodily difference. …

Sicilian Intellectual And Cultural Resistance To Piedmont's Appropriation (1860-1920), Giordana Poggioli-Kaftan

Theses and Dissertations

Through my analysis of literary works, I endeavor to bring to the fore a cultural and intellectual counter-hegemonic discourse that came to be articulated by three Sicilian writers in the years following Italy’s unification. Their intent was that of debunking a national discourse that constructed Italian Southerners as “Otherness.” My study focuses on six primary texts, five short stories, and one novel, written at the turn of the twentieth century. These texts include Giovanni Verga’s “What is the King?” and “Freedom”; Luigi Pirandello’s “Madam Mimma,” “The Black Baby Goat,” and “The Other Son”; Luigi Capuana’s Rabbato’s Americani. In order to …

Young Adult Authors, Readers, And Feminized Social Media, Margaret R. Kohlmann

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at YA literature, a feminized genre that continues to gain momentum in publishing and popular culture. Specifically, I look at YA authors and their readers’ interactions on social media and the manner in which these conversations are gendered. I argue that YA authors are expected to utilize feminized traits on social media with their readers and fellow authors, but they use same traits to create social change in the genre and industry. This project analyzes three different types of readers: Readers, Reader-Creators, and Bloggers and their interactions with YA authors on social media. My interviews with five …

Granite And Rainbow: Queer Authority And Authorship In T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, And Virginia Woolf, Heejoung Shin

Theses and Dissertations

“Granite and Rainbow” argues that queerness is an essential condition for normative creativity to properly function in literary Modernism. Specifically, for the three modernist authors I explore in this project, queerness is at the heart of their literary performances: the private, bawdy, scintillatingly homoerotic Eliot feigning an impersonal, cerebral voice in public; the wounded, traumatized, feminine Yeats desiring for a compelling, masculine mask; and the scared and unsatisfiable Woolf whose strong desire for the maternal and a female tradition of writing is almost always cut short by her simultaneously antithetical craving for a male tradition of writing. This dissertation approaches …

Bigas Luna And The Being Of Spain: A Reading Of "Jamón, Jamón" (1992), Mario Sanchez Gumiel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims at seeing Bigas Luna’s Jamón, jamón (1992) as a modern text that explores the issue of the so-called Being of Spain. Although the Being of Spain has often been considered an issue constricted to the first half of the twentieth century (as well as centered around the question of which landscape could best express the essence of Spanishness), I want to add to the discourse that such an issue is not an issue that must be constricted temporarily to the first half of the twentieth century, but still a current one.

In developing this topic, I will …

Neoliberal Darlings: The Commodification Of Grotesque Children In Contemporary Comics And Literature, Mark Heimermann

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes grotesque depictions of children in contemporary, speculative comics and literature: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth, Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet, and Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen. It argues that the grotesque in these texts embodies the tension between children as economic objects and children as social beings, as the protagonists’ nonhuman elements are used to justify their commodification. Because commodification metaphorically transforms people into hybrids, part human/part commodity, the grotesque, with its emphasis on hybrid forms and ontological destabilization, is uniquely suited for representing this tension. Concern over the transformation …

Eclectic Modernisms, Or Riding Out The Maelstrom: Global Aesthetic Reflections On Disappointment, Jessica Therese Barg

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I interrogate the role of aesthetic modernisms in art and culture, using, as a point de départ, Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent book, Planetary Modernisms. In her book, she lays the ground work for an aesthetic conception of modernisms. She declares the aesthetic experience of modernity is marked by the eclectic recurrence of themes across genres, artistic mediums, or other boundaries, themes which do not always follow one particular system and can be taken from many sources. This essay argues that aesthetic modernisms found in art, when read diachronically, offer a therapeutic perspective on narrativity not only to …

The Meadow: A Novel, Scott Albert Winkler

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

THE MEADOW: A NOVEL

by

Scott A. Winkler

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark

The Meadow considers the question of how all Americans, both civilians and military personnel alike, are affected by the United States’ military actions. Set during the Vietnam era, The Meadow tells the story of Walt Neumann, who is torn between his dream of going to college and his father’s insistence that his sons serve their nation as he did in World War II. Circumstance unexpectedly enables Walt to pursue his dream, but he also comes to realize the source …

Dear Satellite, Kara Van De Graaf

Theses and Dissertations

This creative dissertation explores issues of female identity in contemporary American culture in an extended sequence of lyric-narrative poems. In these poems, speakers must try to negotiate female identity through examining the range of available aesthetic positions offered to women by art, social and cultural identities, and familial relationships as we understand them in western culture.

Most often, the book revolves around questions of body, and attempts to think through how modes of aestheticization-- and fetishization-- of certain qualities of "femaleness" have constructed the ways that women can act and be in the contemporary world. In order to examine the …

José María Arguedas Y La Decolonialidad: Lectura De "Todas Las Sangres" Y "El Zorro De Arriba" Y "El Zorro De Abajo", Iván Andrés Espinosa Orozco

Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand José María Arguedas’s literary production through the

lens of decolonial theory. The first chapter is an introduction to the objectives of this

project. Next, the second chapter is based on an approach to the concepts of decoloniality

and postcolonial studies, which serve as a theoretical background for the purpose of this

thesis. The third chapter is based on a decolonial reading of Arguedas’s "Todas las

sangres", which leads to problematize the aspects related to identity in Peru. The fourth

chapter is based on the analysis of Arguedas’s "El zorro de arriba y el zorro de …

Recombinant, Ching-In Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The hybrid texts (poems and prose) in the following dissertation investigate female and genderqueer lineage in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. In this book-length project, I examine the challenges of communal memory by juxtaposing voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas. Set in a speculative future, these voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through manipulation of white space on the page. The narrative speculates about the origins of M. Lao, a snakehead matriarch who has created a business empire from a fictional edu-tainment park, CoolieWorld, which traffics in the …

That's Debatable!: Genre Issues In Troubadour Tensos And Partimens, Kelli Mcqueen

Theses and Dissertations

The troubadour repertory consists of an elaborate complex of genres, some of which are dialogs that employ argumentation in the form of a debate or contest. The precise classification of these debate songs, especially the tenso and partimen genres, involves a measure of controversy that arose in the fourteenth century and continues today. Modern scholars in both literary and musical disciplines reference the dispute in their study of these songs, but largely gloss over the controversy to uphold the traditional parameters of their own disciplines. For literary scholars, this means treating these dialogs as lyric poetry, and musicologists tend to …

Sardanapalus And Gender: Examining Gender In The Works Of Byron And Delacroix, Stacey Schmiesing

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the gender standards as portrayed in Lord Byron's play Sardanapalus (1824) and Eugène Delacroix's painting Death of Sardanapalus (1828). These Romantic artists were part of a movement that changed gender rules forever. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about a culture that was more visual than ever and symbols of gender identity were everywhere. Rules of masculinity evolved from valuing raw power to including middle class virtues like moderation. Women continued to be objects of male desire but also began to represent the nation and its history. To explore the specific gender relationships within Byron's play and …

"Tales" Of Text And Culture: Tropes Of Imperialism, Women's Roles, Technologies Of Representation, And Collaborative Meaning-Making In Rita Golden Gelman's Tales Of A Female Nomad, Female Nomad And Friends, And Personal Website, Michelle Lynne Van Wert Kosalka

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary travel writing specifically created for a popular reading culture, Rita Golden Gelman's Tales of a Female Nomad, Female Nomad and Friends, and personal website. The project is concerned with how culture is continuously represented and shaped through the dialogic interaction between writer and reader, and the subsequent liminal spaces which emerge in moments of meaning-making. Chapter 1 is a close reading of how Gelman's works reinforce and, in some cases, resist, tropes of imperialism. Chapter 2 examines patriarchal gender roles in Gelman's works and the ways in which recent advances in feminist psychiatry and psychology can …

The Post-Apocalyptic Turn: A Study Of Contemporary Apocalyptic And Post-Apocalyptic Narrative, Hyong-Jun Moon

Theses and Dissertations

Few periods have witnessed so strong a cultural fixation on apocalyptic calamity as the present. From fictions and comic books to Hollywood films, television shows, and video games, the end of the world is ubiquitous in the form of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives. Imagining world-changing catastrophes, contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives force us to face urgent socio-political questions such as danger of globalization, effect of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, ecological disasters, fragility of human civilization, and so on. J. G. Ballard's final fictions, though they do not directly deal with apocalyptic events but evoke apocalyptic mood, portray the bleak landscape of …

We Eat This Gold, Christopher Drew

Theses and Dissertations

We Eat This Gold is a novel set in a small coal mining community in southwestern Indiana. Centered around a son's return to his father's house after a failed music career in Nashville, the novel explores the subtle social structures of rural America, the slow decline of modern coal communities, and the often oversimplified beliefs, worries, and biases found in small towns. It also seeks to provide a realistic portrayal of the inner workings and broader culture of an active underground coal mine, as well as explore the ramifications, both economic and psychological, of serious workplace injuries sustained in such …

The Talent Thief, Kate Olson Nesheim

Theses and Dissertations

The Talent Thief narrates an amateur con artist's philanthropic efforts in Windhoek, Namibia, and her psychological struggle with the guilt of a past crime. Guided by a literalistic interpretation of the Biblical "Parable of the Talents," Callie Donne works to redeem herself and restore her mother's reputation with a high-profile charity fundraising event. The novel's plot echoes elements of the United States' involvement in the economic and political development of the African continent. In its themes and settings, it also offers a point of contact between the Lutheran tradition and post-colonial cultural scholarship for contemporary American readers.

The Heart Is A Hollow Muscle, Aviva Englander Cristy

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poetry explores the relationship of between self and body by way of form and language. Through syntax and poetic forms, especially the sonnet, these poems investigate the interchange between the physical and the linguistics. The manuscript incorporates found text through the collage process, relying heavily on the medical texts of the seventeenth century anatomist William Harvey. The medicalized body becomes the means through which the speakers of these poems experience and express identity, considering the physical body as the body in pain, the queered body, and the body of the beloved.