Comparative Literature Commons^™

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

(Re)Forming Italians: Children's Literature In Italy, 1929-1939, Marisa Giorgi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the centrality of children's literature under Fascism as a tool to bring about the ultimate goal of forming the "new" Italian. This project examines the relationship between children's literature, the creation of culture and the transmission of ideology in Fascist Italy. I chose the period 1929-1939 because this decade encompasses the years the regime actively sought consolidation of power and consensus, as well as the years of the fascistization of Italian schools. These novels are conduits of fascist ideology veiled as adventure stories, historical novels, bildungsroman or romantic fiction for children and young adults and deserve …

A Critical And Cultural Poetics Of The End: Self, Space, And Volatility In Los Angeles, Pamela Albanese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles delineates the correspondences between Los Angeles spaces--exterior, topographical, architectural, and imaginary--and aspects of the self--interiority, identity, experience, and desire--in fictional and non-fictional depictions of Los Angeles. Through close readings of key Los Angeles novels, essays, and films, this project emphasizes how the narrative "I" traverses urban space, focusing on the dissolution of boundaries between self and place. Los Angeles' sprawling, decentralized layout and rapidly-shifting landscape have a profound influence on narrative identity, generating a volatile and disquieting sense of self; this project also explores how …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …

Renaissance And Reformation: From Private Morals To Public Policy In Alonso De Ercilla’S "La Araucana" And Edmund Spenser’S "The Faerie Oueene", Cyrus Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the significance for Ercilla and Spenser of humanism, Neoplatonism, Petrarchism, and cortegiania, competing discourses with distinct identities within the competing ideologies of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both authors draw on a shared heritage of the translatio studii and, in particular, on imagery arising from epic poetry's underlying tension between epos and eros. Ercilla's use of this material fuels a renovatio of classical epic based on the poet's participation in the events he describes. Spenser's utilization of these motifs constitutes a transformatio impelled by reformed religion, which raises the stakes from the potential for shame or …

A Theater Of Anxiety: The Irrepresentable In Shelley's "The Cenci" And In Musset's "Lorenzaccio", Remy Joseph Roussetzki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I develop a comparative study of two outstanding Romantic dramas, Shelley's The Cenci (1819) and Musset's Lorenzaccio (1834), with the purpose of demonstrating that both offer a viable answer to the difficult problems facing the revival of tragedy at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Both Shelley and Musset took into account the tragic traditions available in their time, starting with the Greek models, to the evolution and transformation of the genre during Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England, Neo-classicism in France and the Baroque in Germany.

I argue that these plays aggravated in particular the Historical …

The Romance Of Narrative: Design And Desire In The Odyssey, The Aithiopika, And Don Quixote, Susan Brockman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Odyssey, Aithiopika, and Quixote have a surprising set of narrative structures in common: each work falls into two distinct "halves," and each includes a large number of interpolated narratives which appear largely, though not exclusively, in the first half of the text. Both of these features–the bi-partite frames and the large number of interpolated tales–have important implications, both for the narratives as a whole, and for their relationship to the literary mode of romance. This structure imbues each text with a quality of extreme narrative self-consciousness in which part of the subject of the work becomes the …

The Poetics Of Authorship In The Later Middle Ages: The Emergence Of The Modern Literary Persona, Burt Joseph Kimmelman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Literary individualism manifested itself in the twelfth century both trivially and profoundly. Word puzzles and overt self-naming within a literary work, and discussions of the nature of poetry and the role of the poet in the world, increasingly considered the purpose and efficacy of writing and ultimately of language per se. Poets asserted themselves in their works not so much for the sake of self-promotion, in a modern sense, but to address and modulate contemporary intellectual and spiritual issues. Speculative grammar, nominalism and realism, often provided the material for poets such as Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer and Langland. As …

Eustache Deschamps' "L'Art De Dictier", Deborah M. Sinnreich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

L'Art de dictier, written in 1392 by the prolific courtier-poet Eustache Deschamps, is the first ars poetica ever written in French. It provides invaluable insights into medieval poetics as perceived by a respected medieval poet.

L'Art de dictier is composed of two sections: a brief introductory liberal arts treatise and a prescriptive poetics devoted to the lyric. In the introduction, music is divided into two sub-categories. Deschamps calls instrumental music "artificial music" because he feels it can be taught to anyone. "Natural music," in contrast, is poetry, for only those who are inspired to compose it can do so. …

Gestus In The Theaters Of Brecht And Beckett, Barry Joseph Batorsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation asserts that the gest is the benchmark of Brecht's theater and is a basic element of the Beckettian vision. Part one defines the gest for Brecht's work. Chapter one of part one distinguishes gestic drama from other forms. The gest, understood as a historically significant comportment, proves incompatible with traditional plot and character structures. Chapter two suggests that gestic comportments loosen drama's connection to topics. Mother Courage is not about the horrors of war, but about how society chooses war. Chapter four contrasts the gestic, "typical"-event drama to events-of-character dramas. The distinction is then developed to explain Brecht's …

Montemayor's "Diana": A Translation And Introduction, Roseanna M. Mueller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jorge de Montemayor's Los siete libros de la Diana (1559) was one of the more popular Renaissance pastoral romances. This Spanish pastoral romance written by a Castilianized Portuguese had many continuations. It influenced other pastoral works in England, and enjoyed a wide readership throughout Europe, as its many editions and translations witness. The Diana is a transitional work and an example of what writers of prose fiction were striving for in the middle of the 16th century. The Diana retained elements of the chivalric romance, integrated Petrarchan influences that had hitherto been reserved for the lyric, adhered to Neoplatonic love …