Comparative Literature Commons^™

Deconstructing Biopolitical And Performative Modes Of Gender In Spanish Science Fiction, Emma Navarro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the distinctly Spanish works of science fiction created by Pedro Almodóvar and Elia Barceló through biopolitical and feminist frameworks. Utilizing the theories of feminist philosopher Judith Butler and sociologist Jemima Repo, we uncover associations between the fictional and theoretical that have seldom been studied in conjunction. The paper aims to demonstrate Almodóvar and Barceló’s unique narratives free from the confines of an unwavering gender stratum while simultaneously revealing the deteriorative effects of gender as a control apparatus. Deeply influenced by the post-Franco Madrid Movida movement, these creators exemplify the feminist ideals emerging from that progressive time, rejecting …

The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Are stories healing? This dissertation introduces and explores an idea that I call “the storytelling cure.” With this term I capture a set of related notions about the healing power of stories that span literary studies, intellectual history, philosophy, and medical practice. Through a comparative study I make the case for “the storytelling cure” as a cross-cultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual phenomenon of great age, complexity, and power, worthy of the most sustained attention by the contemporary field of Comparative Literature. Concretely, this dissertation presents three extended case studies of “storytelling cures” from three different kinds of texts (case history, frame …

Female Spaces And Exceptional Women Under Fascism: Anna Banti’S Early Writings (1930s–1940s), Matilde Fogliani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the early literary production of Anna Banti during 1930’s and 1940’s in newspapers and magazines. Female Spaces and Exceptional Women Under Fascism studies how Banti was able to publish and portray women who did not always comply with fascist propaganda’s standards, despite the harsh censorship. Banti employed dissimulation using umorismo, in order to avoid the censorship. Many scholars attributed the use of irony to Banti’s early writings to ridicule her female characters. She instead used umorismo because it leads the readership to an initial amusement but later to a reflection on women’s conditions. This research …

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Drift Net: The Social And Political Agency Of The Migratory Text, Chris Campanioni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a discursive model I call a “migratory text”—migrant-produced media that includes notebooks, correspondences, self-portraiture, diaristic video, auto-archival installation, and immersive performance—Drift Net gleans connections between world literature, literary translation, academic scholarship, and public policy. Alongside close readings of texts from the interwar period through today and intimate archival fieldwork with refugees and shelter staff across Europe, this study mobilizes queer theory and gender and sexuality studies as well as performance studies and media theory to critique migrant-assimilation techniques by state actors and NGOs. In centering the Cold War throughout its five chapters, Drift Net broaches the different political …

“El Inglés Y El Spánich”: Translating The Heterolingualism Of La Frontera–A Critical Translation Of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’S Estrella De La Calle Sexta, Nora E. Carr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers an original translation and critical analysis of Crosthwaite’s Estrella de la calle sexta. In so doing it engages with recent work on contemporary Latin American literature, translation theory, and border theory, while also offering a version of Crosthwaite’s text—itself a seminal work in studies of the Tijuanan imaginary—that will be accessible to anglophone readers. The critical chapters, too, will allow scholars of the border to revisit the stories of Estrella through the lenses of language, translation, and heterolingualism. Chapter One offers a reevaluation of the mode of translation theory that posits translation as a textual transfer from …

El Ascendiente Latinoamericano En La Literatura Euskaldun: “Realismo Mágico”, “Literatura Mundial” Y La Emergencia Del Campo Literario Vasco, Gustavo Jimenez Vaquero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, “El ascendiente latinoamericano en la literatura euskaldun: ‘realismo mágico’, ‘literatura mundial’ y la emergencia del campo literario vasco” (“The Latin American Ascendency of Basque Literature: ‘magical realism,’ ‘world literature’ and the emergence of the Basque literary field”), analyzes the influence of Latin American literature in the formation of modern Basque literature vis-a-vis contemporary debates of World Literature. Contradicting the nationalist agenda governing the metanarrative elaborated by Basque literary histories, my work uncovers the Latin American ascendency of modern Basque literature in the canonical works of a group of Basque writers who played a key role in the modernization …

When Saeed Betrays Fuad: Laughing At The Mechanized Occupation, Ezgi Demirors

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comparatively explores the emergence of the comic in the novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi and the film The Time That Remains directed by Elia Suleiman, by building on Bergson’s theory of mechanization. By tracing Bergson’s idea that comic effect is created through the creeping up of the mechanical on the living, the establishment of the “mechanical occupation” as a source of the comic will be elucidated. The comic will be explored in terms of the ways in which both texts offer a new historicizing operation, being works that focus on the narration …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Prophecy, Emanation, And The Mediterranean Middle Ages, Alberto Gelmi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the notion of prophecy as a semiotic construct in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a chronological span that runs from Late Antiquity to the 14^th century. It argues that theories of prophecy offer useful insights in the domain of rhetoric and not just in epistemology, as scholarship has predominantly contended. The first two chapters survey the trendsetting work of Augustine, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides, arguing that their semiotic angle on prophecy depends on a structural affinity with the metaphysical template of emanationism as formulated by Plotinus and Proclus, whose teachings went often misrepresented or …

Nation(S) And Narrative(S) In Forms Of Chinese Culture, Angela Chun Ling Wei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore the difference in "forms" between literary works and their adapted films, and then examine the relationships between the narrative and subject matter both in written and motion-picture form. In the process, the artistic relationship to life narratives and changes in national culture and government will be explored, employing the backdrop of four important national crises in history: the cultural revolution in mainland China, post-civil war Taiwan, Japanese hegemony in Shanghai, and the 1997 return of Hong Kong. The works covered are novels from Modern Chinese literature and their adapted films, King of Children, A …

Critical Climates: Stimmung, Voice And Mythopoesis In German Literature From 1950–1989, Marc Cesar Rickenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Critical Climates examines the interest in myth among a number of literary figures from 1950 to 1989 in relation to the concurrent re-emergence of the German aesthetic concept of Stimmung. At once referring to atmosphere, milieu, mood, disposition and harmony, while carrying along its root Stimme, or voice, this dissertation shows how Stimmung informed a literary practice among German-language authors that engaged the relationship between narrative, ideology and collective moods in a way that can be spoken of in terms of a mythopoesis. This project builds upon contemporary scholarship that focuses on Stimmung as a way to refigure …

Object Expression: Diligent Realism In The Works Of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, And W. G. Sebald, John Knight

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past twenty years, ambiguous yet meaningful encounters with objects have become a trope in contemporary fiction. Collections and archives, found objects and commonplace articles of modern life have especially substantiated literature that engages themes of displacement and selfhood. The method of incorporating objects into these works ranges from explicit cabinets of curiosities to more subtle appearances, but in each case material reality is the conduit for fundamental expressions of character. These authors draw the reader’s gaze toward an object as a way to indirectly articulate subjective experience, conspicuously displacing the central concerns of a text. This study examines …

The Seduction Of Pessimism: Eros, Failure, And The Novel, Tom Ribitzky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Plato’s Symposium, we get a pessimistic myth not only about love, but about the first experience of loss, in which we were once globular cosmic beings who were split in two by Zeus’s thunderbolts as punishment for not obeying the Olympian gods. Falling down to earth after the split, Zeus introduced eros out of pity for our condition. Our consolation was to find our other halves and hold on to them as a way of remembering what it was like when we were whole. But, as Allan Bloom notes:

…man’s condition soon worsened. In the beginning, their real …

Serial Killer: Gustave Flaubert's Pro-Woman, Woman-Killing Madame Bovary, Francesca Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that Gustave Flaubert kills the women in Madame Bovary, all of whom are married and/ or mothers in the novel, in order to overtly represent the impossible conditions of womanhood and domestic life in nineteenth century France. Further, I will expose the ways in which Flaubert, through these killings, aims to release his woman characters from their lives of oppression and imprisonment, detailing their increasingly limited options in life and their lack of agency. Although Flaubert does attempt to give his women, in particular Emma Bovary, limited agency in the work, this agency is always …

Framing The Border: Liminality In The Network Narratives Of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Muhammad Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores liminality conveyed as displacement before death in the network narrative films of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Due to their depiction of existential crises and possibly fatal scenarios of several characters in different countries and regions, these network narrative films are colloquially referred to as the “Death Trilogy.” Therefore, rearranging the many strands of death-related abstractions and notions in these films around liminality becomes a jumping-off point to explore deeper layers of these works. Through interdisciplinary yet markedly film studies excavations, this thesis projects the liminal spaces of Iñárritu’s films onto border spaces. With borders considered as sites of …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

The Twilight Of The Absolute: Russian Symbolism And The Romantic Project, Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation project, The Twilight of the Absolute: Russian Symbolism and the Romantic Project, scrutinizes and interrogates the premises of so called “influence studies” by examining one tangled instance of cultural interaction—the relation between early German Romanticism (the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Schelling) and the second wave of Russian Symbolism (Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov). In the scarce secondary literature that touches upon this complex literary-historical problem, Russian Symbolists are often unproblematically represented as proud “neo-Romantics,” passive recipients of the Romantic intellectual legacy. The major claim I advance in my thesis is that Jena Romanticism, …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

Cinegrafia: Literatura, Espectadores Y Cinefilia Contemporanea En Latinoamerica, Rojo Robles Mejias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The arrival of cinema in Latin America quickly produced an intermedial cultural landscape. To this day, experimental authors in the Hemisphere and the Caribbean write cinegraphic fiction as a way to deal with film’s socio-cultural repercussions. My work addresses the question of how cinema transforms and subverts the creation of fictional narratives in the last five decades. By considering a corpus of post-1968 literary works in Latin America, I argue that contemporary cinegraphic fiction, a concept I coined, shed light on filmic discourses, platforms, and artifacts and transpose film language into literary texts. Intending to rethink polycentric film production and …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …

Adorno And The Language Of The Intellectual In Exile, Ana Baert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adorno’s experience as an exile influenced his two works Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944) and Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (1951). These works embody the adversity Adorno wrestled with in his personal life and voice a quasi-indignant resignation to the notion of displacement as a natural yet mutilated human condition. I will analyze Dialectic of Enlightenment through the subjective, experiential lens of Minima Moralia thereby revealing the personal allusions to Adorno himself in his analysis of Odysseus as the prototypical bourgeois.

This thesis explores a biographical approach of the man who was known for his viscero-critical voice. …

Chimeras, Centaurs, And Satyrs: Creating Mixed Genre Texts In Antiquity And The Renaissance, Claire Sommers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mirroring its many definitions, the concept of hybridity has historically been a highly fraught one, with creatures such as the centaur or the satyr alternately treated as wild and wise. Defined as a “mixed entity,” the English word “hybrid” derives from the ancient Greek hybris, a term with several connotations, including wanton violence, lust, or outrage. The word is also synonymous with “hubris,” or excessive pride. Hybris also developed additional meanings, referring to a deed of excess, an attempt to rise above one’s station, or the desire to surpass the gods. More positively, hybris may also be translated as …

The Novelist And The Nun: Two Sisters, One Bond, Kathleen J. Gaffney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gabrielle Roy (1909 - 1983) was a French-Canadian author, journalist and teacher. She was also my third cousin, first cousin of my grandfather, Stephen McEachran. She wrote fiction and nonfiction in the latter part of the twentieth century and her work spotlighted Canada’s poor, immigrants, and marginalized women. Gabrielle Roy rose to fame as a keen-eyed witness and commentator in writings spanning over forty years. Her sister Bernadette (1897 – 1970) lived a more private, spiritual life as a nun, named Sister Léon-de-la-Croix, far away from the public spotlight.

In this thesis I summarize the events that shaped both sisters’ …