Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Romani People In The European Cultural Imagination: Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée And Virginia Woolf, Nadya Siyam

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly literature on Roma is scarce compared to other racial groups as a lack of academic interest, financial limitations, and other social and political factors has constrained it. This resulted in a cross-cultural circulation of misinformation about Romani people and the reproduction of Romani myths and stereotypes in fiction. This project aims to analyze selected literary works on Gypsies from three Eastern and Western European countries and two periods to unpack the cultural and political roots of Romani literary misrepresentation. This research employs a range of theoretical frameworks chosen to put the Gypsy protagonists under maximum spotlight without unnecessary repetition, …

Daughters And Fathers In Memoirs: Najla Said And Fatima Bhutto, Yasmina Bakry

Theses and Dissertations

The father-daughter relationship has always been crucial in shaping the identity of the daughter. Daughters inevitably inherit their fathers’ personal trauma, and in the case of the daughters of activists, national trauma as well. Throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, daughters struggle to depoliticize their famous fathers, as well as assert their individuality amidst the overshadowing activism of their fathers and conflictual history of their nations. To heal the daughters’ identity fissures, they embark on a journey to chronicle memories of their fathers throughout their lives and critically assess their fathers’ cultural, social and political heritage and identity. This thesis will …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Doctors And Saints: Preparing Albert Camus’S The Plague To Address The Dangers Of Christian Nationalism, Christopher J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

My project is focused on identifying and responding to Christian nationalism in United States politics by utilizing Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. The Plague found heightened popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting legacy points to what should be long-term prominence in the public eye. With its popularity and anti-fascist content, The Plague is an appropriate text to utilize for addressing America’s Christian nationalism. My paper functions with a foundation on the work of Kenneth Burke, particularly his focus on literature’s utility as equipment for living.

I use my project to suggest that The Plague is not in an …

Archetypes Revisited: Investigating The Power Of Universals In Soviet And Hollywood Cinema, Iana Guselnikova

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the concept of archetypes in Soviet and Hollywood films, drawing perspectives from ancient philosophy and the thought of Carl Jung and post-Jungians. While psychoanalysis provides a valuable framework for understanding the human psyche and the idea of archetypes, it has its limitations and gaps that require further exploration. To address these issues, this paper proposes the adoption of a structuralist approach, with reference to the work of Vladimir Propp on the morphology of the fairy tale. Incorporating Propp's ideas can complement psychoanalytic theory and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying patterns and structures that shape …

From Roland To Gawain, Or The Origin Of Personified Knights, Clyde Tilson

Theses and Dissertations

Though there is a lot of work on the development of the novel, there has not been sufficient analysis of how it was formed, especially the shift towards the modern protagonist. By analyzing two medieval works, one from the early medieval period and one from the middle of the medieval period, the seeds of this shift can be seen. The works chosen were La chanson de Roland and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both have knights with fairly similar expectations, and both have been enduring characters in their respective national identities and literatures. Both Roland and Gawain, being …

Daughterly Narratives In Search Of Voice: Fadwa Tuqan, Latifa Al-Zayyat, And Samar Attar, Rania Bedeir

Theses and Dissertations

A myriad of pressures and struggles affect Arab women as they are coming of age due to the familial and societal constructs they face. As daughters, they yearn for a voice amidst a plethora of generational boundaries, transmissions, and ideals. The intricacy of the psychological and interconnected structural factors is augmented by their gender in societies that are motivated, and often governed by, the implications of gender roles. While multiple layers of influence such as familial and sociocultural institutions affect how consciousness is formed, generational transmission, through the maternal figure, is paramount. Daughters, therefore, cannot narrate their personal stories without …

Fragments Of A Writer’S Mind: Virginia Woolf In Her Own Words, Baheya Zeitoun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a thematic reading of select autobiographical and theoretical works by Virginia Woolf. It utilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the rhizome as a methodological framework. The rhizome does not have a hierarchal structure but is rather interconnected. In the same way, the chapters interweave the multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches to connect the disparate factions of the modernist writer’s mind and life.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of post-suffrage writers with narratives that diverged from male-centric values. Woolf is one of the writers who makes a clear distinction between male and female values by championing women’s experiences …

Palestine Without Borders: A Study Of Arab And Western Voices In Theater, Bassem Mohsen Ahmed El-Sayed Ahmed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Theater has always been perceived as a way to link different cultures together and bring them under one large domain. Regardless, the genre does not give the needed attention to works written in certain regions that may otherwise fall outside the consensus. One good example is Palestine and any works that deal with it as a setting. The first thing that comes to mind whenever the word “Palestine” is brought up is almost always of a political nature, having to do with the Palestinians’ national conflict with Israel. This thesis undertakes to amend this by probing into plays written by …

The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi

Theses and Dissertations

According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

An Ambiguous Hermeneutic: Doubleness In Ingmar Bergman’S Quest For Self, Ingy Aziz

Theses and Dissertations

One of the functions of art in all its forms is to provide the means for self-exploration and, in this way, to enable us to relate cultural representation to the question of meaning. The beauty of cinematic art is that it gives voice to our deepest and most profound concerns and enables us to bridge the gap between personal psychology and public understanding. As interpreters, we do not always unearth the answers that we seek, but we certainly gain more insight through delving into the minds of major filmmakers in the canon of modern cinema. This thesis is on the …

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …

Constructing Selfhood Through Fantasy: Mirror Women And Dreamscape Conversations In Olga Grushin’S Forty Rooms, Grace Marie Alger

Theses and Dissertations

By its very nature, fantasy seeks to estrange its protagonist and readers from reality, leading to the exploration of topics that would generally be left isolated or unchallenged. Fantasy allows a character to step outside of reality in order to examine the conditions of their existence, to question their own position in society, and to reflect upon the ideologies that determine their social positioning. Analyzing Olga Grushin’s Forty Rooms (2016), this thesis examines the ways in which the female narrator turns to fantasy, more specifically, dreamed conversations and visions of multiplied selves, in an attempt to overcome the powerlessness of …

Planting Rhizomes: Roots And Rhizomes In Maryse Condé’S Traversée De La Mangrove And Calixthe Beyala’S Le Petit Prince De Belleville, Rume Kpadamrophe

Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, migration has played a crucial role in the development of human civilization, with the transplantation of cultures from one region to another shaping identities worldwide. The African diaspora, beginning with the Atlantic Slave Trade, saw the forced transportation of around 12 million Africans across the ocean, resulting in the creation of creole identities in the Antilles. Literature has long reflected the experiences of migrants. In Maryse Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove and Calixthe Beyala's Le Petit Prince de Belleville, the complexity of Antillean and Afro-French identities is explored. This thesis delves into how Condé's work highlights the …

Violence, Rebellion, And Compromise In Chinese Campus Cinema ----- The Comparison Of Cry Me A Sad River And Better Days, Chunyu Liu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the social critiques in Chinese campus films by viewing their development and cultural context. Social Criticism, a prominent trend in Chinese cinema, addresses a wide range of widely concerned social issues, including education, romance, marriage, politics, environmental concerns, psychological repressions, etc. It appears that a Chinese mainland woman filmmaker and a Hong Kong professional director echo each other on the same theme. They are inspired by similar genuine events and share many similarities in the way they orchestrate the relationships and backgrounds of the characters. However, the two films retain their different characteristics. This thesis will discuss …

Truth And Identity In Dostoevsky’S Raskolnikov And Prince Myshkin, Gwendolyn Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Situated in the context of Bakhtin’s understanding of Dostoevsky’s narrative structure, the goal of this thesis aims to analyze the ways in which Dostoevsky’s characters negotiate their identities through a dialogic process of truth-telling as it appears in two forms: an explicit expression of truth that is consciously made by a novel’s characters in earnest dialogue, and an unspoken, even unconscious expression of truth that is not openly expressed, but can be inferred from the seemingly illogical reactions and behaviors of characters in the novel. The latter form is established in terms of Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and unconscious …

Geography Of A “Foreign” China: British Intellectuals’ Encounter With Chinese Spaces, 1920-1945, Yuzhu Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how eleven British intellectuals, who lived in or traveled to China from the early to mid twentieth century, represent Chinese spaces and how Chinese spaces shape their identities. This group of writers includes WilliamSomerset Maugham, Robert William Swallow, Ann Bridge, Stella Benson, Maurice Denton Welch, Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Peter Quennell, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, and J.G. Ballard. Multiple genres, including travel writing, diaries, poetry, and fiction, based on the authors’ real experiences in China constitute the research corpus. Current scholarship has researched these works fromhistorical andsocio-political viewpoints, but the spatial perspective has been ignored. Edward Soja’s …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Voicing Female Servitude In Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, And Taha Hussein, Muhammed Salem

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the literary portrayal of the female servant in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1865), Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1890-1979), and The Call of the Curlew by Taha Hussein (1889-1973), within the theoretical framework of subaltern and gender studies. The study shows how three female subordinates in Victorian England, Postcolonial Caribbean Islands, in addition to Bedouin Egypt bargain while trying to dismantle their intersectional subordination within the patriarchal order. The problematic yet romanticized portrayal of governessing in Jane Eyre becomes a commoditized servitude, which requires active resistance in the postcolonial setting of Wide. As for The …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

The Pursuit Of Good Food: The Alimentary Chronotope In Madame Bovary, Lauren Flinner

Theses and Dissertations

The imagery in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is crucial to the structure of the novel due to Flaubert’s insistence on observations of le quotidien or daily life. Daily activities, mundane tasks, and precise descriptions take as much precedence within the chapters as the actions of Emma herself, putting focus on the importance of these activities as readers try to discern meaning from their inclusion. One such daily activity that features in many scenes and varies widely is the presence of food within the novel. As Lilian Furst, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Victor Brombert observed in their analyses of Madame Bovary, …

Poetic Self-Representation Among Russian And British Female Poets In The Late 18Th And Early 19Th Centuries, Ulyana Brewer

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the development of self-representation by Russian women poets of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century through comparison with the women poets in England of the same period. The comparative analysis of the works composed by Ekaterina Urusova, Aleksandra Murzina, Anna Bunina, Mary Julia Young, Mary Scott, Janet Little, and others provides insight into women poets’ practices of exceeding the boundaries of gender-defined art to inhabit literary discourse traditionally occupied by male poets and expose the artificiality of gender and literary genre relations and engage with a variety of political, …

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 …

Postcolonial Narrative And The Dialogic ImaginatioN: An Analysis Of Early Francophone West African Fiction And Cinema, Seydina Mouhamed Diouf

Theses and Dissertations

Francophone West Africa, in the aftermath of colonization, found itself at a crossroads between the necessity to address the problems of neo-colonialism while affirming its cultural identity and the need to embrace a universal message. That dilemma is not shared by literary critics who regard the work of early generation writers merely as an “empire writing back.” In the many classifications of West African literature, the emphasis is oftentimes put either on the importance of a counter-discourse that also rejects Western aesthetics or on the effects of post-independence disillusionment. This study argues that early francophone West African literary productions took …

Contagion And Crisis: Narrating Egypt’S 1947 Epidemic In Literature And Film, Nada Maurice Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

In 1947, cholera struck Egypt causing around 10,277 deaths from a total of 20,804 cases within a few months. What does the cholera outbreak reveal about Egyptian society at the time? How did different writers and filmmakers respond to it? Although several studies have tackled epidemics and the emergence of medical and public health practice in Egypt from an historical perspective, virtually none to date have seriously examined Egypt’s 1947 cholera epidemic from a literary standpoint. This thesis, by analysing the epidemic through works produced about or during the time of the epidemic, offers a deeper insight into the event …

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 …

The Rising Of The Avant-Garde Movement In The 1980s People’S Republic Of China: A Cultural Practice Of The New Enlightenment, Jingsheng Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, entitled “The Rising of the Avant-garde Movement in 1980s People’s Republic of China: A Cultural Practice of the New Enlightenment,” deals with Chinese avant-garde literature and art in the reform era of the 1980s, when the People’s Republic of China was turning from high socialism to state capitalism. Scholars of Chinese studies have deemed avant-garde texts as counter-narratives of enlightenment, which was a main ideology and national agenda of the reform era. This dissertation reexamines this established statement by shifting focus from the traditional hermeneutic approaches to a sociological study of the generative conditions of avant-garde literature and …