Comparative Literature Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Afro-Diasporic Literatures Of The United States And Brazil: Imaginaries, Counter-Narratives, And Black Feminism In The Americas, David E. S. Beek

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores contemporary Afro-diasporic literatures by black cultural producers in the United States and Brazil that resist, subvert, and dismantle the persistent myth of Brazilian racial democracy. From the US, I investigate John Keene’s 2015 collection of stories and novellas Counternarratives, in addition to Gayl Jones’ 2021 novel Palmares. Conversely, from Brazil, I examine Conceição Evaristo’s 2003 novel Ponciá Vicêncio, as well as the black trans musician and slam poet Bixarte’s social media performance art. Although these Afro-diasporic literatures deconstruct the myth of racial democracy in Brazil, at the same time, each is entangled with what …

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 …

Marianismo And The Catholic Autobiographer: A Comparative Analysis, Nina Lee

Theses and Dissertations

As a version of femininity that derives from the figure of the Mother Mary, marianismo emphasizes the traditional roles of self-sacrifice, motherhood, spirituality, and nurturance. While marianismo is most often associated with Latin America, it can be traced back to Catholicism’s origins in Europe. Early and medieval Catholic theologians, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo and Peter Abelard, demonstrate marianista beliefs within their autobiographical writings. As autobiography is purported to be the most intimate window into both the personal and larger social situations of a given time and place, the autobiographies of such Catholic male theologians provide insight into 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 …

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 …

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, …

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, …

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 …

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 …

Digesting Gender: Gendered Foodways In Modern Chinese Literature, 1890s–1940s, Zhuo Feng

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate Han Bangqing (1856–1894), Lao She (1899– 1966), and Su Qing’s (1914–1982) works to study the literary representations of how people purchased, prepared, shared, and ate food in different social contexts allowing them to adapt to new gender norms. I contend that the intersection of food, gender and literature stages the process through which people reconciled different and sometimes conflicting gender norms through their everyday eating practices. When encountering new cooking and eating practices in these literary works, people reflect upon their past lives and, wittingly or unwittingly, begin to accept different gender norms, and modify …

Pushing The Limits Of Black Atlantic And Hispanic Transatlantic Studies Through The Exploration Of Three U.S. Afro-Latio Memoirs, Julia Luján

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation project I intend to push the boundaries, by placing them in dialogue with each other, of both the Black Atlantic and the Hispanic Transatlantic Studies while exploring the cultural production of two groups that are generally excluded from the scholarly research done on the African Diaspora: U.S. Afro-Latinos and Afro-Argentines. While Black Atlantic Studies focuses on the Anglophone world and Hispanic Transatlantic Studies focuses on the Spanish-speaking world, they both ignore the two groups mentioned above as they complicate the boundaries of these fields by sitting at the intersections of race, language, and location.

Furthermore, I explore …

Games And Play Of Dream Of The Red Chamber, Jiayao Wang

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the games derived from Cao Xueqin’s novel Dream of The Red Chamber during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1880s-1920s) through its various literary and textual representations. In brief, the games create a sense of otherworldliness for players to imagine their mode of being in a space that is set apart from the daily grinds of the historical transition. Dramatic and literary sources have been a constant motif or theme for traditional games in China. However, it was after the publication of Dream of Red Chamber that the characters, the themes and motifs of the novel …

The Deconstruction Of Patriarchal War Narratives In Svetlana Alexievich’S The Unwomanly Face Of War, Liubov Kartashova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the Soviet construction of womanhood resulted first in females’ active participation in World War II and then in the silencing of women’s war experiences by fabricating a reality in which women’s trauma did not exist. Such a deprivation of women’s agency led to female soldiers’ confusion of identity, experience of shame and consequential self-censorship. In The Unwomanly Face of War (У войны не женское лицо, 1985), Svetlana Alexievich acknowledges these neglected experiences and traumas, and creates a space in which women’s stories have a right to exist. Applying Jean Elshtain’s theory on the lack of attention …

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

Taiwanese Postcolonial Identities And Environmentalism In Wu Ming-Yi’S The Stolen Bicycle, Chihchi Sunny Tsai

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s 吳明益 2015 novel The Stolen Bicycle (Danche shiqie ji 單車失竊記) and argues that it contests the dichotomous

framework assumed in Taiwanese postcolonial theories by revealing contextualized and intertwined complexities. Taiwanese postcolonial literary theorists have been relying on dichotomies, such as perpetrators versus victims and colonizers versus the colonized, to understand Taiwanese colonial and postwar history. These dichotomies produce ways of identarian standoff that are overly simplified by socio-cultural, political or linguistic differences. These dichotomies are useful from a structuralist perspective in literary theories; yet, they are unable to account for the subtle …

Emerging Populations: An Analysis Of Twenty-First Century Caribbean Short Stories, Jeremy Patterson

Theses and Dissertations

The Caribbean has always been a contested space, a space difficult to define, and the literary genre of the short story has always been difficult to define as well. As a region and as a genre, what they share is less prestige, and less development, than other regions and genres. This dissertation brings both of these elements together in a comparative literature study of three twenty-first century Caribbean short story anthologies from the three major linguistic traditions of the Caribbean (English, French, and Spanish). The distinguishing characteristic of these short stories, and the overarching framework for this study, is that …

Time, Space And Nonexistence In Joseph Brodsky's Poetry, Daria Smirnova

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is twofold: first, to examine the two major themes that permeate Joseph Brodsky’s works, time and space, and see how the poet employs various theoretical approaches to the topics and synthesizes them in order to deliver his unique view on both. Second, based on the examination of time and space, this study defines and distinguishes in relation to the chronotope two sorts of nonexistence – nebytie – heavily present in Brodsky’s later works. This project demonstrates that one kind of nebytie is defined through spatial references and primarily addresses one’s location in space or one’s …

Between Holy Russia And A Monkey: Darwin's Russian Literary And Philosophical Critics, Brendan G. Mooney

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is dedicated to the response of nineteenth-century Russian writers to the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. His theory was by no means the next discovery in a series of indistinguishable scientific discoveries; the fact that its implications touched every aspect of human social life was lost on no one, despite the fact that Darwin did not discuss human evolution in any detail. The Origin changed what it meant to be human: what Darwin’s readers took to be their place in the universe and how they ought to act with regard to both other …

Myths On The Move: A Critical Pluralist Approach To The Study Of Classical Mythology In Post-Classical Works, David Carter Delbar

Theses and Dissertations

The Classical Tradition, now more commonly known as Classical Reception, is a growing sub-discipline in Classics which seeks to trace the influence of Greco-Roman culture in post-classical works. While scholars have already done much to analyze specific texts, and many of these analyses are theoretically complex, there has yet to be a review of the theories these scholars employ. The purpose of this study is to provide researchers with a theoretical tool kit which allows them greater scope and nuance when analyzing usages of classical mythology. It examines five different approaches scholars have used: adaptation, allusion, intertextuality, reception, and typology. …

Surrealism And Postmodernism In Gregory Abbott's Remlack Too, Elizabeth Helen Donakey

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Gregory Abbott's Remlack Too, particularly in its fusion of surrealism and postmodernism. It addresses the ways in which Remlack Too highlights the artist's experience with sleep apnea, but acknowledges that this is only one level of understanding the painting. Other layers are realized through a study of surrealism and postmodernism. This research analyzes the ways in which surrealism and postmodernism work together, including through their lack of style, fluidity in definition, incorporation of semiotics, distrust in science, reliance on psychoanalysis, and especially through postmodernism's appropriating of earlier artistic movements. This thesis reviews the previously overlooked elements of …

Studying The Voice Of Mo Yan And Howard Goldblatt: Zhang Kou In The Garlic Ballads, Yiran Yang

Theses and Dissertations

In 2012, a Chinese, Mo Yan 莫言, became the laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first time in China’s history; this is not because Mo Yan is better than other Chinese writers, or that he follows some Western writers like Gabriel García Márquez, but because he works with better translators, who make his stories captivating for Western readers, than whom his precursors work with. Even though Mo Yan sticks closely to dialect and culture in rural areas in northern China, his translators adjust his writings to an accessible form in another language. In order to understand …

Convertirse En Inmortal, 成仙 Chéngxiān, Becoming Xian: Memory And Subjectivity In Cristina Rivera Garza’S Verde Shanghai, Katherine Paulette Elizabeth Crouch

Theses and Dissertations

Verde Shanghai, published in 2011 by Cristina Rivera Garza, is often used in discussions of Orientalism in Latina America and Mexico. The text employs tropes and stereotypes common in Orientalist thinking, but to label the work Orientalist and analyze it through that lens seems too simplistic. I argue that Verde Shanghai ultimately proves a refutation of Orientalism’s existence within Mexico, and, more broadly, an overall deconstruction of the East-West dichotomy. Rivera Garza appears more interested in using racial and cultural identities to dismantle the polar dichotomies in which her characters live, ultimately critiquing these frameworks in the outside world.

An Exploration Of The Psyche In "Era Of Black", Haley M. Karabasz

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose three parallel projects. The first is an introductory exploration of the narrative conventions that have become, over time, established tropes in Fantasy Fiction as a brief discussion of my conscious strategy to reject the normative structures set in modern fantasy literature in my own fiction project “Era of Black.” Second is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, in which I deploy specific stylistic and narrative gestures that mark my effort to move beyond the received “rules” of the Fantasy mode. The third and final project here is to frame an analysis of my protagonist’s complex psychological …