Comparative Literature Commons^™

Hell Reimagined: Dante’S Inferno And The Secular Afterlives Of Divine Punishment, Yara Mohamed El Hashimi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines contrapasso and how it changes across different media and different sources of moral authority. In Chapter One, I examine four different cantos of Dante’s Inferno and rely on Teodolinda Barolini’s work to examine textual contrapasso. Chapter One also discusses how Dante’s work shows the sinner’s moral condition and makes it visible through the punishment inflicted. Additionally, Dante’s Inferno presents punishment as part of a divinely authorized moral order, which becomes important in Chapter Two when I examine how William Blake visually interprets and questions that system. In Chapter Two, I examine the works of Blake that correspond …

The Narrative In The Algorithm: Storytelling, World Literature, And The Smartphone, Chad Szalkowski-Ference

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I interrogate the role algorithms, artificial intelligence, and smartphone technology play in contemporary world literature. My analysis begins with the post-truth condition, which speaks to the contemporary era’s embrace of alternative facts, authoritarianism, and conspiratorial thinking. I draw on narrative theory and paradigms of world literature to show how “algorithmic reasoning” has led to a state of paranoid persecution. This reasoning has forged new collectivities across traditional borders. Additionally, I show that these new collectivities and new technologies have produced new narrative points of view: the algorithmic first- and third-person, allowing narratives to retain the intimacy and …

The Female Gothic And Marianne Dashwood: The Gothic Heroine Of Sense And Sensibility, Samantha Cottle

English (MA) Theses

In the late eighteenth-century, the rise of the English Gothic novel propelled an extension referred to as the Female Gothic. Through the complexity of the English Gothic genre, writers—particularly women writers—explore the intersectionality of gender, class, natural horrors, and race, creating a space where the heroines of these Gothic novels exist beyond the confinement of the domestic sphere. The Female Gothic was a way for these women writers to acknowledge the natural horrors that plagued the experiences of being a woman—it addressed the oppression of a patriarchal society in which the subversion of the female body was perceived as an …

From Margins To Center: Los Deslenguados In The Borderlands, Brissa S. Porras Villalobos

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Borderland literature is a subgenre that often includes narratives of migration, tribulations, identity development, and resilience. It foregrounds the collaboration of vulnerability, isolation, connection, and power, showing that hybridity is a source of cultural energy. Acknowledging the borderland and its culture is crucial because it challenges stereotypes, validates marginalized voices, and celebrates heritage in all its complexity. By centering these experiences, borderland literature affirms the potential of living between cultures, prioritizing the recognition of the in-between, valuing and celebrating the space where identities are continually reshaped, histories are reclaimed, and resilience is nurtured rather than neglected. Using Gloria Anzaldúa's theory …

Improving Post-Rehabilitation Discharge Outcomes Through A Care Coordination Bundle, Cavene Facey

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Hospital readmissions remain a significant quality and patient safety concern across the United States, particularly among patients transitioning from rehabilitation settings to home or community-based care. Ineffective care transitions, fragmented communication, inconsistent discharge planning, and inadequate follow-up contribute to preventable hospital readmissions, increased healthcare costs, and poorer patient outcomes. Evidence consistently demonstrates that structured transitional care interventions and standardized care coordination processes improve continuity of care while reducing readmissions and enhancing patient satisfaction The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was to develop an evidence-based Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) designed to improve post-rehabilitation discharge outcomes through implementation …

Visual And Textual Representations Of Conquistadors And Indigenous Leaders In The Spanish Drama Of The 17th Century, Liz Carolina Villamizar Caceres

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the visual and textual representations of conquistadors and Indigenous leaders in seventeenth-century Spanish teatro indiano, a Baroque dramatic subgenre centered on the Conquest and colonization of the Americas. It investigates how these representations negotiate questions of sovereignty, political legitimacy, and imperial expansion within the Spanish Monarchy. While scholarship on colonial Spanish theater has extensively examined its historical, ideological, and propagandistic dimensions, the contribution of visual culture to the construction of these political representations has received comparatively little attention. This study argues that early modern Spanish playwrights did not simply reproduce existing images but reinterpreted widely circulating visual …

Performance Arteries: From The Street To The Salon, Zoella Lin

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis concerns itself with navigating what it means to build community during a time of uncertainty. Specifically, it is an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry in Les Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris alongside his figure of the flâneur as a way to understand the aporia of the modern world (modernity) as a way to inform how instances of connection can occur. The first chapter suggests that a close reading of Baudelaire's poetry gives us insight into what it means to live in this present moment by looking at how Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur navigated the rapidly changing world of …

Ambivalence, Foremourning, And Displacement In The German Translation Of Marie Bonaparte's Topsy, Kooper Wilson

University Honors Theses

This paper offers a reading of Sigmund Freud’s German translation of Marie Bonaparte’s book, Topsy: The Golden-Haired Chow, in which the author attempts to both delay the death of her dog and mourn it in advance through what I call foremourning. I argue that the manifest subject matter of Topsy should not be interpreted away as a projection of merely human concerns, but rather that close attention to Freud’s translation introduces themes from his analytic experience which engender an appreciation of Topsy’s atopia (intractability). I draw from recent psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and deconstruction, especially Jacques Derrida’s seminars …

An Absolute Manner Of Seeing: Flaubert, 1848, And The Development Of Modernist Style, Nicholas Olson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as a key work in the emergence of literary Modernism from the tradition of Realism. I begin by exploring the intellectual background of Realism in the works of Honoré de Balzac and the ties between this aesthetic theory and the theory of representative government: here I discuss the work of François Guizot, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, J.W. Goethe, and Walter Scott as well as later thinkers like György Lukács, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. From this, I demonstrate a commonly held theory of the social as a discreet totality, which makes …

Twitteratura: Digital Social Reading And Active Reception Of Literary Texts In The Context Of Italian Contemporary Literature, Iuri Moscardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Digital Social Reading (DSR) as a novel mode of literary engagement, focusing on the Italian project Twitteratura, a series of social reading experiments conducted on Twitter (2012–2016) and later on the Betwyll app. The research situates Twitteratura within the intersection of Reader-Response Theory, Digital Humanities, Reception Studies, and Sociology of Literature, demonstrating how digital environments reshape the act of reading and interpretation. Through detailed analyses of four DSR projects centered on major twentieth-century Italian authors—Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg—this dissertation argues that Twitteratura provides a concrete, data-rich demonstration of Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response …

Beyond The Veil Of Modernity: René Guénon, Prophet Of The Metapolitical Imaginary, Frederic Colier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heralded by some as one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, French metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) is also the controversial father of Primordial Tradition, a metaphysics designed to remedy the decline of Western civilization. Guénon viewed the West in the grip of a prolonged cycle of degeneration. He sought to implement a pseudo-authoritarian spiritual reset that required a total rejection of its Western intellectual heritage and an embrace of Eastern doctrines.

Focusing on his landmark book The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), the dissertation examines how Guénon implemented his controversial reset. After outlining the religious, cultural, and …

Semantic/Epistemic Scope Of Political Poetry Translations: The Russian/English Case, Sonia E. Meytin

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

Language as a system of technical symbols is rigid; language as a social practice is not. The best practice of intersection and reception between these two aspects—especially in subjective media like poetry—is often hotly contested. The aim of this research is to compile and analyze the reception of six approaches to the translation of political poetry from Russian to English. The work is grounded in the poetry of 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova and contemporary poet Egana Djabbarova; political themes in their poetry are either explicit, as in Djabbarova’s case, or implicit through Aesopian language, as in Akhmatova’s case. The …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Learning From The Remains: Meditations On Sustainability, Julae Tan

Masters Theses

What remains when a person or material assemblage is stripped of its

component parts?

What is left is the remainder, an irreductible core.

Purely cerebral learning can be fleeting. A hybrid approach of cerebral and

visceral, “perverse” learning grounded in a familial understanding of the

remainder yields a more resilient pedagogy that endures long after leaving the

site of formal education.

This research was completed under the aegis of the 2025/26 Sustainability

Design Lab and features the subject of making with paper discards as the

primary mode of interrogation.

Via a collection of essays, a literature review, as well as …

Imagining Karbala: ʿAshura Symbolism In The Iranian Feminist Literary Imagination, 1969-1988, Brock E. Quant

Honors Projects

This paper explores the evolution of Battle of Karbala symbolism in the literary imagination of Iranian feminist writers from the late 1960s through the 1980s - or in other words, across a society-altering revolution and the establishment of an authoritarian theocratic regime in Iran. I begin my analysis by considering Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun, a cornerstone feminist novel which makes heavy use of Karbala symbolism to encapsulate both nationalist and feminist hopes of liberation in the pre-revolutionary period. I continue my analysis by considering a selected poem from each of a pairing of prominent Iranian writers: Simin Behbahani and Tahereh Saffarzadeh. …

Al-Manfiyun Exiliados: Voices Of The Lebanese Diaspora In Mexican Literature, Mia Del Rosario

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This thesis explores two key works of Mexican literature published in the late 20^th century in terms of their cultural relevance in the Mexican literary sphere. The novels En el verano, la tierra by Carlos Martínez Assad and Las hojas muertas by Bárbara Jacobs center around the infrequently-explored identities of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico and their Mexican-born descendants through a sociocultural lens, discussing their identity negotiation in the context of 20^th-century Mexico, which was in the process of redefining its national identity after the Mexican Revolution. During this time, people of ethnicities that did not fall into …

Writing Through The Plague: Memory, Trauma, And Survival In Arabic And English Narrative, Zainab Abbood Jawhar Aldaoseri

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Arabic and English literary and intellectual traditions responded to the Black Death as a shared yet differently articulated experience of collective trauma. Drawing on trauma theory, particularly the work of Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, it analyzes how plague narratives function as cultural mechanisms for processing mass suffering. Through a comparative study of Arabic historiographical, theological, medical, and poetic texts alongside English allegorical, mystical, autobiographical, and satirical writings, this project argues that both traditions developed distinct narrative strategies to render the trauma of plague intelligible. Arabic plague literature, represented by figures such as Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn …

The Reliance On Children In Atomic Bomb Literature, Chenyeng Vang

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper explores the conventions of children’s literature, or what children embody in literature, and how it functions within atomic bomb literature in three ways: filling the gap of the unreliability of language, pushing past binaries through its queerness, and universalizing messages of peace to focus on a broad vision of a better future. Analysis involves atomic bomb literature written within the first five decades of the bombings, from 1945 to 1995. This research additionally seeks to answer the question: why children’s stories? This paper concludes that the dependence on children within atomic bomb literature hinges upon constructions of children …

Parasites Of Meaning: When Interpretation Becomes Infection, Kimberly Medrano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impulse to seek moral certainty in morally ambiguous first-person confessional narratives and argues that such certainty is unnecessary. When confronted with narrators whose moral positions remain unclear, readers often project their own moral frameworks onto the text to place the narrator within specific moral binaries. This impulse reveals the reader’s discomfort with ambiguity. This study analyzes the confessional narration, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. The thesis will explore how its confessional narrator resists moral clarification. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of moral binaries and J. Hillis Miller’s concept of the “Critic as Host,” this thesis …

"Black History Is Black Horror": Hauntology And Cultural Trauma In 20th And 21st Century Black Women's Gothic Horror, Destini S. Beckwith

Theses

Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic, gothic horror, neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) vividly illustrates the story of a woman, Dana, involuntarily time-traveling from her home in 1976 Los Angeles, California, to a plantation in 19th-century Maryland. The interactions that she has with her ancestors, such as Alice, a free Black woman, and Rufus, a white man who enslaves Alice, leave Dana mentally and physically scarred. The 20th-century novel is meant to graphically reflect on the horrors of enslavement and the mental and physical effects that Black people endured/still endure because of it (i.e., grief, racial violence, and post-traumatic stress disorder). Furthermore, the novel’s …

The Mountains Call: Escaping To Zones Of Seclusion, Alec Lee Parry

Theses and Dissertations

The biographical and thematical overlap between the literature of Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, and Swiss writers Max Frisch and Fleur Jaeggy, is established in literary scholarship. However, similarities in the role Alpine spaces play in their works remain unaccounted for. The Alps represent a cultural and geographical boundary between linguistic identities and international borders. Protagonists across this dissertation’s three chapters face internal crises, prompting them to move to “zones of seclusion.” Within these “zones of seclusion,” characters spark discussions of collective memory even if they are isolated themselves. These peripheral locations force recollection, often on collective memory, …

Recollection Of The Archaic Psyche: A Comparative Study Of Viacheslav Ivanov’S Realistic Symbolism And Carl Gustav Jung’S Analytical Psychology, Jack Wilson Dedmondt

Theses and Dissertations

While nominally appearing disparate in their construction, the theoretical systems pioneered by Russian Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov and Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung operate under parallel hermeneutics of inference concerning the symbolic comprehension of reality. This dichotomy is drawn between an immediate (conscious) stratum of sensible reality of Apollonian, concrete, individual, and intelligible forms, and a transcendent (unconscious) stratum of Dionysian, associative, collective, and nominally unintelligible forms. In the present investigation, we aim to identify the proximity between Jungian analytical psychology and Ivanov’s “Realistic Symbolism” in order to provide the groundwork for future application of Jungian methodologies as an interpretive …

Caribbean Movements In Alejo Carpentier’S Écue-Yamba-Ó And Maryse Condé’S Traversée De La Mangrove, Gisselle Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

One of the broad questions this essay examines is how literature represents Caribbean cultural identity. This essay continues the conversation of how Caribbean cultures are formed, depicted, and defined in twentieth-century literature, specifically, in Alejo Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove. Although the novels are published within about fifty years from one another, both writers consider the question of what Caribbean cultural identity may look like. Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó follows the life of Menegildo, an Afro-Cuban man who works in the sugar plantations, who ends up killing a Haitian man. In his first novel, Carpentier writes from a …

The African Sky And The Human Spirit: Ethics, Exile, And Women In Saint-Exupéry And Camus, Snezana Popova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a comparative study of Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, focusing on their representations of women and the ethical visions that emerge through them. While Camus is often associated with the philosophy of the absurd and Saint-Exupéry with transcendence and spiritual hierarchy, this study argues that both writers articulate a shared moral humanism grounded in responsibility, solidarity, and fidelity to human presence. The figure of the woman—whether as mother, beloved, or silent moral witness—becomes a crucial site through which these ethical commitments are revealed.

Through close textual analysis of major works—including La Mort heureuse, L’Étranger, La …

Embodied Horror: Women And Medical Authority In Video Games, Jocilynn Denise Colombo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Through a critical analysis of interactive horror, this paper argues that video games can function as ethical diagnostic narratives that uniquely expose systemic failures surrounding women’s bodies and medical authority. Focusing on Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011), I examine how these games render harm legible through player participation. By requiring players to move characters through hostile environments and make decisions within systems that simultaneously grant and restrict control, these games foster identification and complicity by positioning players directly within the structures they critique.

While feminist horror scholarship—notably from Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed—has explored societal anxieties …

The Transparent Crypt: Temporal Stratification, Materiality, And The Affective Archive In Jenny Erpenbeck’S "Kairos", Mallory Wooldridge

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

For Germany, the process of reckoning with the past is not a new one. Termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the post-war period and envisioned as a project extending beyond the academy into public consciousness, “dealing with the past” was first envisioned in response to the Nazi regime and its horrors. While already a disjointed project in the Nazi context, the question of how reunified Germany reckons with the former German Democratic Republic’s past remains unresolved.

In her 2021 novel Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck proposes a different model of historical consciousness. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s post-war theory of working through the past ( …

Wood Lands: Forest As Site Of National Memory In Germany And Italy, Clarissa Melendez

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Arguing that the rich symbolic associations of trees become a medium to synthesize shared identity during a country’s formative moments, this paper theorizes the image of the forest as a site of national memory. By tracking representations of the natural landscape during nation-building to representations that attempt to recover and reclaim dignity postwar, this paper lays bare the potential of the national symbol to transform as history progresses. The paper’s author reads three genres–fairy tales, a novel, and a work of public art–from three authors–the Brothers Grimm, Italo Calvino, and Joseph Beuys–across time to interrogate the role of the forest …

Icarus’S Fall: Villainization In Wicked, Star Wars, And The Untamed, Laura Renfroe

Honors Theses

When looking back on the most beloved, yet infamous, villains of popular culture, one can note an abundant rise of prequels and backstory-driven media exploring the paths that villain characters take that lead them to their tragic fall. Some of those stories include John M. Chu’s Wicked, George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Chen Jialin and Zheng Weiwin’s The Untamed, each of which explores protagonists who are labeled as “wicked” and depicted as fallen to the “dark side.” While these characters are often studied in existing literary research, there have yet to be explicit ties …

Reconfiguring The Category Of 'Sudan' Through The Literary Field: Representation, Disposability, Ambiguity And The 'Magical' In Four Post-Colonial Novels (2002-2022), Mourad Farahat

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I shall argue that contemporary African literature, with ‘’both its ethnographic imagination and anthropological complexity’’ (Orock, 2022, p.3), its use of ‘disruptive’ characters, and its focus on the embeddedness of the ‘collective’, the ‘common’ and the ‘vulgar’ in the personal (Mbembe, 2003), may help us mitigate some social scientific limitations on the study of Africa, and may aid us in understanding relations of power within the post-colony. I seek to show how contemporary Sudanese literature has already moved beyond the fixed social categories, lines, and limits which dominate some of the social scientific literature on Sudan. Literature …