Comparative Literature Commons^™

Romance, Politics And Minor Art: A Nomadology Of Inamoramento De Orlando And Star Wars, Andrea Privitera

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While existing theories of romance (in particular, those formulated by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson) accurately characterize this literary mode as a highly politicized example of art, this thesis contends that the political nature of romance is broader and more complex than discussed so far. In order to offer a new and comprehensive political theory of romance, this work proposes a comparison between two historically and culturally diverse examples of romance, that is Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric poem Inamoramento de Orlando and George Lucas’ space opera film Star Wars. By reading Boiardo and Lucas’ texts via Gilles Deleuze and …

Impacts Of Globalization: Educational Reforms Shifts The Public Into A Recurrent Devalued Socioeconomic Era For Minorities, Jacqulyn Washington

Master's Theses

This article delves into the breakdown of the impact globalization have on the success of minorities in urban centers. While expanding on the many factors that contribute to the success of minorities, it informs the reader how education, being a huge indicator of success, has been underserved to the poor and minorities. Lacking many resources, this blockage has been further strained through the local government, multinational corporations, educational reforms, and Translocal politics.

The Texture Of Reading / Reading Textures: Poetic, Visual, Material, And Inter-Medial Dimensions Of Textuality In Arabic Poetry, French Picturebooks, And North American Bookarts, Lara Matta

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a comparative study of the poetic, verbal, visual and material dimensions of textuality. It asks the following questions: what does texture look like in our literary context? What does an attention to layers and fragility convey about or add to our reading experience? And how can they relate to the experience of loss? I argue that an engagement with textures may help account for a layered multidimensionality and that structural imageries—whether in relation to organic matter or textile or overlay—allow for the intersection of materiality and conceptuality in intricate patterns. I offer a poetic reading of intermedial …

美國詩歌的中文編譯, 1934-1961, Zijiang Song

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

本項研究旨在勾畫從1934年至1961年間美國詩歌的中文編譯。本項研究計劃的研究對象是這段時期在中國和香港出版的四個美國詩歌中譯選本：施蟄存編譯的「現代美國文學專號•現代美國詩抄」(1934)；袁水拍編譯的《現代美國詩選》(1949)以及《新的歌一一現代美國詩選》(1953)；馬朗編譯的 「英美現代詩特輯•美國部份」(1956)；宋淇編譯的《美國詩選》(1961)。 施、袁、馬、宋等四位詩人既編且譯，由於身處不同的地緣和文化政治語境，對中文新詩的體認各不相同，意識形態各異，同時四個案例在文本、語境、贊助人、詩學、意識形態等層面各有不同卻有所關聯，因此本文運用安德雷•勒菲弗爾(André Lefevere)的改寫理論，並適當加以補充，分析四個改寫文本各自在編纂和翻譯上的改寫體現的詩學和意識形態，並且描述四個改寫文本投射出不同的美國詩歌的形象，又同時折射出改寫者各自理想的現代中文詩歌的形 象。現存相關的英美文學中譯史研究，由於過於側重資料整理及對政治語境的描述，而對相關譯者和譯本的沒有進行足夠的研讀與探究，也沒有分析美國詩歌中譯的選本，鮮有细讀譯本，更無顧及1949年後在香港發生的翻譯現象。本項研究填補這方面的研究空白，考察四個改寫文本產生的語境和過程，分析四位改寫者的詩學和意識形態，通過比較分析他們的編纂策略和翻譯實踐，勾畫四個改寫文本互相之間的關聯，提供跨越1949、涵蓋中港兩地的美國詩歌中文編譯。

1981: One Or Several Aesthetics?, Jacob Norris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation (1981), proposes a theory of aesthetic experience that prioritizes the material depths of sensation over stable, identifiable forms. Deleuze’s key references in The Logic of Sensation to playwright Antonin Artaud arouse the suspicion that Artaud’s schizophrenic experience of language, wherein words are reduced to phonetic ramblings, illuminates how Deleuze interprets this chaos of sensation in Bacon’s art. My work therefore calls back to The Logic of Sense (1969) and the first section of his book on Masochism (1967) to explore the waves of consistency between Deleuze’s understanding of language and …

The Body And The Sacred In Contemporary Italian Women Writers, Laura R Feola

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores the presence of what has been called the “persistence of the sacred” in modern and contemporary Western culture. More specifically, I focus on the intertwining dimensions of the human body and the experience of the sacred in selected works by Dacia Maraini, Elena Ferrante, Cristina Campo, and Alda Merini. Despite their different voices, and the “secular” or “religious” labels with which each of these Italian authors could be defined or confined, I identify and analyze patterns, similarities, and differences in the interwoven realities of the body and the sacred present in their works.[1]

[1] See Snyder, …

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19^th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …

The Redemption Of Goethe’S Eternal Feminine: Discovering The Reality And Significance Of An Archetypal Phenomenon, Mariana Weisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the phenomenological history and significance of the archetype of the Eternal Feminine, as well as her role in Goethe’s Faust. Although the Eternal Feminine (Goethe’s “das Ewig-Weibliche”) first appears in literary form in 1832 with the publication of Faust: Part II, she has an ancient archetypal history that reaches from the age of pre-patriarchal domination into the modern era. This thesis contends that the Eternal Feminine is a Jungian archetype—a “primordial image” or motif that exists unconsciously and evokes a universal experience within both the individual and the society. Five historical figures exemplify the archetype of the …

Manifest Density: Decentering The Global Western Film, Michael D. Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Western is often seen as a uniquely American narrative form, one so deeply ingrained as to constitute a national myth. This perception persists despite its inherent shortcomings, among them its inapplicability to the many instances of filmmakers outside the United States appropriating the genre and thus undercutting this view of generic exceptionalism. As the Western has migrated across geographical boundaries, it has accrued potential significations that bring into question its direct alignment with national ideology and history. Rather than attempting to define the Western in terms of nation or myth, we should attend to how each new text reconfigures …

Cultural Memory And The Traumatic Past: Examining The Voids In Contemporary German And Uruguayan Literature, Museums, And Film, Jessica Paola Marino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates how “voids” are used as a poetic lens in German and Uruguayan literature, film, music, museum spaces and memory places to excavate traumatic events of the twentieth-century and represent them in collective memory, further promoting a new understanding of historical experiences. These voids are used to symbolize gaping wounds left in Uruguayan culture after the military dictatorship of 1973-1985, the sense of absence and emptiness left in German-Jewish culture after the Holocaust and the breaks, ruptures and divisions in Germany post-WWII. Case studies include the architectural “Voids” in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin, “empty tombs” and installations …

The Nature Of Influence: Fu'ad Rifqa's Wilderness Poetry At The Intersection Of Nation And Modernity, Delilah Clark

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fundamental changes in the form and content of Arabic poetry occurred rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in the development of free verse and prose poetry as well as the jettison of traditional requirements including end-stopped two-hemistich long lines, strict adherence to meter, and monorhyme. These changes draw from innovation within Arabic poetry, competing nationalist agendas, increased translation of European texts into Arabic, and the productive engagement of Arab poets with Western literatures. In 1957, Syrian poet Fu’ād Rifqa embarks upon a five-decade poetic project of intentional intertextuality that acknowledges these sometimes collaborative, sometimes competing narratives. …

Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes adaptation in the Hindi film industry and how the concepts of gender and identity have changed from the original text to the contemporary adaptation. The original texts include religious epics, Shakespeare’s plays, Bengali novels which were written pre-independence, and Hollywood films. This venture uses adaptation theory as well as postmodernist and postcolonial theories to examine how women and men are represented in the adaptations as well as how contemporary audience expectations help to create the identity of the characters in the films. Ultimately, this project hopes to fulfil the gap in scholarship on adaptations in Bollywood.

Re-Conceptualizing Foreignness : The English Translation Of Chinese Calligraphic Culture, Ge Song

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Foreignness is one primary concern of Translation Studies. Chinese calligraphy, with its unique aesthetic pursuits and cultural underpinnings, presents an unusual case of foreign otherness in relation to the English language. Thus, theories derived from the translation of Chinese calligraphic culture into English can contribute to our existing knowledge of the nature of translation. Despite sporadic endeavors, translation issues related to Chinese calligraphy remain largely under-researched. This thesis constructs a theoretical framework that offers new perspectives on translating foreignness by exploring how the culture of Chinese calligraphy, concretized in the discourses of classical treatises, has been translated into English since …

Bodies Under Siege: Intersections Of Warfare And Hiv/Aids, Daniel Nevarez Araujo

Doctoral Dissertations

Analyzing works by Juan Goytisolo, Rabih Alameddine, and Derek Jarman, this dissertation studies the similarities of war and AIDS as sensorial experiences socially located and complexly embodied. This study looks at the ways bodies engage with, are affected by, and respond to both war and AIDS, specifically within the AIDS/War Narrative; that is, narrative spaces that foreground both experiences simultaneously. Influenced by Mark Paterson’s notion of felt phenomenology and positioned at the nexus of Comparative Literature, Disability Studies, and Husserlian phenomenology, this dissertation studies texts that exhibit an awareness of the phenomenal characteristics governing the experiences of AIDS and war, …

"A Page From The Song Of Songs": Études In Allegoresis, Andres Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines some of the ways in which exegetical traditions and other medieval creative work grew out of the conventional hermeneutics of allegorizing the biblical Song of Songs. Beginning with a close reading of the Hebrew poem itself, this work continues by probing the unique disconnect between the Song’s literal meaning that exegetes either struggled to comprehend or chose to ignore, and the poem’s significance as a sacrosanct, canonical text in both the Jewish and Christian worlds. The displacement of the poem’s literal reading for an amorphous figurative one resulted in a rich legacy of creative commentary and literary …

The Eloquence Of Automata: Socio-Political Commentary In Nineteenth-Century Literature On Artificial Humanoids, Madalina Meirosu

Doctoral Dissertations

Though the present debate over artificial intelligence might seem an exclusively modern issue, the beginning of a widespread cultural debate actually dates from the end of the eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century authors quickly transformed the question of automata and artificial intelligence into something new, using popular fiction to adapt the automaton motif to political concerns and agendas. This dissertation is a cross-cultural investigation of these political dimensions of the automaton motif in nineteenth-century German, French, British, and American texts and cultural contexts. In it I employ systems theory and close readings to analyze the automaton motif as a cross-cultural system that …

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …

La Influencia De Boccaccio En La Literatura Catalana Medieval (1390-1495). Un Estudio De La Imitación Literaria En Bernat Metge, Bernat Hug De Rocabertí Y Joan Roís De Corella, Pau Cañigueral Batllosera

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of the works by Giovanni Boccaccio on Catalan medieval literature. The influence of Italian literature in medieval Iberian writing is traditionally understood as a key component of a wide-ranging cultural process of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the tre corone, played a crucial role in that process. Boccaccio, in particular, became a model for the writing of a variety of literary genres, from misogynistic poetry to chivalric romances. His works, both in Latin and Italian, featured in the most remarkable libraries of the period …

The Passing Away Of Nature: Two Essays On Natural History, Domenic Hutchins

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis begins by examining the natural-historical character of Theodor Adorno’s thought and corpus, 1931–1969, by way of engaging the centennial of the October Russian Revolution. In the first three chapters we attempt to read Adorno’s corpus as écriture or writing whereupon unconscious writing of history is transcribed. This literary-driven approach to Adorno’s work highlights the primacy of history for his thought, whence his late-Marxism issues that culminates in what we call a politics of experience. Given the historical experience we seek to make legible heretofore, in chapter four we briefly turn to the hyper-object of ongoing and future anthropogenic …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

The Eternal Rehearsal: Judith Butler's Gender Performativity In Wilkie Collins, Sarah Waters, And Tana French, Jillian Slezek

Honors Theses

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble proposed the groundbreaking theory of gender as a constant performance: a series of cues observed, internalized, and repeated over time. Her argument benefits society’s desire to deconstruct gender, and her ideas apply to a vast array of texts and periods. In fact, whereas Butler’s text was published in 1990, over a hundred years earlier Wilkie Collins already toyed with gender performance in his formative novel, The Woman in White (1860). In this thesis, I examine The Woman in White through a Butlerian lens, illuminating how Collins began critiquing the concept of performative gender, especially with regard …

Desire In The Bildungsroman: Construction And Pursuit Of An Ideal Self Through The Ideal Other, Ethan Watson

Honors Theses

The Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” has remained popular since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. I examine this novel, as well as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Walter Moers’s Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, focusing specifically on the relationships between the three male protagonists and the women that they encounter throughout their lives. Using the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary critic René Girard, and feminist philosopher Judith Butler, I draw parallels between and contribute to the scholarly conversation of all three works (or in the case of Moers's recent fantasy, Rumo, begin …

七月派翻译家研究, Qingyang Gui

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

中国现代文学流派“七月派”强调文学创作中的“主观战斗精神”和“精神奴役创伤”，因其在文学领域异质凸显，与代表主流文化的文艺思想不尽契合，导致了 1955年中华人民共和国的第一大“文字狱”。自20世纪80年代以来，胡风事件及胡风文艺思想重新进入学术研宄视野，成为史学界和文艺界的研宄热点，但迄今为止国内外关于七月派研宄的现状并不令人满意，正如周燕芬所指出的，“现在的研宄成果中，实在留下不少史料的空白或者因史料的不信、疑虑、矛盾而带来的所谓‘分寸’，所谓‘留有余地’，说到底，依然是研宄的一种不清楚和未完成状态”（周燕芬，2013:6)。而就七月派翻译家研宄而言，也存在诸多研宄缺口。本论文论题有三：1、七月派作为“新文学的骄傲”， 其领袖人物胡风的文艺理论特质何在？影响了怎样一个文学流派及翻译家群体？2、七月派翻译家以“启蒙现实主义”为译介出发点，形成了怎样的译介主张？3、从翻译政治学、描写翻译学理论、生存心态等视角探讨以胡风、满涛、 绿原、呂荧等为代表的七月派翻译家具有哪些群体特征？本论文得出以下结论: 七月派翻译群体是我国翻译史上不可忽视的群体，他们基于启蒙现实主义思想的译介主张是以为时代和战斗而翻译，为文学经典生成而翻译，为民族文学发展而翻译为主要特征的。而胡风“为时代、为战斗而翻译”的“武器”翻译论， 满涛“传达精义”的翻译观，绿原“整体效果”、翻译“异同”性、名著重译 “接力赛”等译论，呂荧“谐意谐音”的诗歌翻译理念等等，既是对七月派翻译主张的体现和深化，又是各自翻译实践的重要指导思想。本研宄原创性在于: 在追根溯源七月派的源流、定义及其影响的基础上，从活生生的研宄对象及历史语境出发，对胡风文艺理论影响七月派翻译主张形成的过程以及七月派翻译家的文化生态作出相对可靠的历史复原，让读者对该时期的翻译历史全貌具有更清晰的了解，这在近现代翻译史研宄上不啻为一个重要发现。

Women’S Erotic Desires And Perspectives On Marriage In Sappho’S Epithalamia And H.D.’S Hymen, Amanda Kubic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In her collection Hymen (1921), the modernist poet H.D. engages in a collaborative, composite reception of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. H.D. draws on Sappho as a source of lyric power and lesbian erotic authority, and brings together the various women’s voices and perspectives represented in Sappho’s poems—especially those that have to do with marriage—into her own present poetic moment. As the title Hymen suggests, of particular significance to H.D.’s Sapphic reception work is the genre of the epithalamium, or “wedding song.” Sappho, in her epithalamia, constructs a woman-centered and woman-identified thiasos that is centered on the bride, her …

“More Human Than Human”: Lacan’S Mirror Stage Theory And Posthumanism In Philip K. Dick’S Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Richelle V. Finn

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is examined using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory. In the novel, humans have built androids that are almost indistinguishable from humans except that they lack a sense of empathy, or so the humans believe. The Voigt-Kampff Machine is a polygraph-like device used to determine if a subject shows signs of empathy in order to confirm if one is an android or a human. Yet, should empathy be the defining quality of determining humanity?

In his article "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the …

“Home Sweet Home”: Displacement And Belonging In Post-1960s Diasporic Chinese Literature, Melody Yunzi Li

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Situated at the intersection of Sinophone and Diaspora Studies and focusing on the rhetoric of “home,” my dissertation explores the ways in which Chinese immigrant Sinophone writers and Anglophone writers in the U.S. construct “imaginative homes” in response to the absence of their physical homes. Through detailed analysis of works by Yu Lihua (Again the Palm Trees, 1967), Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi, 2011; A Woman’s Epic, 2006), Pai Hsien-yung (Taipei People, 1971), Shi Yu (New York Lover, 2004), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing, 2010), Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple, 2004) and Ha Jin (A …

Reading Female Identity Creation: Self-Realization In Colonial And Postcolonial African Literature, Katie Johnson Jorgensen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The thesis, Re-defining Madness: Reading Female Identity Creation and Self-realization in Colonial and Postcolonial African Literature, compares female identity creation in three novels by African female authors. It reveals how the colonial texts represent extreme female identity formation (stagnation vs. transcendent life) juxtaposed with the dynamic and interconnected identity formation represented in postcolonial writing. The analysis begins with The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), to detail how identity stagnation results when the protagonist faces oppression in her culturally defined role as mother, yet returns to this role without further opposition. The second section focuses on Efuru by Flora …

El Fenómeno Patria, De Fernando Aramburu: Una Nueva Narrativa En Torno Al Terrorismo Vasco, Ana María Casas Olcoz

Theses and Dissertations

La irrupción en el panorama literario español de la novela Patria (2016), de Fernando Aramburu, ha supuesto un fenómeno editorial de proporciones inimaginables: en los dos años que han pasado desde su publicación, ha vendido más de 700.000 ejemplares en un total de 28 ediciones. Al contrario de lo que algunos críticos han comentado, se trata de una novela que continúa una tendencia literaria previa, iniciada con Cien metros de Saizarbitoria en 1976, que toma como argumento el terrorismo de ETA durante los llamados “años de plomo”. La diferencia de Patria con estas novelas es que, independientemente de su calidad, …

“De Hidalgo A Narcotraficante”: Breaking Bad Como Reinterpretación Del Mito Quijotesco., Jesus Alberto Garcia Bonilla

Theses and Dissertations

El presente estudio pretende analizar las conexiones existentes entre la serie Breaking Bad y la novela Don Quijote de la Mancha, con el objetivo de demostrar que dicha serie puede ser entendida como una reformulación de la novela. Para llevar a cabo este objetivo, primero se expondrán algunas de las características que nos permiten considerar ambas obras como textos que reflejan la ruptura de sus respectivas sociedades. Después se trazará un hilo conductor que conecte tanto la estructura como algunos de los personajes que aparecen en ambas obras. El estudio se apoyará en la teoría del monomito propuesta por Campbell, …