Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Turkish Spy: A Peripatetic Novel, Alain M. Antoine

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

Beginning its published life in a short Italian version featuring 30 letters in 1684, Letters Writ by a Turkish Spygrew into 102 letters in a French version published in 1686, and between 1687 and 1694 turned into a monumental eight volumes English Edition featuring 632 letters. The hero of the novel, a Muslim Arab spying on Louis XIV’s France for the Ottoman sultan undergoes a transformation by his contact with the Christian world, and his reflections on man, society and God seized the imagination of the public. The novel’s popularity helped its rapid spread over European nations in the …

The Mystery Of The Missing Half: The Developing Female Investigator Trope In Detective Fiction, Anthony E. Farah

English Department Theses

While mainstream thought considers Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to be the first detective with Murders in the Rue Morgue his debut appearance, the female detective trope has her origin in E.T.A. Hoffman’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi. Despite her vintage, the mademoiselle’s role as investigator was overshadowed by her male counterparts in detective fiction, first in time not here being first in right. In subsequent detective fiction a la Poe, the female’s role is typically that of a body—a victim or a corpse exploited by both author and character alike, crimes against who throws a patriarchal world into disorder (e.g. …

Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia: Crossing Borders And Proposing A New Concept Of Indonesian Domestic Workers, Tri Murniati

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Indonesian migrant women who seek employment as domestic workers in foreign countries have caught the Indonesian reading public’s attention with their novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction writings. Creative work by migrant domestic workers was established as a genre when Denok Kanthi Rokhmatika, a domestic worker who works in Hong Kong published her collection of short stories Negeri Elok nan Keras dimana Kami Berjuang (Beautiful and Tough Country where We Struggle) in 2002 (Insani and Raihan iii). The publication marks the birth of a new genre, which has become known as “Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia” (Indonesian migrant …

The Criterion (2019)

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

Coming To Terms With Gonzo Journalism : An Analysis In Russian Formalism., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gonzo journalism is notoriously difficult to define because of its ambiguous nature. To date, scholarly definitions focus on historical interpretations of Gonzo’s content, its connection to social and political contexts, or the biography of Hunter S. Thompson. These definitional attempts neglect the formal devices of the composition. This thesis aims to redefine Gonzo as its own genre by using the nearly forgotten methods of Russian formalism—specifically the works of Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevsky—to analyze the formal devices and components of its form. The results are twofold; first, it acts to rejuvenate an unpopular literary theory by illustrating …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

The Body And Its Signifiers: Bodily Depictions In Niccolò De’ Conti And Odorico Da Pordenone, Antonella Dalla Torre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines textual, bodily depictions in two western European, medieval and late-medieval travel accounts, which describe the eastern travels of the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti and those of the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone. My analysis show how a connection between the characterizations of the body and the process of identity definition is forged and sustained in these texts.

Through a cultural-studies perspective, my work focuses specifically on depictions of the body in Poggio Bracciolini’s account of the travels of Niccolò de’ Conti and in the text of a vernacular rendition of Odorico da Pordenone’s Relatio, the …

Conceptions Of Modern Egyptian Childhood During The Period Of The “Liberal Experiment” In Egypt, 1922–1952: A Comparative Study Of Taha Hussein’S, “An Egyptian Childhood,” And Sayyid Qutb’S, “A Child From The Village”, Nora Elgabalawy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Counter to French social historian Philippe Aries’ argument, the concept of an Egyptian childhood has its own traceable history, separate from the modern Western European concept of childhood. As shown, with the presence of language on childhood, in a number of pre-modern Arabic/Islamic literature, notions of childhood had a rich history outside of modern Western Europe. But, depictions of an Egyptian childhood in modern Egyptian literature, specifically two childhood autobiographies/memoirs, Taha Hussein’s An Egyptian Childhood and Sayyid Qutb’s A Child from the Village, do not emerge seamlessly from these early pre-modern depictions of childhood. Both Hussein and Qutb wrote …

Migritude: Migrant Structures Of Feeling In A Minor Literature Of Globalization, Ashna Ali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Migritude: Structures of Feeling in a Minor Literature of Globalization examines contemporary postcolonial narratives of migration written by women of color writing in English and in Italian under the rubric of “migritude.” Migritude literature describes the work of a disparate yet distinct group of contemporary authors whose work describes the condition of being a migrant under globalization with a critical feminist and anti-imperialist politics and poetics. It is a global justice movement that sees literature as a form of cultural activism. Migritude literatures traces the connections between contemporary globalization and colonial processes of the past and sheds light on how …

Transfigurations Of The News: True Fictions, Strange Thresholds, Jeffrey Peer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares twentieth-century literary journalism from the U.S. and Mexico, with a focus on the nonfiction novel and the Mexican chronicle. The dissertation considers the two genres both historically and theoretically, in order to distinguish the borders between literature and unscrupulous journalism. North American journalism is at the heart of a crisis over the epistemological status of facts and their place in our political discourse. Some have argued that works of literary nonfiction can damage social norms like journalistic objectivity. Others argue that forms like the chronicle and the nonfiction novel can describe experience better than news reports. This …

Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During The Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the reception of T. S. Eliot, one of the leading proponents of Anglo-American modernism, shaped the aesthetics of Russian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Russian culture found itself in a unique situation of separation from the Western world, with which it had largely identified in the previous century. The official change of the cultural paradigm that took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution led to the advancement of the literary theory and practices of Socialist Realism, shutting off modernist tendencies and …

The Subject Of Jouissance: The Late Lacan And Gender And Queer Theories, Frederic C. Baitinger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Subject of Jouissance argues that Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis, far from being heteronormative, offers a notion of identity that deconstructs gender as a social norm, and opens onto a non-normative theory of the subject (of jouissance) that still remains to be fully explored by feminist, gender, and queer scholars. Drawing mostly on the later Lacan, The Subject of Jouissance shows that by locating the identity of the subject in the singularity of its bodily mode of enjoyment (that Lacan calls “jouissance”), and not in the Imaginary illusions of the ego, nor in the Symbolic social structures, Lacan fosters thinking …

Reading The Readers : Analyses Of Shakespearean And Cervantine Characters As (Dys)Functional Readers., Erin Shannon O'Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how the protagonists of Don Quixote and The Tempest perform the act of reading. It explores how the authors create interpretive communities within their works and bring them into conflict in order to foreground the dysfunctionality of particular types of reading. While functional readers are capable of reading among and beyond diverse interpretive communities, dysfunctional readers operate within a single community to the exclusion of other possible interpretations. Chapter One examines Cervantes’s creation of multiple interpretive communities within the first six chapters of Don Quixote, and how Don Quixote acts as dysfunctional reader through his inability …

Children Of A One-Eyed God: Impairment In The Myth And Memory Of Medieval Scandinavia, Michael David Lawson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using the lives of impaired individuals catalogued in the Íslendingasögur as a narrative framework, this study examines medieval Scandinavian social views regarding impairment from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Beginning with the myths and legends of the eddic poetry and prose of Iceland, it investigates impairment in Norse pre-Christian belief; demonstrating how myth and memory informed medieval conceptualizations of the body. This thesis counters scholarly assumptions that the impaired were universally marginalized across medieval Europe. It argues that bodily difference, in the Norse world, was only viewed as a limitation when it prevented an individual from fulfilling roles that …

Fir-Flower Petals On A Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry Through Asian Aesthetics In Early Modernist Poets, Matthew Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, …

Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction By Marina Warner, Barbara L. Prescott

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Realismo Y Exasperación: Un Estudio De Los Personajes Femeninos En La Pata De La Sota Y La Nona De Roberto Cossa, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En esta presentación analizamos las obras teatrales La pata de la sota (1967) y La Nona (1977), del dramaturgo argentino Roberto Cossa. Estos textos se constituyen en textos-faro del subsistema teatral del realismo reflexivo. El primero, uno que define la ortodoxia del universo realista, mientras que el segundo la supera, incorporando un universo muy cercano al absurdo y el sin sentido. Trabajando, entonces, desde las coordenadas del realismo y su evolución, nos focalizamos aquí en la relación madre-hija, para señalar cuáles y cómo son los cambios en la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el pasaje de una fase a …

Parodic Archipelago: Friday, Or, The Other Island, Vendredi Ou La Vie Sauvage And Foe, Marie Bellec

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the concept of parody through three novels, Friday or the Other Island, Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage and Foe, rewriting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I focus more specifically on the character of the island as the metaphor of the process of rewriting, and I argue that the multiple rewrites shape an archipelago. I apply Linda Hutcheon’s critical work A Theory of Parody to show how the island’s paradoxical aspect illustrates the parody’s paradoxical aspect: it is constrained – the island is isolated and the parody is forced to follow a literary format or pattern, …

Seccll Conference Program 2019, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference Program 2019

Transpacific Resonances And Affiliations In Leanne Dunic’S To Love The Coming End And Ruth Ozeki’S The Tale For The Time Being, Michel O'Brien

English Faculty Scholarship

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being. The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and …

La Poétique Du Dépassement Dans Les Littératures D'Expression Française Des Antilles Et De L'Océan Indien, Jeanne Jegousso

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project argues for a new critical approach to contemporary Caribbean and Oceanic literatures through a poetics of dépassement. A key concept to understanding the work of the Martinican theorist and author Édouard Glissant as a whole, dépassement generally designates, first, a dialectical process in literature that Glissant uses to analyze texts in order to portray a global and universal poetical knowledge. Secondly, dépassementimplies transcending literary genres and historical approaches to the point that formal and conventional constraints are no longer pertinent. Through a study dedicated to the original interpretations of literature in Glissant’s early work (1953-1969), which …

Call For Papers/Abstracts, Lynn Rhodes

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Eng 200: On Killing, Kenneth Schlabach

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind. New York: Harpercollins Publishers, 2015, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Polynesian Civilization And The Future Colonization Of Space, John Grayzel

Comparative Civilizations Review

Polynesian civilization was configured—prior to Western colonization—in ways similar to that sometimes described as necessary for humanity's interstellar migration into space. Over thousands of years and miles, across open ocean, a core population expanded to settle on hundreds of scattered islands, while maintaining shared identity, continued awareness and repetitive contact with each other. Key to their expansion was their development of robust ocean-going vessels and their extraordinary abilities to navigate across vast expanses of open water. The first half of the 1800s saw a surge in contacts between Polynesia and western missionaries and whalers, followed by significant depopulation due to …

Andrew Robinson. Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations, And Civilizations. London And New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016, Ernest B. Hook

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Ccr Style Guide For Submitted Manuscripts, Comparative Civilizations Review

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.