European Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Desire Of Strict Souls: The Poetry, Criticism, And Letters Of Paul Valéry And Wallace Stevens, Michael Healy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares the poetic, critical, and epistolary oeuvres of Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens and the influence of the former on the latter. Valéry famously advocated for the pursuit of “poésie pure” (“pure poetry”) and influenced Stevens especially in this way, though both of them concluded it was not achievable. I establish an approximation of a critical framework based on the work of the following critics and scholars: Wendy Lesser, Wendy Steiner, Anthony Cuda, Michael Clune, Paul Bové, and Liesl Olson. Harold Bloom’s passionate advocacy and deep, sustained engagement with Stevens and his work strongly influenced my choice to …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

Italian Culture Through Film, Monica Rossi-Miller

Open Educational Resources

Introduction to important themes of Italian culture by viewing and analyzing
representative Italian films from the post-World War II era to the present. Topics examined include: the Italian family, how World War II has shaped contemporary Italian culture, Italy as a country of emigrants and immigrants, and an examination of religion and the Catholic Church.
This is a Writing Intensive course conducted in English, and all films have English subtitles.

A Writing Intensive Course Specifically is a designated course sections that—in addition to providing the established disciplinary-oriented student outcomes—incorporate approved instructional strategies and course assignments designed to enhance students’ writing …

Alianzas Antimodernas: Estudios Del Cine Español Del Proceso 15m, Pedro Cabello Del Moral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anti-Modern Alliances: Studies of Spanish Cinema of the 15M Process mobilizes decolonial theory to shed new light upon the politics of the 15M (or Indignados) movement and its visual culture. It tackles anti-modern critiques as embodied in film characters who have been traditionally relegated to the margins of modernity’s grand narratives. The research corpus encompasses a diverse body of works –documentaries, fiction films, activist video essays and their paratexts, which I critically interrogate in dialogue with contemporary feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, anti-neoliberal and anti-ableist debates. Thus, the dissertation examines the methods by which audiovisual works from the past ten years have …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

Stourhead In Arcadia Ego: The English Countryside And The Expanding British Empire In Eighteenth-Century, Rachel C. Sherr

Theses and Dissertations

Stourhead Gardens, an emblematic eighteenth-century landscape, reflects Britain's socio-cultural and imperial changes. Owned by the Hoare family, it melds classical influences and Enlightenment ideals. Existing research deciphers its iconography, but this thesis broadens the perspective, placing Stourhead in its era's socio-cultural context. It's a narrative rich in cultural and historical significance, shedding light on identity, art, and culture, past and present.

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Fantasmas Compartidos: Posmemoria, Herencia Y Reescritura De La Guerra Civil Española En México Y España, Mayte Lopez Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes contemporary novels and films about the traumatic legacies of the Spanish Civil War through the lens of postmemory, memory studies, and transatlantic studies. I examine how Mexican and Spanish writers and filmmakers from the postwar generations approach the memories of their ancestors—and their own—to reframe history through fiction, memory work, and personal agency. Studies about historical memory are typically constrained to national contexts, but I highlight how trauma transcends the nation not only in space but also in time. Moreover, I focus on how inherited memories acquire new meanings in contemporary representations and how those resignifications have …

Made In Italy: Gli Effetti Della Musica Italiana (T)Rap Sulla Società E Sulla Lingua, Paraskevi Z. Gkana-Alberico

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the history of Italian (t)rap music, and uses the lyrics of famous songs in an attempt to examine the effects the sometimes vulgar and explicit themes, which are usually accompanied by the use of foreign languages, could have on society and the Italian language.

Hist20600: Modern Europe, Benjamin Diehl

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus was created for the introductory course to Modern European history offered by City College's Department of History. It was designed by Benjamin Diehl, PhD candidate in History at CUNY Graduate Center as part of City College's OER Initiative. As such, it attempts to provide the outline of a Modern Europe course which is completely free, zero-textbook-cost, using open access resources.

Re-Presenting The Un-Presentable: Annie Ernaux’S "L’Évènement" And Cristian Mungiu’S "4 Months, 3 Weeks, And Two Days", Victoria Tomasulo

Publications and Research

Situating Annie Ernaux’s L’évènement and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in a reproductive justice framework, I argue that both the memoir and the film contribute to working-class historiographies by documenting backstreet abortion in times and places where it was heavily criminalized: 1960s France and Communist Romania. Committed to a working-class aesthetic with roots in neorealism, Ernaux and Mungiu focus singularly on an event once deemed unrepresentable in literature and cinema. Drawing upon the distinction made between empathy and “rational compassion” made by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy (2016), as well as from Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

The Dichotomy Of Nature And Culture In Riders To The Sea, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Jonathan Millington Synge spent his time on the Aran Islands wandering through the peasantry in the countryside, using his experiences and things he witnessed to inspire his writings. He wrote the play Riders to the Sea to portray the lives of the Aran peasants by showing the way in which they coped with the natural forces surrounding their island through believing in certain cultures. Synge constructs a dichotomy between the belief in the forces of nature and culture stemming from modern Christianity not only to portray the mixture of cultures present among the Aran peasants but also to challenge the …

Sacred Music In Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization Of The Taino People, Tito J. Gutierrez

Student Theses

During the 15th-18th centuries, the major European religious orders; the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Jeronymites, journeyed to the newly colonized American territories in an attempt to convert the multitudes of natives peoples living there. Along with prayer books, crucifixes, and religious images, these missionaries brought sacred European music to American shores in an attempt to attract the native people to the Catholic faith.The use of music as a tool for conversion of native people in places such as Mexico, South America, California, and the South West United States, have been well researched and documented. However, the research of the spiritual …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

Shamanic Performancesjoseph Beuys's Der Eurasier, Eurasia Siberian Symphony, And Auschwitz Demonstration, Caroline Rupprecht

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Grkmd 41w Modern Greek Literature In Translation, Fevronia Soumakis

Open Educational Resources

This course surveys Modern Greek literature in translation from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. We will consider authors and their works not only for their individual stylistic elements, but also within the context of European literary and cultural movements. As a “W” course, we will also focus on the development of writing skills. We will devote some time each week to discussing writing issues and will workshop papers.

The Argentines Of Paris: Theatrical Networks And Assemblages, Stefano Boselli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work investigates key theatre productions written or directed by Argentines who left Buenos Aires, for personal, artistic, and/or political reasons, and established themselves in Paris. Case studies refer to the lives, visual art, theatre companies, official appointments, and global networks that contributed to their creations between the 1960s and 1990s. Although others are mentioned briefly, the main focus remains on a cluster of theatre practitioners who more frequently connected with each other around playwright, performer, and graphic artist Copi (nom de plume of Raúl Damonte Botana). These included director Jorge Lavelli; director and performer Jérôme Savary; director and visual …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Contradictions Of Freedom In The Tempest And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Menaka Serres

Theses and Dissertations

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) the character negotiate contradictions of freedom: the entitlements that justify violence as well as oppression on the one hand and rights that grant access to emancipation from violence and imposition on the other.

The Cool Medium. The Global Pedagogy Of Eportfolio In The Foreign Language Classroom, Giulia Guarnieri

Publications and Research

The student-centered and integrative pedagogy of ePortfolio finds perfect applicability in the foreign language classroom. In contrast, textbooks for Italian language elementary courses, for the most part, implement a traditional and grammatical based methodological approach which hiders the process of ePortfolio integration which instead places greater emphasis on global and integrative pedagogy. The study discusses the implications these factors hold in preparing foreign languages instructors to use ePortfolio technology underlining its role as a cool medium which provides meaningful impact on student learning and participation

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …

In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Women And Carriages In 17th-Century Aragonese Burlesque Poetry, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

During the 17th century, literature turned the growing number of carriages into a burlesque topic. There were countless poems written about traffic jams, accidents, or the proper way to ask a friend for a carriage, often considered a symbol of status. Literary references to carriages can tell us many things about the men and women who used them, as well as about gender stereotypes. Women and carriages were understood as interconnected elements in Early Modern Spain; carriages appear as a means to conquer feminine muses as well as a recurrent satirical topic even for women poets. This article analyzes some …

Clemence Of Barking And Valdes Of Lyon: Two Contemporaneous Examples Of Innovation In The Twelfth Century, Lisa Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Twelfth Century in Western Europe was a remarkable time in history. Scholars have noted that Roman law was being revived, Aristotelian theory was being studied, Romanesque and Gothic art was being produced, scholasticism was being cultivated, and economic growth was being fostered by the rise of towns. These are just some of the developments that help give this era the well-known term “twelfth-century renaissance.” Despite the flourishing of creativity that this label suggests, there are few surviving, specific examples of innovation from this time that have been passed down to us. In AD 1175 the Benedictine nun Clemence of …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …