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Articles 31 - 49 of 49

Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse Jun 2017

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …


El Spill De Jaume Roig. Estudio De Relaciones Semióticas Con La Picaresca, Raul Macias Cotano Feb 2017

El Spill De Jaume Roig. Estudio De Relaciones Semióticas Con La Picaresca, Raul Macias Cotano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spill is a literary work written in the Catalan dialect of Valencia in 1460 by Jaume Roig, a prestigious doctor whose personal and public life is well known. The book presents numerous parallels with Lazarillo de Tormes, the 1554 novel written in Spanish (or “Castilian”) that has traditionally been considered the start of the picaresque genre in Spain. These similarities are so striking that it makes critics wonder if Spill may be a precedent of Lazarillo de Tormes. This dissertation studies the possible relations between those two books. The similarities are mostly thematic, for which the lens …


Ludic Conceptualism: Art And Play In The Netherlands, 1959 To 1975, Janna Therese Schoenberger Feb 2017

Ludic Conceptualism: Art And Play In The Netherlands, 1959 To 1975, Janna Therese Schoenberger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, the first extended study on art in the Netherlands in the 1960s and ‘70s, investigates the phenomenon of ludic art, taking its lead from Johan Huizinga’s definition of ‘ludic’ in his seminal Homo Ludens (1938). According to Huizinga, the ludic is characterized by masquerade, freedom, and purposelessness, to which I add my own theoretical contribution—absurdity. I argue that the key instantiation of Huizinga’s ideas is found in the utopian project New Babylon (1959­–74) by Constant Nieuwenhuys. In the 1960s, ludic art was deployed as a strategy of social critique that attacked from an oblique angle, sometimes effectively­, but …


An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau Sep 2016

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.


Edwin Fischer And Bach Performance Practice Of The Weimar Republic, Bradley V. Brookshire Sep 2016

Edwin Fischer And Bach Performance Practice Of The Weimar Republic, Bradley V. Brookshire

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960) provided a synthesis of approaches to Bach pianism that resolved dialectical tensions of long standing between schools that opposed one another throughout the nineteenth century. I argue that Fischer’s synthesis––which permits exegetical interpretation while maintaining a preservationist stance toward the integrity of the text––resembles both Felix Mendelssohn’s bifurcated approach to Bach’s music and Moses Mendelssohn’s description of a similar duality within modern Judaism. Such resemblance may not be coincidental or superficial, given that Fischer married into the Mendelssohn family at the height of its cultural influence in Weimar-Era Berlin. Although pieces of the Mendelssohnian construct were in …


The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis: Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki Jul 2016

The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis: Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

The relationship between Modern Greece and the West has always been a complex and tortuous one. Greece as “the cradle of democracy” – a construct at the intersection of western modernity’s political imaginary and Greek national identity – a terribly familiar and powerful cliché which to a great extent, still today, informs our imagination and politics has been at the heart of this relationship. It is rather a truism to suggest that democracy lies at the political core of the civilization that the West insists offering to the rest of the world, yet we tend to forget that this is …


A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas Feb 2016

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …


Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia Feb 2016

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …


Referencias Cortesanas En La Obra De José Navarro: Los Virreyes De Cerdeña Y Margarita Teresa De Austria, Almudena Vidorreta Jan 2016

Referencias Cortesanas En La Obra De José Navarro: Los Virreyes De Cerdeña Y Margarita Teresa De Austria, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Beating The Odds: Teaching Italian Online In The Community College Environment, Giulia Guarnieri Sep 2015

Beating The Odds: Teaching Italian Online In The Community College Environment, Giulia Guarnieri

Publications and Research

This study analyzes data collected from Italian language online classes during the course of four consecutive semesters at Bronx Community College in order to measure the impact that distance learning has on students’ retention and success rates in elementary courses. The results reveal that reconfiguring the online meetings to a lower percentage and implementing social pedagogies reduce course abandonment and favor the creation of strong learning communities. Furthermore, the data relative to the grade distribution shows no substantial difference between online courses and face-to-face instruction.


The Will To Change: The Role Of Self-Consciousness In The Literature Of Metamorphosis, Michael Giovanniello Jan 2015

The Will To Change: The Role Of Self-Consciousness In The Literature Of Metamorphosis, Michael Giovanniello

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.


Ways Of Seeing Language In Nineteenth-Century Galicia, Spain, José Del Valle Jan 2015

Ways Of Seeing Language In Nineteenth-Century Galicia, Spain, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This article discusses a language-ideological debate surrounding Galician between two Spanish intellectuals – one Andalusian, Juan Valera, and one Galician, Manuel Murguía – who clashed on the desirability of the literary cultivation of the language. This encounter is framed as a language ideological debate and interpreted in the context of Spain’s late nineteenth-century politics of regional and national identity.


El Pasado Lingüístico Colonial Y Las Lenguas De Instrucción En La Educación Filipina, David Sánchez-Jiménez Apr 2014

El Pasado Lingüístico Colonial Y Las Lenguas De Instrucción En La Educación Filipina, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki Jan 2013

Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

"Scientificity" and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools when institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens attempt to maintain professional autonomy. Nonetheless, the cooperation of scientists and scholars with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), among them archaeologists affiliated with the American School, suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. This relationship is here mapped in historical terms, while, at the same time, sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employment are used in order to situate archaeologists in their broader social and political context and to evaluate their work not merely as agents …


Gothic Cosmos: Instances And Implications Of Medieval, Sameeah Muhammad Jan 2013

Gothic Cosmos: Instances And Implications Of Medieval, Sameeah Muhammad

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.


On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki Dec 2012

On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

Hellenism is one of those overarching, ever-changing narratives always subject to historical circumstances, intellectual fashions and political needs. Conversely, it is fraught with meaning and conditioning powers, enabling and constraining imagination and practical life. In this essay I tease out the hold that the idea of Hellas has had on post-war Greece and I explore the ways in which the American anti-communist rhetoric and discussions about political and economic stabilization appropriated and rearticulated Hellenism. Central to this history of transformations are the archaeologists; the archaeologists as intellectuals, as producers of culture who, while stepping in and out of their disciplinary …


Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), Ria Banerjee Jan 2012

Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This is a biographical overview of the life and principle works of the French author Rachilde, a.k.a. Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women writers working in the masculinist field of fin-de-siecle or decadent fiction.


Transnational Languages: Beyond Nation And Empire? An Introduction, José Del Valle Jan 2011

Transnational Languages: Beyond Nation And Empire? An Introduction, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This article discusses changes in the conditions under which linguistic repertoires are conceptualized as nationalist paradigms come to co-exist with post-nationalist ones. It discusses the persistence and demise of linguistic nationalism, linguistic imperialism and linguistic commodification.


Ealles Englalandes Cyningc: Cnut's Territorial Kingship And Wulfstan's Paronomastic Play, Paul Gates Nov 2010

Ealles Englalandes Cyningc: Cnut's Territorial Kingship And Wulfstan's Paronomastic Play, Paul Gates

Publications and Research

The phrase ealles Englalandes cyningc appears for the first time in I–II Cnut, and represents a shift in the discourse of Anglo-Saxon kingship, changing it from king over a people to king over a territory, redefining the discourse of nationhood.