Modern Literature Commons^™

Queer Postsecular Conocimiento: Anzaldúan Readings Of Time, Spirituality, And Transformation In Nugent, Vuong, And Herrera, Joshua A. Swem

Theses and Dissertations

An overreliance on secularism within the field of queer theory and a denial of spiritual epistemologies prevent deep, alternative, and transformative strategies of analyzing literature. It can regurgitate oppressive ideology in academia. In this work, I synthesize Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical concepts of mestiza consciousness, nepantla, la facultad, and el cenote with José Esteban Muñoz’s queer temporality and futurity as a framework to engage with literary texts in queer, postsecular ways, freeing up fresh insights and polysemic perspectives. I argue that in  "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" by Richard Bruce Nugent, Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri …

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 …

Ztc Sls 302: Medieval/Early Modern Cultures, Nicolette Guida

Open Educational Resources

This course explores the depiction of gender, race, and social class in Shakespeare’s plays, with a focus on how his works engage with and challenge the norms of early modern society. In this course, we will study two of Shakespeare’s comedies: Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew; as well as two of his tragedies: Romeo and Juliet and Othello in relation to the culture of early modern England. Through an in-depth study of these texts, students will examine the complexities of these social categories as portrayed in the plays and how they continue to resonate in …

Cultural Of Authenticity And Commodification: Analyzing The Aesthetic Waves And Collective Culture In The 2010s And 2020s, Stefanny Leung Yu

Student Theses

The “authentic self” is curated, aestheticized, and most notably, commodified. Digital algorithms, likes, views, and engagement are more than just digital metrics, they are the management of performance. For millions of other users — including the author herself — social media is the locus of personal expression. Most notably, sites like Tumblr, where users in the 2010s posted hazy images or overly filtered graphics along with melancholic song lyrics that match the vibe of the moment, expression was earnest and idealized. Today, social media in the 2020s, new creators like Hannah Neelaman, better known as Ballerina Farm, dress in pastoral …

Revelations: Spirituality As Privileged Perspectivism In Magical Realist Distortions, Isabella Scala-Kazanecki

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the role of spiritual beliefs in the literary mode now known as magical realism in Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Indian-Born British and American Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and a lesser-known novel, Household Saints (1981) by Francine Prose, an American writer. The Kingdom of This World, itself the originator of the mode of magical realism, has allowed me to conclude with Carpentier that magical realism arises from “privileged revelations,” as he notes in the preface to his seminal book. But these revelations in magical realism are not necessarily always of the …

Science Fiction, Eng 2420, Syllabus And Course Outline, Jason W. Ellis

Open Educational Resources

This Science Fiction, ENG2420 syllabus and course outline was written for an online, asynchronous class taught in the Department of English at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY. It was designed to compliment the OER Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) and have a Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) approach with readings and viewings found primarily through the Internet Archive. The course follows a historical approach to the science fiction genre covering the Origins of Science Fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Proto-SF, Pulp SF, SF Film Serials, Golden Age SF, SF Film Through the 1950s, New Wave …

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18^th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19^th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

The Golden Age Of Mexican Cinema, Daniel Galindo

Publications and Research

This presentation is about the film called María Candelaria (1943), a film of the cinema of the golden age of Mexico that shows the lifestyle of the people of that time, more than anything it shows how women were reviled in the macho society. The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is a period of brilliance in the history of Mexican cinema, which began in 1936-1956.

Decolonizing World Civilizations Ii: 1500 A.D. To The Present, Juliana Nalerio

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

America’S Enabler: How Colson Whitehead’S The Underground Railroad Contributes To Racial Inertia, Cherif Ba

Dissertations and Theses

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was met with near universal acclaim and enjoys regard as an important work which illustrates the difficulty and horror that was black life under chattel slavery. This essay argues that despite the work’s stated purpose, its ultimate, if unintended effect is to reify the current racial hierarchy. Drawing primarily from current events and an Afropessimist framework, I attempt to illustrate how this work, and others like it, occupy a specific space in the cultural zeitgeist bent to a specific purpose: obfuscating contemporary liberalism’s current transgressions from its past ones and maintaining a social stratum with …

Collect Cosmic Dust, Make It Into Bright Stars: The Use Of Temporal Data In Regeneration Of Life Space And Time Via A Construction Of The Political-Sociological Theory Of Justice, Yi Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues for an argument-counterargument approach to the atypical classics of Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson. This approach to the literature is useful for a construction of the political-sociological theory of justice, which claims that the state of a just world is each individual’s lifetime moving in a dialectic-of-anti-violence-and-non-violence manner.

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 …

Writing As Liberation: Challenging Yemeni Patriarchal Practices, Sheema Alamari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Patriarchal societies create an environment where men hold power and women are often treated as second-class citizens or are often held as having an inferior status. Throughout history and across cultures, literature has provided a platform for writers to share their stories and express themselves. However, Yemeni women have often been silenced and marginalized due to limited education and censorship. In recent times, Yemeni and Yemeni-American women have turned to storytelling as a means of creative expression and emotional release. This thesis analyzes Zubaida “Jasmine” Sharif’s memoir, Caged in America: One Woman’s Journey Through the Veil, and Nadia Al-Kowkabani's …

Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany

Student Theses

"In this essay, I examine three texts that consider the repercussions of passing for Black Americans. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) serves as a namesake for this general idea, as two light-skinned African American women represent the divisionary approach to racial passing. In George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) we see a passing Black man’s virility being tested as he enters an ‘alternate universe’, in which a scientific invention grants him full access to the wondrous white world he’d always dreamed of entering. Finally, in the middle of this textual spectrum is Angelina W. Grimké’s 1919 short story, “The Closing …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

Giving Voice To The Body: Slam Poetry In The Poet X, Stefanny Leung Yu

Student Theses

When the world silences her, can slam poetry become her voice? Elizabeth Acevedo, an author and poet, uses her beautiful piece of slam poetry to explore how language can empower marginalized voices, speaking on behalf of those who are usually silenced. The Poet X is a verse novel that narrates the powerful story of a young Afro-Latina girl, Xiomara Batista, who navigates the intersecting pressures of school bullies, family issues, religious conservatism, patriarchal rules, and racialized body politics in her Harlem community. This research engages with Acevedo’s work to focus on how slam poetry serves as a powerful outlet and …

Storytelling In Modernist Fiction: A “Method Of Presence”, Laura Malhotra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between narrative modes in cinema and literature and adopts the lineage laid out by Lukács that connects the oral tradition and epic poetry to the novel. I attach art cinema to this lineage and seek to justify its position as an equally significant medium representative of the age in which it is produced. This study aims to correct one established view of film, put forth by the Frankfurt School, of its low value as an art form and as a site of meaning. I compare the birth of literary modernism in Britain to the emergence …

Virginia Woolf: The Bookbinder And The Bibliophile, Geoffrey Bridgman

Dissertations and Theses

The triumph of Virginia Woolf’s career as a novelist is one of the most famous stories of the 20th century. Her career as a publisher of her home-grown Hogarth Press is a little less widely acknowledged. But Virginia Woolf is known to have engaged herself for many hours folding, stapling, sewing and gluing the publications which she and her husband Leonard had tried printing (at least to start) with the small platen press they had set up in their home. What is even less acknowledged is that Virginia Woolf maintained a private practice re-wrapping the books in her own library …

Primitivism, Performance Studies, And Modernist Time: Tracing An Alternative Genealogy Of Performance Studies Through Case Studies In Modernist Cultural Appropriation, Stephanie Vella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces a genealogy of research methodologies for documenting, transmitting, and analyzing embodied, non-textual performance practices from the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. I uncover intersections between these methods and the conflations of race and temporality that are ubiquitously threaded through modernist cultural practices during this time in the form of primitivism. The researchers whose work I analyze all saw European modernity as fundamentally detached from physical culture, while viewing other cultures—especially those of the people most directly threatened by colonial and capitalist expansion during this time—as having access to a “lost” corporeal knowledge. I argue that primitivism is not …

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Spa321. Búsquedas De La Igualdad: Feminismo Y Abolicionismo En Los Siglos Xviii Y Xix (Sílabo Y Materiales De Lectura), Juan Jesús Payán

Open Educational Resources

SPA321 - 3 hours, 3 credits. Readings from representative works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

El curso está dedicado al examen de la situación de la mujer en la sociedad patriarcal y el compromiso abolicionista durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. Tras una contextualización sumaria sobre los problemas que subyacen a la naturalización acrítica del canon y la periodización hegemónica, debatiremos sobre los estigmas que pesaron sobre las mujeres que querían dedicarse a la literatura; discutiremos el perdurable impacto que tuvo el modelo de domesticidad del “ángel del hogar” y finalmente analizaremos la contradictoria posición ideológica encarnada en el …

Pushing Understanding: Curriculum Resources For Digital Pedagogues, M. Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Whether one wishes to admit it or not, the classroom is a distinct and separate space from the rest of the world with its own rules, expectations, and environment. Even when a class takes place outside of a classroom, the space takes on the role of a classroom, if not outright becoming a classroom in every form aside from shape. This is not unlike, for instance, a tabletop game: even if not played on a literal tabletop, a tabletop game remains identifiable as such, and its rules and expectations remain the same, as does even its environment. A course may …

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

Intro To Jewish American Literature, Amy W. Kratka

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Self-Reclamation Through Death: Attaining Creoleness In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And In Praise Of Creoleness By Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau And Raphaël Confiant, Phillip J. Jordan

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis makes the claim that Xuela, the protagonist of the novel The Autobiography of My Mother mirrors the principles of the essay In Praise of Creoleness by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. These works, published nearly a decade apart address a process of identity formation in which specifically Caribbean identity features blend together in a fluid and complex way, the process of creolization. The essay, In Praise of Creoleness, can be seen as the manifesto of creolization, while Kincaid’s Xuela in The Autobiography of My Mother is the manifestation. Kincaid’s work presents an account of an individual’s …

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Object Expression: Diligent Realism In The Works Of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, And W. G. Sebald, John Knight

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past twenty years, ambiguous yet meaningful encounters with objects have become a trope in contemporary fiction. Collections and archives, found objects and commonplace articles of modern life have especially substantiated literature that engages themes of displacement and selfhood. The method of incorporating objects into these works ranges from explicit cabinets of curiosities to more subtle appearances, but in each case material reality is the conduit for fundamental expressions of character. These authors draw the reader’s gaze toward an object as a way to indirectly articulate subjective experience, conspicuously displacing the central concerns of a text. This study examines …

Mario Levrero: Un Estudio Fenomenológico De Su Obra, Sergio Alves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines three novels of Mario Levrero, which have an unnamed first-person narrator, and his autobiographical-essay-memoir type of works. The novels, known as the “involuntary trilogy”, have been considered by many as a kind that belongs to the subgenre of the fantastic. In both types of literature, we agreed that Husserlian phenomenology was an unavoidable and substantial frame for any discussion. The part of the fictional narrative considered here, by its plots, themes, narrator and characters, vocabulary and concepts, brought us to observe parallelisms with phenomenology as a discipline and body of knowledge, and as a process and attitude. …