Modern Literature Commons^™

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.

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Desire, Curiosity, And The Search For Truth In Proust, Moreno, And Bechdel, Santiago Parga Linares

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marcel Proust’s influence on twentieth century literature is broad and has been well documented. This dissertation attempts a comparative reading of À la recherche du temps perdu that places it in contrast with Colombian writer Marvel Moreno’s 1987 novel, En diciembre llegaban las brisas, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 comic memoir, Fun Home. Starting from a Deleuzian reading of the Recherche, this dissertation proposes the notion of the “proustian truth seeker”, a thematic and stylistic phenomenon which can be traced in all three writers. The characteristics of the truth seeker can be used to understand the ways in …

Una Democracia Aterrorrizada: Justicia Y Afecto En Los Textos De La Transición Democrática Argentina, Mariana Graciano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the links between justice and affect in some of the most emblematic texts of the democratic transition in Argentina. Films, novels and photos are incorporated here as texts or complex utterances, as they constitute a framework of signs with a communicative intention that makes sense in a given context. In order to analyze these links, I consider terms from the field of transitional justice (reconciliation, forgiveness, restoration) and specific affects (terror, empathy, guilt, resentment, tenderness, happiness and cruelty).

The key questions guiding this thesis are: what links did visual arts and literature have in relation to the …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

For Narrativity: How Creating Narratives Structures Experience And Self, Natallia Stelmak Schabner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation responds to the challenge to narrativity posed by Galen Strawson in “Against Narrativity,” where he claims that not everyone is Narrative by nature and that there is no reason to be. I make my claim “For Narrativity” as a mental process of form finding and coherence seeking over time that is an inherent mental activity and essential for experience of one’s Self. I make my case through examinations of our experience of time, our use of language, how we plan, and our sense of Self. In the first chapter, I show that considering Narrativity as viewing life as …

Mermaid Song: The Notebooks Of The Writing Woman, Gianna T. Ward-Vetrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is built on the model of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, that is, it is a feminist project of holistic integration that does not reject fracturing, ambiguity, or contradiction, but aims to attain a more complex and thus truer portrait of the woman writing. Lessing’s notebooks examine conflicts between communism and capitalism, racial conflict in Africa, conflict between men and women, and the conflict between the protagonist Anna Wulf’s identity as a woman and her identity as a writer, each of which she then attempts to integrate into the singular golden notebook of the title. I propose …

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 …

Subversion And Transcendence In The Latin American Modern Travel Novel (1928-1976), Andrea Babsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of this dissertation is the role that travel plays in Latin American novels that stem from 1928 to 1976, specifically, Macunaíma, Los pasos perdidos, El reino de este mundo, and Mascaró, el cazador americano. Departing from the fact that this period of time in history was marked by political and cultural change and upheaval, different aspects and interpretations of travel as manifested in the novels of the corpus are explored as a means of subversion and transcendence to hegemonic discourses. Travel is viewed as a means of disruption, particularly of limits and borders, be they geographical, …

The Struggle To Re-Establish Anglo Superiority In American Modernism And Its Collapse Into American Tragedy, Jeff Brelvi

Dissertations and Theses

A study of the impact Anglo race assertion had on American Modernism through the work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot shaping the discourse on American cultural identity. Arthur Miller and his "Tragedy and the Common Man" put an end to Modernism's Anglo stronghold and brought about the next period of American literature, ushering it into the era of American tragedy.

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

Testimonios (Re)Creados: La Nueva Novela Testimonial Latinoamericana, Reynaldo Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last twenty years, the writing of testimonial literature in Latin America has gradually declined due in part, because civil war struggles in Central and South America have ceased and the misrepresentation of facts in testimonial narratives have discouraged readers and critics from studying testimonial literature with the same enthusiasm as previously done. Another contributing factor is the question of authorship of these narratives because of problematic issues in identifying whether or not the informant or the transcriber authored the work. Furthermore, scholars realize that at times the transcriber interrelate fact and fiction to the extent of creating a …

Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications And The Poetics Of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

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.

Wet Data: The Ocean And Its Negative Archive, Kendra M. Sullivan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper and the poetry cycle (Wet Data) it describes are in dialogue with a wide array of social and cultural histories of the sea; the production of the sea as a social, economic, and militarized space; maritime ethnographies; as well as artistic and literary projects stemming out of what are now being termed offshore art and forensic literature. The ocean is a contested territory that plays a profound and often under-examined role in defining geopolitics and nationalism under globalism. In eco-critical and creative art contexts, the sea is often represented as a metaphor for loss, the outside, …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Transparent Interiors: Detective And Mystery Fiction In The Age Of Photography, Melissa D. Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a meditation on the mutable boundaries that define interior life in the age of photography. I probe these boundaries through selected readings in two literary genres that share conceptual links with photography—detective fiction and mystery fiction. Photography plays an important role in a radical reconsideration of the boundaries between public and private, engaging two dominant and often conflicting cultural values that shape American life at the turn of the twentieth century—the mandate to define and protect privacy and the simultaneous call for greater transparency in public and personal life. Photography, through its perceived transgressions against private life, …

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 …

Filología Reflexiva: Hacia Una Pedagogía “Evaluadora”. Reflexión Y Evaluación Del Campo Filológico Español (1936-1968), Jose Antonio Losada Montero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral thesis offers an original and valuable contribution to the study of the genealogy of the literary canon between 1939 and 1968. During Francisco Franco´s dictatorship, Spanish Universities underwent a series of important changes in its academic and management configuration and in the way Spanish elites envisioned Higher Education inside the regime. This research focuses in the role that Spanish scholars, inside Hispanic and Modern Language Departments, played in this renegotiation of a new and crucial sociopolitical mission for College Education. By focusing on the period between 1939 and 1968, a moment of sociopolitical instability and conservative literary and …

Global Homesickness In William Gibson’S Blue Ant Trilogy, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

This article explores theories of home, homesickness, and identity instability as they occur in William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, which consists of three novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010). In order to clarify this collision and underscore the importance of cultural and aesthetic codes of uneven globalization, this article offers a character study focused through the place-based intensities of global homesickness. Each character has a strained relationship with home: Cayce Pollard only feels at home while reading and writing in an online film forum; Hollis Henry wonders if she might be considered homeless, even though …

Creando Barrios. Vecindarios, Cine Y Poesia. La Concepcion Del Espacio Urbano En Espana. 1970-1985., Magdalena Romero Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on how urban spaces were imagined and questioned in Spanish neighborhoods and in poetry and cinema during the Transition. I explore how urban spaces are not so much physical entities but lived spaces, with the potentials of reconceptualizing human practices in today's artistic creations. My point of departure studies how different grassroots associations were able to introduce significant changes in the cultural values imposed by the Franco dictatorship while challenged their limitations through alternative practices of the everyday life. I analyze how the changes introduced in the morphology of the neighborhood questioned the success of urban-focused modernization …

A "Digital Wasteland": Modernist Periodical Studies, Digital Remediation, And Copyright, Roxanne Shirazi

Graduate Student Publications and Research

The nonlinearity of magazine reading is an important consideration in the emerging field of modernist periodical studies, one that deserves greater attention in the development of digital collections. As modernist scholars begin to generate a theoretical foundation for periodical studies it becomes evident that digital technologies must go beyond reproducing the printed page. This paper reviews recent scholarship and digital projects in modernist periodical studies and introduces non-consumptive research methods as a partial solution to the post-1923 copyright conundrum.

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sing Me A Song Of Sorrow: Analzying The Internal Dynamics Of Howl And Its Place As A Modern Epic, Anthony Hosey

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

On The Origin And Future Of Poetry: Notes Towards An Investigation, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

An exploration on the historical and material conditions that allowed the emergence of metaphors and poetry alongside language. This article analyzes the historical relation between poetry and technology across history. It discusses the so-called ontological crisis of poetry and opens the conversation on its future.

The Journey Back: Revisiting Childhood Trauma, Ruth Lipman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the adult's endeavor to revisit childhood trauma in four sets of literary texts that are not typically studied together. These works, all published after 1968, address the central problem of revisiting childhood trauma in order to open a potential for mourning and sometimes for healing. I explore connections between individual/family trauma and collective/historical trauma. I argue that the use of objects and/or photographs is integral to the process of touching and representing the buried, embodied wounds of childhood, propelling the journeys and conveying the experience to the reader. Each pairing of literary works concerns a different kind …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …

¡No Contaban Con Mi Astucia! México: Parodia, Nación Y Sujeto En La Serie Televisiva De El Chapulín Colorado, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

¡No contaban con mi astucia! México: parodia, nación y sujeto en la serie televisiva de ‘El Chapulín Colorado’ (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2014) es un estudio revolucionario del impacto y la efectividad residual de la literatura del Siglo de Oro y el periodo colonial en la producción audiovisual de Latinoamérica en el siglo veinte. El trabajo de Roberto Gómez Bolaños (creador de El Chapulín Colorado) se transmite hoy en día tanto en el formato original como en series animadas en varios canales de USA. El público norte americano y la academia están presenciando la consolidación de los estudios audiovisuales …

Gender And Resistance: Afro-Brazilian Women's Anti-Naming As Recovery From Trauma In Conceição Evaristo' "Eu-Mulher" And Ponciá Vicencio, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.