Postcolonial Trauma In The Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, Rosario Pollicino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a …

Imagining The Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, And Peripheral Communities In The Contemporary Urban Situation, Colton R. Sherman

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Various works of psychogeographic literature explore privileged and non-privileged communities and spaces through narrative and character development. Novels of this sort—specifically those by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and J.G. Ballard—feature narratives where their respective protagonists undergo a liminal metamorphosis and transform from a monotonous, albeit privileged urbanite into a free-associating inhabitant of the urban periphery: the unimagined, non-privileged space of urban detritus. By engaging with these authors’ novels alongside the works of the Situationists, Walter Benjamin, Rob Nixon and others, the goal of this thesis is to explore how the dominant urban epistemologies are subverted—whether or not they should be …

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

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This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …

The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst The Ruins And Beyond In Testimony, Literature And Film, Aviva Atlani

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ABSTRACT

Jewish humour sheds a crude light on the social, political, and historical realities of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, contentiously, doses of levity during this period were very much a reality, and even a psychological necessity. The purpose of my thesis is to explore the historical, social, and political ramifications of such laughter provoking manifestations. In doing so, the nuances are highlighted which are found within the laughter of the ghettos, the transit camps, and the concentration camps. Furthermore, some of these jokes, and their subsequent variations, reappear within the discourse of children of survivors. The dissertation explores how some of …

Entre El Juego Y La Memoria: El Detective Y La Ciudad En La Narrativa Neo Policiaca De Paco Ignacio Taibo Ii Y Leonardo Padura Fuentes., Carlos Pardo

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This dissertation examines the development of the characters in the detective series of Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Mexico) and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Cuba) and their relationship with their Hispanic-American cities: Mexico D.F. and Havana. To accomplish it, this dissertation initially deals with the connection between the “neo policiaco” and the narrative tradition that precedes it: the classical detective story or whodunit and the American hardboiled crime story, as well as its link with Spanish contemporary detective fiction. As a result, the Hispanic-American “neo policiaco” explores new possibilities of detective narratives in which complex characters and the Hispanic American city as …