Comparative Literature (Bi-College)

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Correspondence with the Dead; Poetic Identity and Translation in Lorca’s 'Poeta en Nueva York' and Spicer’s 'After Lorca'
(2012) Swomley, Olivia; Burshatin, Israel; Allen, Elizabeth
My thesis analyzes poetic identity and correspondence in two works: Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and Jack Spicer’s After Lorca. Poeta describes New York City as a metropolitan monster. By denying his own poetic voice and using violent images of voids and victimization, Lorca depicts the city’s desolation as contributing to his own fragmented poetic identity. For Lorca, paradox is essential to poetry, and he uses contradictory images to construct a fractured poetic identity for himself and the city. After Lorca draws on the ambiguities of Lorca’s identity, as embodied in Poeta, through the conflation of Spicer’s poetic identity with Lorca’s. The flirtatious dialogue between the two poets in After Lorca emphasizes a correspondence theory of translation, with each poet speaking through time to contribute and respond to the poetic tradition. In addition to translating Lorca’s work, Spicer is also translating Lorca himself, for through their correspondence, Spicer helps to construct a poetic afterlife for himself and Lorca.
Creating an Image of Walt Whitman in the "Oda a Watlt [sic] Whitman"
(1999) Carrasquillo, Pedro; Burshatin, Israel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Stadler, Gustavus
Depictions of Time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
(2011) Breakstone, Lauren; Burshatin, Israel
Do the ideas about time in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges, conflict, coincide, or both? Are these views presented as positive, negative, or both? This paper aims to show that Vonnegut’s and Borges’ ideas about time in these works coincide, and that they present these ideas negatively. Both texts show how time contributes to or constructs one’s understanding of reality, including one’s emotional responses to that reality. Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five, and the characters promoting Tlön in Borges’ story, are all trying to utilize their views on time to create a positive emotional affect in themselves and others, but for different reasons.
Languages of Oppression, Languages of Hope: An Exploration of the Various Roles of Language In the Concentration Camps and Ghettos Within the Texts of Primo Levi and Jurek Becker
(2011) Uca, Didem; Burshatin, Israel; Patruno, Nicholas
LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING THE BRIDGE BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND HISTORY THROUGH THE POETRY OF LUIS PALÉS MATOS AND DEREK WALCOTT
(2018) Lomba Guzmán, Gabriela; Burshatin, Israel; McInerney, Maud Burnett
Derek Walcott famously writes in his poem “A Cry from Africa” that he is “divided to the vein”—in itself a succinct exploration of what it means to be born into a colonized (or once-colonized) country. Luis Palés Matos explores this division in different words, but to a similar effect, as he describes “la antillana” [the Antillean] that is “una mitad española / y otra mitad africana” (“Ten con ten” 37-38). The history of the Caribbean manifests itself in both of these lines as they complicate narratives of Caribbean identity. My essay not only aims to explore what it means to be divided to the vein, but more precisely, what it means to be divided to the tongue. Through Palés Matos’s lens, this tongue is one that is both Spanish and African and through Walcott, it is African, English, and Dutch. The tongue, when explored through the works of these two poets, becomes a site of resistance. By employing my reading of Homi K. Bhabha’s “OF Mimicry and Man,” I trace how Walcott and Palés Matos challenge a one-dimensional rendering of the Caribbean and allow for a more nuanced understanding. Though both poets work within the linguistic in order to reframe accounts of the Caribbean, they differ in intention and in effect. Walcott’s poetry embraces colonial language and poetics, yet manages to employ them within his larger critique of colonialism. Conversely, Palés Matos defines and (at times) creates a Boricua Spanish, which works within a larger Antillean language. Through this linguistic invention, Palés Matos creates a document that records the sonic aspects of the islands—ones that are inextricably tied to African dance and song. By exploring the linguistic finesse of these two poets, my project aims to uncover how their respective works delineate different accounts—with attention to their advantages and limitations—of a Caribbean history.
Migrant Hermeneutics : Shall We Dance?
(2006) Bagus, Erin Rose; Burshatin, Israel; Ricci, Roberta
In my thesis I examine Italophone and Indo-British literatures, that is, how they are similar in some ways but very different in others. To do this, I look at all aspects of the literatures: author, text, and reader. I begin my discussion with the author, using some of Martin Heideggers ideas on culture as determinate and closed. He believed that our mother tongue provides us with an inexorable way of viewing and interacting with the world, from which we can never escape in the sense that we cannot learn a new way (as is embedded in a new language). The migrant literature, however, contradicts these assertions as migrant authors show themselves to have not only learned the language of their new land but to have gained an understanding of the cultural-historical-social references embedded in that language. Having learned these references, they appropriate and rewrite them according to their own experiences as migrants, living amongst several cultures. We can see their mastery of this reappropriation in the two main stories examined: At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers by Salman Rushdie and Naufragio by Martha Elvira Patiña. Turning to the reader, I examine what audiences these traditions tend to write for and introduce some of Hans-Georg Gadamers metaphors of the hermeneutical experiences, first play then the fusing of horizons, to consider how these readers understand. In my conclusion, I attempt to find the socio-cultural reasons why these two traditions have received such different responses, which I believe goes back and also affects the genre in which each chooses to compose. Italy, it seems, represses Italian-language migrant literature partly because they have no historical relationship with the migrants and thus feel like they never opened themselves up to any interaction with them, and also because the country is tending towards a more religiously and culturally xenophobic politics and literature in recent years. England, on the other hand, has a strong historical relationship with India and willingly opened up a space of interaction with them through colonialism. Furthermore, because British politics is more economically focused and immigrants provide cheap labor, they are generally more welcoming and accepting to them. In conclusion, I invite Italians to experience the great innovation and renewal that British literature and culture has received, if only they can learn to embrace, instead of fear, difference.
Positively Uncertain: The Refutation of Scientific Monism in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla”
(2011) Raghavan, Krishnan; Burshatin, Israel; Schönherr, Ulrich
During the latter half of the nineteenth‐century, scientific discourse came to dominate the sociopolitical climate of Western Europe as a result of the immense fertility of discovery in the natural sciences at the time. The scientific skepticism of the era shaped the supernatural narratives “Le Horla” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James in obliging these authors to craft a more liminal, “realistic” supernatural. Both author’s fantastic narratives remain ultimately ambiguous; however, this ambiguity subverts and critiques the forward progression mandated by positivist doctrine. Positivism is denigrated on a narrative level in both stories through the representation of techniques of positivist psychology as ultimately impotent. Maupassant and James’ aesthetic approaches towards this “new supernatural” ultimately champion a more pluralistic perspective than that of positivism.
"Reconciliation" and Creation: Literary syncretism in the Testimonio and the Slave Narrative
(2006) Flor-Stagnato, Anne; Burshatin, Israel; Castillo Sandoval, Roberto
REIMAGINING RETURNS: the Preservation of Caribbean Identity and Generational Trauma of Exiles Through Cultural Memory
(2018) Mundo, Maria; Burshatin, Israel; Gómez Unamuno, Aurelia
Edwidge Danticat’s Haitian-American novel, The Dew Breaker, and René Marqués’s Puerto Rican play, Un niño azul para esta sombra, present the struggle and internal conflicts associated with offering a perspective of a historical event, throughout generations. Both of these texts are written between the boundaries of cultures that place the narrative in a translocative and transtemporal state, when searching for a symbolic return to past landscapes. Danticat’s novel refuses any uncomplicated access to experiences of trauma, handing over the strain of unraveling the past to the readers, along with the difficulties of erasure and censorship. Marqués’s play shows how the burden of carrying the political ideals and cultures of previous generations has destroyed any chance of a future for the young protagonist, reflecting the effects of trauma on the individual. The role of children is deemed essential in these texts to further their parents desired narratives of their personal history and idealized collective national identity. They interweave individual and communal trauma, thematically and allegorically, in attempts to reconcile with the past.
So is This the End?: The Unfinishability of Quixotic Play
(2015) Pedersen, Anna; Burshatin, Israel; Castillo Sandoval, Roberto
Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quijote is perhaps one of the most heavily studied, reviewed, and interpreted novels of all time. This thesis attempts a unique study, however, by interpreting the novel through a modern lens of performance theory. The study retroactively applies the theories of Richard Schechner, one of the forefathers of performance theory, onto the seventeenth century novel by arguing that certain representations of madness by characters other than Don Quijote can be understood as performances. Using Schechner’s theories, this paper creates a clear distinction between Don Quijote’s madness and that of the other “sane” characters based upon the social function of performance, which acts as a medium to enact socially forbidden behavior. The paper then argues that not only do the various characters perform madness, but that this performance is a type of dark play because of its inherent danger in destabilizing the boundary between sanity and madness. Tracing the progression of this dark play throughout the novel, the paper then posits a total obliteration of any distinction between play and reality, causing the play to be “unfinishable,” in an act of what I term quixotic play. The paper then turns to the 2002 film Lost in La Mancha directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe as an example and embodiment of quixotic play, both in terms of the play enacted within the film and as part of a larger version of quixotic play which is the legacy of the seventeenth century novel. The comparative analysis concludes by suggesting that the original narrative, as an example of quixotic play itself, is unfinishable by its very existence, that it can never end and will instead remain perpetually in a state of play.
The library as intertext: readers real and fictional
(2011) Meravi, Elizabeth; Burshatin, Israel; Quintero, María Cristina
The Library as conceived by Jorge Luis Borges functions as an allegory for the intertext. Through analysis of this allegory in "Magic for Beginners" and "Pretty Monsters," by Kelly Link, and in El beso de la mujer arana, by Manuel Puig, we can investigate how the intertext functions in a modern context, being read by active readers. The intertext takes on new attributes, becoming portable and particular to the reader; it can be all-encompassing, but it does not have to be. The readers in these texts model various types of productive relationships with the intertext, allowing it to be a source of opportunity for multiplicity within the reader and the text alike, allowing for endless possibility rather than endless impossibility.
The Rooster and Murrieta: The Outlaw-Figure(s) in I am Joaquín and Gallo de Sinaloa
(2018) Jauregui-Volpe, Marcelo; Burshatin, Israel
This thesis centers on the hero-bandits in Rodolfo Gonzales’s epic poem I am Joaquín (1967) and a handful of corridos from Chalino Sánchez’s album Gallo de Sinaloa (release date of this posthumous album is 1995, but many of these corridos were released prior). I am calling these figures hero-bandits due to their tendency to exist on the fringes of society while being entities of admiration. I am Joaquín is an oral history of Mexico and a battle cry of the Chicanx Movement of the 60s. The corridos from Gallo de Sinaloa are isolated tales from life on the Mexico-US border and around Sinaloa. The hero-bandit in these works are the vessels through which these authors attempt to uplift marginalized groups and forge a national and regional identity. I am particularly interested in how these figures are constructed through the corrido and epic genres and why they generate such a mass appeal.
"There are frogs falling from the sky": Divining the Essence of Lived Experience through Creative Acts in Magnolia and Proust
(2015) Casem, Catherine; Burshatin, Israel
In an interview called “Singing in the Rain” with Mark Olsen of Sight and Sound magazine, contemporary American director Paul Thomas Anderson talks about his 1999 film Magnolia and his reflections on the relationship he feels in his own life between film and reality. He explains that, “Movies are a big influence on how we deal with death, relationships... But they can also be a betrayal in terms of how to live your life” (Anderson, Sight and Sound, 10.3.26). This quote reveals a complicated disparity between real life and fictions: how can fictions help us cope with and comprehend real life events when at the same time they are incongruous with daily, lived experience? In this project, I will explore this issue with the help of Magnolia and Marcel Proust’s epic seven-volume work, In Search of Lost Time. I will analyze the interactions between the protagonists and fictions in each work, as well as the reader’s own experience with each work. In doing so I will ultimately convey that the creative act of engaging with a text offers an experience of essence, or the holistic, eternal significance of an individual’s experience outside of their subjectivity. This essence experienced through the creative act divulges the essence of everyday reality that would otherwise remain obscured, and in this way is able to help the individual understand and “deal with” their past events, assuring them of their position within that essence.

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