Browsing by Author "Mohan, Rajeswari"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 57
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    A "Consummate Artist" and "Consummate Rascal:" De Profundis, Imaginative Resistance, and the Queer Erotics of Prison Writing
    (2021) Murphy, Jack; Mohan, Rajeswari
    "I sit between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade," Oscar Wilde writes to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, known affectionately as "Bosie," from the solitude of his prison cell (54). The letter – given the title De Profundis – was the last full work of the Irish aesthete and playwright who fell from stardominto obscurity after his sentencing for "gross indecency," a crime of homosexuality, in May of 1895 (Tóibín xxiii). Throughout the letter, Wilde continues todraw on the muses of other prison writers: he praises the "perfect lives" of "Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin," and compares his mother kindly to "Madame Roland" (130, 140). In its self-announced lineage, De Profundis offers a basis to evaluate the aesthetics of prison writing. Firstly, the letter must be read in terms of mimesis, or how the prison materially shapes the text. Gramsci's theory of the subaltern clarifies how time and language in prison impress upon Wilde's writing, creating a fluidity of prose and a strategic turn to essentialism. Subsequently, the letter can be read in terms of anti-mimesis, or how the text creatively shapes the prison in acts of expropriative refashioning. Wilde resists the religious indoctrination of the prison by encoding a homoerotic portrayal of Christ. In doing so, Wilde reasserts his imaginative preeminence by employing the body of Christ as a symbol for the fluidity of sexuality and for an ethics of bodily care amongst the imprisoned men. In De Profundis, Wilde not only challenges the narrative of defamationon trial but also produces an artistic work that employs the pressures of confinement as features of its self-expressed agency.
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    “An Embrace in Death” Psychic Resistance of the Symbolic Order as Freedom in Mrs. Dalloway
    (2019) Misangyi, Hannah; Mohan, Rajeswari
    My thesis examines the social formation of identity in Mrs. Dalloway through the work of Julia Kristeva.
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    Beyond Impulse: The Pleasurable Death of Certainty in Ulysses
    (2010) Amendolara, Ben; Mohan, Rajeswari
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    Deconstruction of the Human: The Post-Darwinian Feral Child in Juvenile Fiction
    (2013) Levinson, Sam; Mohan, Rajeswari
    The subject of this thesis paper is the construction of a feral child character in late 19th - early twentieth century juvenile literature. In the late 19th century, a convergence of imperialist mentality and progressive scientific advancement simultaneously radiating throughout the public discourse led to new scrutiny upon the formalized understanding of human identity. The arguments of social scientists Hobbes and Rousseau had, in prior centuries, framed a debate for the state of humanity outside of a social contract. Each of their posited arguments, however, assumed a level of a purified human form that Darwin's work in On the Origin of Species challenged. Through Darwin's work, the assumed separation between the human and the animal became less clearly delineated. During the same time period, the widespread development of British imperial conquest led to racially‐based speculation on the human form. Rudyard Kipling's children story The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulp publication Tarzan of the Apes both present characters developing outside of a human‐made social contract or a European environment. Through the development of these characters, Kipling and Burroughs necessarily make decisions that form a position on the nature of human identity. Through the dissembling act of maturing an unacculturated infant character in an animal setting, the two authors deconstruct the elements of a human figure, suggest a degree of transmittable identity from the animal to the human, and comment upon the macrocosm of human culture. Tracing the contemporary arguments of the human form demonstrates how the figure of the feral child became a trope fraught for such a wide spread literary examination of identity.
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    Dominican History Reimagined: Fukú and History from Below in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
    (2022) Wolfenden, Abby; Mohan, Rajeswari
    "They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles" (Díaz, 1). These are the words that launch Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. What Díaz is describing is known as fukú americanus–a curse that haunts Oscar de León and his family throughout the novel. Fukú has deep ties to histories of slavery, colonialism, and the dictatorship of Rafael Leónida Trujillo Molina; and it is an element of the novel's narrative form that works to reimagine the history of the Dominican Republic. Alongside fukú, Díaz uses two unique narrative voices and a complex character-system to illuminate the largely untold, almost inexplicable, and often violent history of the Dominican Republic. Together, these elements of the novel's narrative form can be read as a history from below, or a history that spotlights the perspectives of the ostracized, the oppressed, and the marginalized. The blending of magical realism with historical fact becomes a means of conveying the extraordinary historical events that the conventions of realism are simply inadequate to represent. It creates a narrative that reimagines the history of the Dominican Republic and African Diaspora as a history of marginalization, and also of redemption and hope through zafa–centering the experiences of a myriad of characters and their struggles with machismo, abuse, and identity.
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    Fractured Heart: Locating Puerto Rican Identity and Masculinity in Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets
    (2015) Arroyo, Cruz; Mohan, Rajeswari
    Piri Thomas’ autobiography Down These Mean Streets grapples with the difficulty of selffashioning an identity against a national neglect of Puerto Rican heritage and the pressures of the impoverished street culture of Harlem. Many critics have approached the autobiography by focusing solely on Thomas’ race or masculinity. This essay considers how Thomas unpacks the fractured nature of Puerto Rican identity by examining his usage of movement through space as a guiding structure to emphasize his resistance towards misidentification. I employ the notion of critical geographies and the bildungsroman, or coming of age story, in order to establish Harlem as the text’s epicenter and highlight Thomas’ resistance towards the essentialist racial climates he enters. In addition, I apply Fanon’s theory of the abandonment neurosis to foreground a discussion of the Thomas family’s repressed racial shame and Thomas’ triangulated relationships. Both Fanon and Thomas’s own articulation of his cara palo, or deadpan expression, demonstrate how his racial anxieties inform his hyper masculine performance, resulting in the selfshattering of the subject denied recognition. Thomas’ autobiography ultimately presents a fractured Puerto Rican identity, cocooned under racial marginalization, familial ostracism, and selfdestructive code of the streets. This essay considers how this autobiography disrupts the literary silencing of Nuyoricans, Puerto Ricans, Barrio denizens, and people of color alike.
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    Fragments and Fictions: Narrating the Nation in Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'
    (2004) Read-Brown, Sandra Helen; Mohan, Rajeswari
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    From a Single Disaster Victim to a Possibility for Global Solidarity: Imagining the Posthuman in Animal's People by Indra Sinha
    (2021) Le, Tatiana; Mohan, Rajeswari
    This paper explores Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People, a fictional representation of a real-world ecological disaster, and its imaginative implications through the theory of the posthuman. The narrator and protagonist—a gas leak victim who adopts the name Animal as given to him in childhood to mock his deformed back—acts as an dramatic center to a broader debate on the exclusive authority of the human in matters of the environment. A traditional ecocritical lens, concerned with human responsibility and action towards preserving the environment, assumes a categorical and hierarchal distinction between human and the environment, enforcing an intermediary requirement for victims of ecological disaster to either prove their worth as humans or prove the worth of their environment to the greater human community in order to receive aid. Drawing from Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman, this paper analyzes Animal as a character who "used to be human once" (Sinha 1), and how his alternative mode of being offers a form of resistance against the classic and unsustainable human-animal hierarchy. Using Justin Johnson's ""A Nother World" in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," this paper examines the implications of a posthuman reading of Animal, his people, and Khaufpur as a whole, aspart of an apocalyptic aestheticization of the posthuman subject, demonstrating how the futurity of the posthuman institutes a new form of decentralized environmentalism that threatens to undermine the procedural corporate dehumanization and environmental degradation.
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    Fukú and Zafa: Oppression and Redemption through Language in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
    (2013) Martínez, Gabrielle D.; Mohan, Rajeswari
    In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the romantic failures of an overweight Dominican nerd are attributed to an all-encompassing curse that is passed through generations and across national borders. Intrinsically tied to the violent legacy of slavery, colonialism, greedy dictatorships, and political corruption, the curse, referred to as the fukú, is much more than a supernatural entity in the novel; the fukú and its antidote, zafa, function as conceptual mechanisms through which characters engage with their worlds and make sense of their diasporic experiences. By first elucidating the restrictive and liberating effects of the fukú and zafa, respectively, on the characters’ mentalities and then showing how these same dynamics are repeated in the language of the novel, this essay posits that the dialectic between the fukú and zafa reveal both the imprisoning and freeing effects of discourse and narrative in the construction of life stories.
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    Her Body, Her Self: Negotiating Social Expectation and Desire in Jane Austen's Persuasion
    (2014) Esaa, Farida; Mohan, Rajeswari
    Jane Austen's final novel poses the question of an analogy between bodily and mental frames and this essay explores the extent and nature of the connection between mind and body as rendered by the text. Recent critical conversations discuss the way Anne's body is objectified by gazes, the way that sensations and bodily movement in Persuasion figure and facilitate romance, and the way that the blush communicates shame. Building upon this scholarship, I argue that Anne's body is the site of self-knowledge that facilitates a process of understanding her desires and resisting social expectation. Kathleen Stewart's concepts of "bloom space" and worlding are useful as a manifestation of the dynamic process of coming to know oneself, while D.A. Miller's concept of "Austen Style" provides a foundation for an analysis of the ways that social expectations and pressure are established by the narrative. With these theoretical frameworks, I discuss how depictions of liminality and movement are a narrative strategy for communicating the desire and anxieties that inform Anne's self-understanding. I also attend to gazes, physical appearances, physical sensations, and physical manifestations of affect as signals of self-understanding as well. Through the emerging confidence and sense of self that comes from attention to her body, Anne is ultimately able to defy social expectations and pursue her romantic desire for Captain Wentworth. By considering the capacity of one's body to be the site of understanding one's place in the world, I believe that Persuasion challenges twenty-first century readers to think about the social expectations and opportunities for self-knowledge that are created or denied by new forms of disembodied communication and social media.
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    “His Strokes Rhyme Couplets Now”: The “Prismatic light” of Impressionist Poetry in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound
    (2007) Brislin, Claire; Mohan, Rajeswari
    Tiepolo's Hound is a poem about contradiction, confusion, and conflation; of the unreliability of memory, the sudden moment of epiphany and its immediate loss, and the privileging of the parergal. This essay explores the way that Derek Walcott uses both poetry and painting to navigate these issues and asks if the possibilities of language can be expanded through its combination with the visual. Through his ekphrastic poetry and the inclusion of his own paintings, Walcott challenges assumed dichotomies and perspectives and forces a new way of seeing the world.
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    Historicizing “a fresh, green breast of the new world”: A Postcolonial Reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
    (2017) Curran, Catherine; Mohan, Rajeswari
    In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald presents Jay Gatsby, the eponymous hero of his novel, through images framed by the narrator, Nick Carraway. Gatsby appears as the exotic ‘other’ in the first image and a wannabe struggling to mimic the old money class of Long Island in the second. Finally, Nick creates a fully developed composite picture of Gatsby through fragments divulged in nonlinear fashion that reconcile his many faces to reveal a man greater than the sum of his flawed parts. Not only do these images reflect concepts of ‘othering,’ mimicry, and ‘unhomeliness’ found in colonial discourse, they appear in a setting where old money, new money, and no money stereotypes from the Jazz Age support such discourse. Although Fitzgerald occasionally parts the curtains to reveal the novel’s colonial undertones with allusions to the Columbus egg, early Dutch explorers, polo playing, big game hunting, the Fourth of July, and European styles that predate the American Revolution to reveal the meaning of Americanism, these undertones have gone largely undetected. My thesis demonstrates how using a postcolonial lens to examine the different incarnations of Gatsby can help disclose the meaning of ‘great’ as redefined by Nick. By revaluing Gatsby’s third and final image as ‘Jay Gatsby’ the story, Nick redefines American to include a collective identity defined by ‘otherness,’ mimicry, indeterminate ethnicity, and ‘unhomeliness.’ Recognizing the novel as postcolonial helps the reader see Gatsby as a postcolonial subject who is great because he embodies the American Dream.
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    “I Knew Such Lovely Pictures”: The Aesthetic Function of Nadsat and the Politics of Counterculture in A Clockwork Orange
    (2023) Mastrocola, Sarah; Mohan, Rajeswari
    This thesis contemplates the function of language in Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, paying close attention to the colloquial dialect, Nadsat, with which the narrator, Alex DeLarge, speaks. The essay explains how such language embodies an aesthetic of distortion and creative violence, which speaks to the anti-nationalistic sentiment and struggle for individualism expressed in British counterculture during the mid-twentieth century. We begin with an exploration of the linguistic construction of Nadsat as a device for social rebellion by analyzing its parent languages. This process involves looking into the sociopolitical and aesthetic properties of Cockney, a sociolect tied to the experience of the British working class. We also look at how Burgess’ use of Russian vocabulary suggests an underlying political commentary that drives the novel’s stylistic appeal. At the crux of this essay’s agenda is the question of how language represents the values of British youth counterculture, the emergence of which occurred after World War II. To answer this, we consider how the poetics of Nadsat express anarchy and perversion and still sound attractive. Through close readings, rhetorical analysis, and conversations with scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Dick Hebdige, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Edmund Burke, this essay justifies Nadsat’s grotesque beauty and reveals its liberating quality. What follows is a discussion of how the creative distortion of language allocates power to the individual, as it represents a rejection of traditional rhetorical structures endorsed by government institutions and, in turn, embraces the art of disrupting the norm. Nadsat posits Burgess' novel as a punk manifesto that asserts itself as distinct from the kind of linguistic and thematic content traditionally deemed appropriate for the Western literary canon.