Browsing by Author "Roberts, Deborah H."

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    A Comparative Study of the Effects of Gender on Travel Writing in Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters
    (2007) Zackey, Meredith; Allen, Elizabeth; Roberts, Deborah H.
    My thesis is a comparison of two texts: Madame Chrysanthème, by Pierre Loti, and Turkish Embassy Letters, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Loti was a French author and sailor writing in the late 19th century and Montagu was an English noblewoman writing in the early 18th century. In my thesis, I argue that Montagu, as the first female travel writer, must undergo several transitions; these transitions are from passive observed to active participant, from occupying a role in society which limits her to fixed interactions with a select group of people to occupying a role in society which allows her to engage with various groups, and from proper, formal actions to adventurous and informal actions. By undergoing these transitions, Montagu is able to embrace her role as female travel writer and define this role for women to follow. Montagu must undergo changes to her social role and her gender role in order to embrace this role, however. A female travel writer must be an active participant, capable of accessing society at various levels and not afraid to be adventurous and informal, and Montagu's confining English social and gender role do not allow for these qualities. Loti's role as an established male travel writer, on the other hand, precludes changes to his social or gender role. Loti exists in a strong tradition of male travel writers, and it is because he is so rooted in this imperialist tradition of dominance over the Other that he cannot undergo changes to his social or gender role.
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    Amazons in the Amphora: Traces of the Defeated Other in Wonder Woman Comics
    (2010) Pollack, Lara; Roberts, Deborah H.; Mulligan, Bret
    References to the Amazons, a mythical race of warrior women, are widespread in ancient literature. They were generally represented as a defeated Other in their relations with the Greeks, reaffirming the patriarchal nature of Greek society. Amazons have also been received into modern literature, with the most prominent example being Wonder Woman, a comic book character created by William Marston in the early 1940s. Wonder Woman has generally been hailed as a feminist icon. The widespread representation of bondage and other sadomasochistic elements throughout the Wonder Woman comics, however, argue that she and other female characters are still represented as a defeated Other, retaining traces of the misogyny widespread in ancient accounts of Amazons.
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    “Ce Lieu de Déséquilibre Occulte:” The Postcolonial Fantastic in La Vie et Demie and Midnight’s Children
    (2016) Givertz, Samuel Wolfe; Higginson, Pim; Roberts, Deborah H.
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    Cicero and the Lion's Roar: An Examination of Churchill's Use of Ciceronian Rhetoric to Justify WWII and Motivate the Allies
    (2014) Reale, Gabriel; Roberts, Deborah H.
    Both Cicero and Winston Churchill are considered titans of rhetoric, but only once before have the two been put into scholarly dialogue with one another. Sir Harold Nicolson and his friends sat down to determine whether or not Churchill lived up to the standards set by Cicero in his De Oratore. I intend to expand upon this article to make a more detailed and accurate comparison between the two, and I will show that Churchill was indeed a Ciceronian orator. In order to demonstrate this point, I will draw from the two authors' speeches and their other works in which they discuss their process and philosophy.
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    Creating an Image of Walt Whitman in the "Oda a Watlt [sic] Whitman"
    (1999) Carrasquillo, Pedro; Burshatin, Israel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Dancing Text
    (2002) Zanders, Rachel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Caruso-Haviland, Linda
    In this paper, I will study three dances based on previously existing texts. I will argue that, although the dance often retains particular messages conveyed in the origin text, the final message goes beyond, or is otherwise different from, that found in the source.
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    Dangerous Fugues: Sirens, Divas, and the Dangerous Voice
    (2012) Silverblank, Hannah; Mulligan, Bret; Roberts, Deborah H.
    The Sirens first appear in Book XII of Homer's Odyssey, and from this episode has emerged a tradition of the dangerously seductive and powerful feminine singing voice. In this essay, I argue that the Sirenic tradition can be identified in the music videos of the American pop divas Madonna and Lady Gaga, in which the singers' voices contain Sirenic qualities but also transcend the power of the ancient Sirens. I use reception theory and Helene Cixous' “The Laugh of the Medusa” to explore the ways in which the voices of ancient Sirens are silenced, arguing that pop divas channel this Sirenic voice in order to move outside of its expressive confines and limitations. I locate four primary sources of danger in the song of the Homeric Sirens. First, the Sirenic voice threatens bodily harm to its listeners, who die upon hearing the song. Additionally, this voice threatens the temporality of the primary narrative, as the Sirens offer the pleasure of a song with an alternative temporality that is incommensurable with that of the Odyssey itself. Next, the temptation of the voice offers a fatal distraction from and thus destruction of the hero's voyage. Finally, I argue that the Sirens' song beckons its listeners to indulge desires that threaten the social stability and economy for the song's male listeners. This section about the danger of the Sirens is followed by an exploration of the mortal female voices in the “Cupid and Psyche” episode of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, wherein the different female characters speak in Sirenic tones and thus offer a mirror to the Homeric rendering of the Sirens. Having traced these dangers through ancient accounts of the Sirens, I briefly discuss other ancient female characters with dangerous voices in Greek and Roman literature, including Medusa, the Furies, the Bacchantes, Scylla, Philomela, Echo, Cassandra, Medea, Circe, and various witches. The essay then moves toward its analysis of the vocal and visual poetics in Madonna's “Bedtime Story” video and Lady Gaga's “Telephone” video. Here, I argue that Madonna's video invokes Sirenic imagery to inscribe power within the voice of the singer, but also to ultimately reject the Sirenic tradition. Through the interactions between the visual, sonic, and lyrical elements of the text, Madonna's “Bedtime Story” enacts a performance of Cixous' écriture féminine in a way that re-characterizes the danger of the Sirens and works to create and claim a new kind of power for the feminine voice. Next, I analyze Lady Gaga's “Telephone,” and I suggest that the two divas in the video also employ Sirenic themes in order to reject a certain mode of listening to the powerful feminine voice, using écriture féminine to break out of the Sirenic tradition and to migrate toward an unspecified, anonymous elsewhere. Where “Bedtime Story” both uses and rejects the Sirenic tradition in the formulation and performance of écriture féminine, the “Telephone” video speaks in écriture féminine in order to defy the limitations placed upon the diva and to posit a new but unknown potential for the feminine voice.
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    Divine Embodiment and Cosmic Tragedy in Prometheus Desmotes
    (2011) Reisman, Asher Jacob; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In this thesis I posit a new reading of the dramatic structure of Prometheus Desmotes, in which the textual and visual features of the play's performance are principally oriented towards the impression of a keen awareness of Prometheus' body in the attention of the audience. This impression is initially produced by the horrific violence of the prologue. This opening scene describes the body of Prometheus and its violation in the unrelentingly corporal terms from the language of human embodiment, while also powerfully affirming his immortality and godhood in the extent to which the violence surpasses all human endurance. These features of Prometheus' body (pitiable physical suffering and divinity) are sounded in a corresponding and intensified manner in the play's cataclysmic finale and more finely articulated and reiterated through the play's otherwise static middle by comparison to other figures whose bodies will share some but never all of these attributes. The significance of this conceptual depiction of a divine body is made clearer by situating Desmotes in relation to its chief predecessors, Homer and Hesiod, in the literary treatment of divine bodies and divine existence more generally. The revisions Desmotes makes to these earlier views is to amplify the prominence of divine violence and suffering and to destabilize the narrative structures which govern it; overturning Homer's program of an Olympus existing in blissful stasis and Hesiod's Zeus-centered cosmic history. These changes open the possibility for genuine tragedy among the gods. Desmotes demonstrates the profound power of such a tragedy first in its long, complex meditation on the body of Prometheus, broken and eternal, and also in the cosmic alterity it envisions in the drama's apocalyptic finale.
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    Enforcing Utopia: Intersections of the Idée Fixe and Camusian Philosophy in Jorge Luis Borges’s “El Zahir” and Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”
    (2019) Konradova, Katerina; Roberts, Deborah H.
    My thesis aims to tie together two short stories, Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El Zahir,” by means of examining their shared themed of the idée fixe. The “persistent idea” that eventually drives the protagonists mad takes different forms but involves the same underlying principle: their deepest desires unfulfilled, they resist the seemingly unjust world and engage in a frantic quest for the impossible, be it fabrication of a new national identity, upward social mobility, or recuperation of a deceased lover. This theme is examined in light of Albert Camus’s theory of the absurd, elaborated in The Myth of Sisyphus. The absurd arises from the contradiction between what we want and what the world gives us, between our desire for meaning and the impartiality of the world. The idée fixe in the two stories is the result of the protagonists’ effort to resolve the absurd that characterizes their lives; their effort is to prove this “unjust” and “contradictory” world wrong, and the obsession becomes exacerbated precisely because they cannot remedy and control the situation with reason. I build the essay around close character analysis and examine the characters’ relationship to various psychological and philosophical concepts, including but not limited to personhood, societal pressure, national identity, hope and free will.
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    Equivalence, Paratext and Elephants’ Feet: The Translation of Humor in Die Harzreise
    (2018) Adorney, Adam; Sedley, David Louis, 1968-; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In my thesis, I examine the treatment of humor in the English translations of Die Harzreise from Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder. Six translations come into the discussion, including the first English translation (Charles Leland, 1855) and more recent translations (Ritchie Robertson, 1993 & Peter Wortsman, 2008) The issue of interpretation is central to Heine’s text; Heine aim his cruelest jokes at the philistine professors and intellectuals whom he believes interpret the world incorrectly. With the help of Erich Eckertz, I lay out the elements of Heine’s humor and look at which aspects the translators strive to maintain and which they leave out. Through examination of key jokes in the original and the translations, I show how translations create different versions of the text while still remaining “Heine”.
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    [Identity] is [Capitalism] plus [Abjectification]: [Post]-Soviet Subjectivity
    (2014) Trickett, Nicholas; Roberts, Deborah H.; McInerney, Maud Burnett
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    “Legends Malleable in His Intellectual Furnace”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, Mythological Adaptation, and Children’s Literature
    (2013) Horn, Jacob; Roberts, Deborah H.; Schönherr, Ulrich; Edmonds, Radcliffe G., III, 1970-
    Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1851, occupies an important position in the history of children’s literature because of its novel approach to the adaptation of classical mythology and its attitudes towards children as readers. While myth was commonly presented to children in the form of dictionaries or schoolbooks, Hawthorne was the first to use it as the inspiration for pleasurable storytelling. Writing stories intended for children to enjoy in a non-instructional setting, perhaps even along with their parents, Hawthorne heralded a shift in attitudes towards young readers that helped to define how juvenile literature has been written by future authors. My thesis examines the Wonder Book’s creation and impact from multiple perspectives. Part I, “Juvenile Literature Matures,” provides a basic account of the beginnings of children’s literature and Hawthorne’s history with the juvenile market in order to pinpoint the Wonder Book’s significance. In part II, “The Bright Stuff,” I analyze the author’s use of a frame narrative to effectively address an audience of children and adults, and to realize his goals for the stories. This discussion extends into part III, “Hawthorne’s Pandora, Unboxed,” in which I identify strategies of adaptation employed in the Wonder Book, with a particular focus on its interpretation of the Pandora myth, entitled “The Paradise of Children,” and the episode’s reception of its ancient sources. Part IV, “Beyond Hawthorne’s Intellectual Furnace,” closes the paper with a brief look at Hawthorne’s influence on later authors, who have continued to employ his adaptive strategies as myth has become a widely popular form of storytelling for children.
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    Locating Belonging in Postcolonial Space Homeland Narratives in René Philoctète’s Le Peuple des terres mêlées and Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies
    (2017) Hwang-Carlos, Miriam Soo Young; Roberts, Deborah H.; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    This thesis explores the construction of homelands through space, movement, and time in Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies (1990) and René Philoctète’s Le Peuple des terres mêlées (1989). Retour à la saison des pluies is an autobiographical novel of Lefèvre, who grew up marginalized in Vietnam for her mixed French and Vietnamese ethnicity. In the text, she returns to Vietnam for the first time after thirty years in France. Le Peuple des terres mêlées is a magical realist novel that takes place during the 1937 massacre of Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. In the text, Adèle, a Haitian woman, and Pedro, her Dominican husband, attempt to flee their deaths and reconstruct a borderland community. Racialized, nationalist, and (post)colonial forces complicate the concept of homeland for Lefèvre, Adèle, and Pedro. As they search for homeland and are excluded from communal homelands, they travel through time and space. Retour à la saison des pluies and Le Peuple des terres mêlées warp relationships between space, time, and body to explore the meaning of human movement and location.
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    Medea in America: Afrocentric Receptions in the 21st Century
    (2023) Mears, Liam; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In this thesis, I look at two Afrocentric adaptations of Euripides’ Medea, originally an Athenian tragedy from the 5th century BCE recounting the story of Jason and Medea in Colchis, and Medea’s revenge plot when she finds out her husband is leaving her for the princess. In it I argue for the importance of new and innovative forms of reception, and specifically how the growing tradition of Afrocentric classical reception can read new meaning into texts as well as draw ancient themes into the modern world in order to tell new and meaningful stories. I look at two specific plays, Silas Jones’ “American Medea” (1995) and James Ijames’ “Media” (2023). Both of these plays offer distinct reimagining’s of Medea’s mythology, showing us two versions of the Medea character, one set in the early 1700’s and the other in the modern day. In both versions, Medea retains many of the attributes associated with her in antiquity, but the authors develop her character throughout their separate narratives in a way that redefines her in both settings. In each version, Medea and Jason’s children feature much more prominently as characters, and their development contributes to the evolution of the Medea myth.
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    Narrative, Identity, Authorship: Reading and Watching Joan of Arc’s Martyrdom
    (2016) Gant, Sophia; McInerney, Maud Burnett; Roberts, Deborah H.
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    Negotiating Allusions in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius
    (2019) Breitenfeld, Paul Brucia; Roberts, Deborah H.
    Scholars have come to recognize over the last few decades that Apuleius’ novel, the Metamorphoses, must be allowed to enjoy multiple, coexisting interpretations. To that end, I demonstrate how a certain class of allusions, those which recall the language of referents but invert the contextual purpose of those words, can be read as hermeneutically parallel. I argue that Apuleius’ readers could have followed their own path of interpretation based on their personal experiences, using a theoretical lens which combines postcolonialism and allusion. The allusions I examine all grapple, in some way, with complex questions of identity and power in the context of Roman imperial subjugation of the provinces. As Apuleius was himself an elite African who lived and worked in Carthage, he was in a position in which he could write for and empathize with both powerful Roman colonizers, whose exploitation of natives brought Apuleius’ family to prominence, and local Africans, with whom he shared a rich cultural background marked by Roman intrusion. Some could read these allusions as either playful or imperializing jokes, or as pointed commentary regarding the effects of imperialism hiding behind a veil of comedy, depending on what each reader was predisposed to see. This paper aims to string together three allusive sections of the Metamorphoses: the prologue in Book 1, the myth of Cupid and Psyche in Books 4–6, and the tale of the death of Charite in Book 8. When these are read together, certain themes begin to emerge: the repeated misapplication of philosophical arguments, the difference between the imitation and mutation of words, and the ever-looming presence of Rome and Carthage as both explicit locations in the empire and novel, and as battlefields, past and present. These aspects of the text reveal how interpretive confusion can be translated into programmatic unity. Apuleius’ novel becomes meaningfully accessible not just to the rich and powerful, but also those who wished to be free of the violence which marks every occupation. Ultimately, the parallel readings I delineate demonstrate how Apuleius can be read as a witness to the complexities and realities of imperial domination.
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    País de Ganadores: Tracing the Roots of Neoliberal Propaganda from Chile’s Sí Campaign to Iron Man
    (2014) Brown, Brian; Castillo Sandoval, Roberto; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In this thesis, I argue that a post-9/11 Hollywood blockbuster--John Favreau's Iron Man (2008)--and a series of 1988 television spots advocating the reelection of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet engage in parallel discourses as propaganda pieces. The Sí campaign, in its attempt to define the legacy of the fifteen-year Pinochet government, prefigures the methods with which Iron Man demarcates heroism and situates it in a 21st-Century, post-9/11 context. Using McKenzie Wark's article, "Gamer Theory," as a lens for understanding Iron Man's distillation of plot down to a series of decontextualized plot twists and victories, I suggest that protagonist Tony Stark's heroism stems from the repeated act of victory itself, a succession of mini-catharses that an increasingly global--and globalized--audience can enjoy vicariously without having to triumph over the constantly shifting terms of their lived realities. The Sí campaign, I argue, characterizes Chilean society and the dictatorship's experiment with early neoliberal economics by constructing the same kind of victory narrative, albeit half-formed and less finely-tuned than the streamlined power fantasies that would emerge more prominently in Iron Man. In their respective fetishizations of victory, in their use of constructed villains (caricatured Marxist militants or loosely-Islamic terrorists depending on the era) as both sites of triumph and scapegoats for social insecurity, as well as in their reluctance to acknowledge the state violence of their political context, these texts demonstrate the gestation of an ideology and its ascension to a place of privilege in the dangerously sacred haven of popular entertainment.
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    Reconciling Fratricide: The Narration of Violence in the Roman Foundation Myth
    (2011) Glick, Frances R.; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In the earliest versions of the Romulus and Remus myth (as reported by later authors) Romulus kills his brother, Remus, when he jumps over the newly built walls of Rome. In ensuing narrations of the Roman foundation myth, the suppression of certain elements of the myth is common; the violent death of Remus in particular is treated as an unwanted complication. How can one reconcile a murderous foundation myth with a cityʼs subsequent greatness and prosperity? In this thesis, I explore the narrative techniques writers use in recounting or alluding to this problematic foundation myth as well as the myths connection with the civil wars of the late Republic. By examining seven writers chronologically, I trace the evolution of the Romulus and Remus mythʼs treatment through a variety of literary genres and through several periods of Roman history.