Comparative Literature (Bi-College)
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- ItemA 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.
- ItemA Process of Becoming: Wandering, Identity, Authorship(2011) Hogarth, Thea
- ItemA Truth with Points of View(2001) Leuschke, KateMy fieldwork in Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas, Mexico forms the base of this text which focuses on the production of ethnographic life histories. Several excerpts from my fieldnotes are included and analyzed through traditional anthropological and literature lenses. I look at the way life histories are related to the Crisis of Representation in anthropology, to linguistics, feminism, and autoethnography. Using my own work and the published life histories of Oscar Lewis, R.M. Keesing, Vincent Crapanzano, Elisabeth Burgos-Deray, and Ruth Behar, I claim that the model of a reader-author contract from literature studies can illuminate the processes involved in the production of an ethnographic life history. This contract must be extended to take into account the agency of the subject of the life history. I examine various aspects of the contract itself, manipulations of both the form and the content of a text which represents the encounter between the anthropologist and the subject. I claim that the primary way readers are able to engage with a text is through a sense of empathy and identification with one of the "characters." This identification can allow the reader to feel that they are part of an unmediated dialogue with the subject because they inhabit the character of the anthropologist. I call attention to the problems with this assumption and the ambiguous nature of identification as a tool of interpretation. Finally, I argue that identification and therefore other basic tenets of the reader-author-subject contract must be renegotiated in order to allow conversation to occur on equal terms between subject, anthropologist and reader of life histories.
- Item...And Survived to Tell the Tale: Trauma and Personal Narrative(2006) Kozey, Christopher
- ItemBetween Ser and Parecer: Reality and Subjectivity in Cervantes, Unamuno, and Borges(2013) Ikeda, Daniel; Schönherr, Ulrich; Sacerio-Garí, EnriqueIn this thesis, I examine how three literary texts—Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1615), Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla [Mist] (1914), and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El Zahir” (1949)—problematize the possibility of a stable, accessible “I” and, in doing so, call into question the prospect of separating appearance from reality and supplying knowledge with a measure of certainty. Using René Descartes’s skepticist hypothesizing in the Meditations as a foil, I contend that each author extends—and indeed comes to privilege—the skeptical conjectures that Descartes eventually discards. By rejecting Descartes’s argument that the “I” may know itself without meaningful interaction with the external world, each author, I suggest, places himself in a position that is at once antithetical to, and consonant with, the modern(izing) project that begins with Descartes. In forging such a “mentality of antinomy” in which notions of appearance/reality, rationality/irrationality, modernity/antimodernity, and realism/idealism are “held in juxtaposition” rather than “integrated” or deconstructed, Unamuno and Borges effectively excavate a Spanish Baroque tradition that begins with Cervantes and his contemporaries and purportedly dies at the close of the 17th century. In extending a Spanish Baroque ethos that resists the reduction of objects to either/or categorizations, Cervantes, Unamuno, and Borges present alternative conceptualizations of reality, conceptualizations that ultimately reject the binaries of mind/body and reality/irreality that Descartes constructs. In doing so, all three adopt positions similar to those of Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and their Baroque contemporaries, whose opposition to the epistemological developments occurring throughout the rest of Europe found expression in their privileging of contingency over universality, and their textured negotiations of ser [“to be”] and parecer [“to seem to be”].
- ItemBlazing Trails: Reclamation and Re-Appropriation of Native Culture, Identity, and Voice in Post-Colonial Literature(2012) Ward, Miya; Tratner, Michael
- ItemBlurred Identities: Investigating Language and Memory as Locations of Identity and Culture in Amara Lakhous' Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez(2013) Allen, Anaka; Higginson, Pim; Ricci, Roberta; Seyhan, AzadeWhile varied forms of migration have always existed, the last few decades have witnessed vast displacements and resettlements of many populations. World and ethnic wars, the dissolution of nations, environmental fluctuations, and the increasing wealth disparities between nations have all contributed to the growing number of exilic populations. In addition, the world has also contracted in its perceived expanse as a consequence of improved technologies, which have provided a facility of communication and mobility across borders. Thus exile, a term that has often been perceived as a unifying condition suffered by populations of ‘immigrants,’ ‘emigrants,’ ‘emigres,’and ‘refugees,’ has become an increasingly universal experience. Amara Lakhous and Richard Rodriguez, two authors who have encountered the liberties and constraints pertaining to the modern exile, have demonstrated their precarious condition of “in-betweenness” in their respective works. As modern exilic authors, they are concerned with the preservation of identity and cultural history in the face of a destination country that does not resemble their own and misunderstands the ‘other’. As they attempt to balance two opposing cultures, language and memory become crucial modes for both accessing the past and assimilating within the host culture. Lakhous and Rodriguez demonstrate that the exilic author is a classification under construction, which complicates the limited boundaries of nation and national literature, and the experience of migration.
- ItemBorrowed tongues: Djebar and Roy and the colonizer's language(2001) Talcott, L. Christina; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; Allen, Elizabeth
- ItemCarnival and Contemporary Theater(1998) Bridger, Jonathan
- Item“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.
- ItemConnecting Time in Proust and Stoppard(1995) Irwin, Amanda E.
- ItemConquest Forever? Mexico and the Circularity of Destruction in Contemporary Mexican and Borderlands Texts(2016) Delgado-Gonzalez, Itzel; Quintero, María Cristina; Vargas, Jennifer Harford
- ItemCorrespondence 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, ElizabethMy 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.
- ItemCreating an Image of Walt Whitman in the "Oda a Watlt [sic] Whitman"(1999) Carrasquillo, Pedro; Burshatin, Israel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Stadler, Gustavus
- ItemDancing Text(2002) Zanders, Rachel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Caruso-Haviland, LindaIn 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.