Academic literature on the topic 'American literature Literature, Comparative Literature, Comparative'

This thesis purports to delineate and offer conclusions about a wide range of American "coming of age" texts. Traditional, New Historicist, and Sociological research methodologies all served as points of departure for the definition of terms, selection of evidence, and specific thesis arguments. The thesis is organized into four chapters. The first chapter discusses the genre characteristics and tradition of the European bildungsroman, and the thematic and stylistic departure of its American "coming of age" counterpart. The second chapter considers cultural and anthropological studies of boyhood in non-Western societies in order to determine the extent to which rites of passage and "coming of age" studies are universal. The third and fourth chapters both present close readings of specific American "coming of age" texts: chapter three foregrounds the indissoluble relationship between an American boy's coming of age and the natural world, and chapter four focuses on the dissolution of the American wilderness, the resultant urban alternative, and the subsequent maturity of the boy without access to a natural world in which to perform traditional rites of passage. The thesis speculates on the possibilities of replacing the neutral matrix of the natural world with some other template that engenders moral growth. The thesis concludes with a consideration of cyberspace as a new, egalitarian neutral matrix from which we can potentially create new rites of passage, and return to liberating basics.

<p> This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional <i>Bildungsroman</i>. Specifically, I read Jos&eacute; Mar&iacute;a Arguedas&rsquo;s <i>Los r&iacute;os profundo </i>s (1958) and Sherman Alexie&rsquo;s <i>Flight</i> (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border-<i> Bildungsromane</i>, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(<i>dung</i>)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., <i>Bildungsroman</i> and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11&mdash;Joseph O&rsquo;Neill&rsquo;s <i>Netherland</i>, Junot D&iacute;az&rsquo;s <i> The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao)</i>, Teju Cole&rsquo;s <i> Open City</i>, and Jennifer Egan&rsquo;s <i>A Visit From the Goon Squad (Goon Squad)</i>&mdash;I explore representations of the effects of and the attempts to cope with traumatic experiences including 9/11 itself.</p><p>

This dissertation compares Native American and Sardinian literatures, focussing on literary renditions of detective stories, a recent development which has occurred in both literatures. The study is based on Procedura (1988), and Il terzo suono (1995), by Sardinian author Salvatore Mannuzzu; The Sharpest Sight (1992), Bone Game (1994), and Nightland (1996) by Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. In both literatures the use of detective fiction embodies the authors' commentary regarding the discourse on colonization. Recurrent thematic features are the concern with history, notably the history of domination and the processes that have led to the present post-colonial condition. The drive towards solving the crime symbolizes and comments upon the necessity of addressing the history of colonization, past and present, both of the land and its people. All the novels included in this study elaborate the basic features of the genre in innovative ways that offer significant commentaries on the condition of these two colonized peoples. The truth at the end of the narration is broken down to a multiplicity of competing narratives. The dispossession and exploitation of ancestral land are textually structured as crimes which further parallel and comment upon the murder of human beings. Also, the characters of the detectives are pivotal for the embodiment of a critique of the classic anthropological model. The gathering of data in order to offer a 'scientific' version of the truth is an endeavor shared by criminal investigators as well as anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists. Since classic detective fiction and modern science developed simultaneously around the middle of nineteenth century, it is not coincidental that post-colonial authors of detective fiction feel the necessity to address the self-appointed superiority of so-called scientific discourse. As both cultures have been commodified as objects to be studied by external social scientists, Mannuzzu's and Owens's refusal to depict a univocal solution is also indicative of the clash between definitions elaborated by outsiders versus forms of traditional knowledge within the cultural group.

<p> This thesis examines concepts of control, alternation, and deletion (CTRL, ALT, DELETE) through the poetic process. By examining some of the specific poems presented here, one can see the effects of literary and social critics including Michel Foucault, Hart Crane, and Adrienne Rich on my poetry. Thematically, structurally, and linguistically, the poems in this thesis address contemporary concerns and ask the reader to face the challenges of postmillennial life with creativity, empathy, and humor.</p>

Among the different theories of translation, the work of critic Antoine Berman is most remarkable. In Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne, published in 1994, Berman suggests, in the segment entitled "Le projet d'une critique 'productive'", a critical method of translation that is not a "model", but a possible analytical process. By following the steps devised by Berman, we will endeavor to apply this method to a translation of several short stories by the American writer Raymond Carver, chosen from the collection Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1976. The work has only been translated into French once, by Francois Lasquin in 1987. Our analysis will be based on this version.<br>The creative component of our Master's Thesis will consist in a new translated versions of the selected short stories from Carver's collection, namely: Fat, They're Not Your Husband, Are You A Doctor?, Nobody Said Anything, Night School, The Student's Wife and Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets .<br>Subsequent to the applications of the possible analytical process , we will compare the version presented in the first part of this Thesis with Francois Lasquin's, using the tools proposed by Berman. This comparison will be based on the deformation tendencies theory found in Berman's essay: "La traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain", published in 1985 in les tours de babel. Finally, we will re-emphasize the recurrent changes suggested in the version we are presenting. This analysis leads us to a discussion of our own conceptions of translation, and the elements that motivate and justify our choices concerning translation and translating.

This study examines Emerson's influence on Melville's works from Mardi through The Confidence-Man. Each work demonstrates Melville's deep concern and keen interest in Emerson's optimistic idealism and transcendentalism and documents his changing attitude toward key Emersonian concepts. Melville questions and interprets Emerson's ideas of self-reliance and subjectivity and explores in detail Emerson's way of seeing nature and the world. Since Emerson's epistemology and ontology are epitomized in the images of "eye" and "star," Melville utilizes these images to express his response to and interpretation of Emerson. In this process he suggests the ways in which both men were geniuses of their times and possessed "a correspondent coloring." As generations of critics have noticed, Emerson's influence on Melville's work is prominent and pervasive, but it is also, at times implicit and ambiguous. In my reading of the novels, I explore the way in which Melville at once acknowledges Emerson's influence and calls a number of his crucial concepts into question. Central here are Emerson's theories of seeing and reading, problems of perception and interpretation. Though Melville agrees with Emerson's idea of the world as "an open book" or a text, he is suspicious of reading that book, for, as Melville understands it, nature is indecipherable or inscrutable. As a creative reader and a creative writer, Melville devotes his career to an attempt to write the great American work that Emerson had called for in the "American Scholar." Each of the novels I examine embodies Melville's careful and close reading and critical interpretation of Emerson and his works. Since Melville recognized Emerson as an "uncommon man" and a "great man," he was attracted to his ideas and his works. However, as his career developed, he became more and more aware of what he had called Emerson's "gaping flaw," and that flaw for Melville involved Emerson's influence on the current literary culture as well as Emerson's ideas as such. By the time of The Confidence-Man he had lost his faith in Emerson and the literary world he had come to represent.

This dissertation examines how literary form adapts to emergent print environments by identifying common strategies for incorporating the act of reading into the situation of the text. In my analysis of original textual forms, I investigate the material specificity of constitutively modern practices of reading and subjectivity, focusing on how innovative publications structure these practices by involving the reader in the process of production. This project assembles six pioneering writers across literary traditions, genres, and periods, from the 1830s to the 1910s, in three chapter pairings: novelistic episodes of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris in nineteenth-century Parisian periodicals; the prose poetry books, Une saison en enfer by Arthur Rimbaud and Spring and All by William Carlos Williams; and genre-bending texts from the œuvres of Stéphane Mallarmé and Vladimir Mayakovsky, including the typographically irregular page spreads of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard and Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (Vladimir Maiakovskii: Tragediia). My discussion locates reflexive conceptions of modern literature in constructions of the reading subject, while extending the performative framework of textual modes of address to new media and digital technologies—social interfaces that mediate subjectivity by structuring practices of reading.

One important means by which a society maintains and reproduces its dominant ideology is through cultural seductions. By creating in its viewers/readers a good feeling about themselves and the world they live in, popular culture entices individuals into approving of, supporting and embracing the dominant social, political and economic orders of our world. What Louis Althusser calls ideological "interpellation," therefore, is frequently a form of seduction involving the use of sweeteners that render certain values, beliefs and social positions enticing and attractive. Among such seducers are money, women (sexual pleasure), fear, an illusion of power and the semblance of dissent/rebelliousness, many of which are, or are generated by the representation of, the cultural and political "others" of the West. At the same time, the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant orders in the West, to which these "others" make no insignificant contributions, ultimately reinforce their subordinate and underprivileged statuses. Driving such illusion-based ideological seductions are capitalism and its colossal culture industry--a symbol of the postmodern convergence of the cultural, ideological and the economic--whose insatiable desire for profit casts the "others" of the West into the vicious circle of mis-representation and domination.