Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Comparative literature, american and spanish'

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 Bildungsroman. Specifically, I read José María Arguedas’s Los ríos profundo s (1958) and Sherman Alexie’s Flight (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- Bildungsromane, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(dung)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas’s and Alexie’s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., Bildungsroman 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’s and Alexie’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.

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.

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—Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao), Teju Cole’s Open City, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (Goon Squad)—I explore representations of the effects of and the attempts to cope with traumatic experiences including 9/11 itself.

Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander's transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as "black-white") terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. More specifically, Black Notes on Asia argues that the ruling conceptions of the so-called "Harlem Renaissance in black and white" and the reductive understanding of the Black Arts Movement as an uncomplicated, propagandistic expression of black nationalism, fail to pay due attention to their underlying multiracial/multicultural/transnational aesthetics and perspectives. In order to understand the full complexity and heterogeneity of the African American imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, it is necessary to account for cultural ebbs and flows, echoes and reverberations, beyond the United States, Europe and Africa, to include Asia. Rediscovering the hitherto overlooked traces and reflections of Asia within the African American imagination, this dissertation argues that Asia has provided numerous African American authors and intellectuals, canonized as well as forgotten, with additional or alternative cultural resources that liberated them from, or at least helped them destabilize, what they considered as the constraining racial and nationalist discourse of the United States.

This thesis recontextualizes the politics of Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels in terms of the literary development of Gothicism (Friedrich Schiller) and Romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel) in Germany. This recontextualization highlights the ways in which Brown's work is participating in a transatlantic conversation about the relation of epistemology and politics in art, while underscoring how Brown's use of the gothic addresses the vital issues of grounding democratic politics in the early republic. The argument is that between his earliest extant gothic novel and his later gothic novels Brown uses Schiller's model of the gothic tale and its appeal to methodologies of epistemological verification to support democratic politics. However, in the later novels, he disregards method and uses the state of uncertainty to articulate radical subjectivity as the basis of democratic politics—pace Schlegel's defense of democracy.

I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a poeta doctus, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit.

Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, The Cabala, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. The Skin of Our Teeth exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor.

Vergil’s expression, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: Aeneid 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase lacrimae rerum is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding lacrimae rerum as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker and Emily Webb in Our Town, Wilder transforms Vergil’s lacrimae rerum into “Our Tears.”

Reading Home from Exile: Narratives of Belonging in Western Literature analyzes the way in which narratives of belonging arise from Western literary works that have been largely read as works of exile. This dissertation insists on the importance of the concept of home even in the light of much of the theoretical criticism produced in the last fifty years which turns to concepts that emphasize movement, rootlessness, homelessness, and difference. Through readings of Western literature spanning from canonical ancient Greek texts to Mexican novels of the revolution and to Chicano/a literature, this study shows that literature continues to dwell on the question of home and that much of the literature of exile is an attempt to narrate home. Beginning with a close reading of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, the first chapter discusses Oedipus's various moments of exile and the different spheres of belonging (biological/familial, social, political) that emerge through a close reading of these moments of exile. Chapter 2 examines these same categories of belonging in Mauricio Magdaleno's El resplandor, an indigenista novel set in post-revolutionary Mexico about the trials and tribulations of the Otomi town of San Andres. Chapter 3 continues to consider literature that takes Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico as setting and analyzes the narratives of belonging that arise in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Elena Garro's Recollections of Things to Come. Finally, Chapter 4 analyzes the emergence of these categories of home in Chicano/a literature and thought, focusing on Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and its relation to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity and to postcolonial theory in general.

Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States is an exploration of contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels written in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. Framed in the long tradition of Bildungsroman studies, this study illuminates the structural transformations that the coming-of-age genre has undergone in contemporary diasporic communities. Children of Globalization analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for the tercentennial genre. While the most traditional iteration of the Bildungsroman genre follows male middle-class heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection to become citizens and workers, contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard, narratives of nationhood. Recent changes in the global genre are the direct consequence of the intricacies of the formative processes of culturally-hybrid protagonists who must negotiate their access into adulthood and citizenship, and puzzle over sexuality and gender identity, in host societies that at times regard them with contempt and distrust. The study spans three centuries as it traces both perennial and volatile elements of the genre through its contemporary state. In doing so, it identifies thematic and structural seeds which, planted through the centuries in varied locations, have bloomed into nuanced explorations of the self in an interconnected world where regional and national definitions of identity are increasingly contested and in flux.

In order to contextualize the genre and provide evidence of its enduring malleability, the study begins in Germany, tracing what I term Proto-Bildungsromane, long medieval narrative poems that follow the formative processes of knights and heroes in grandiose style. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century poem Parzival and the coeval Gottfried von Straßburg’s Die Geschichte der Liebe von Tristan und Isolde ponder the development of the self but too heavily rely on destiny to be considered Bildungsromane. Still in Germany, I illustrate the fundamental characteristics of the genre in Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In order to showcase the flexibility of the genre, I analyze its early transformations in England in prominent works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and E. M. Forster. The last four chapters focus on the exciting development of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in England, the United States, and Germany. Despite the stark differences between these societies and the particular cultural wealth of diasporic groups that have migrated there, the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel has enabled sophisticated explorations of identity and belonging in all three countries. As the chapter summaries show, contemporary writers have used the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel to untangle complicated formative processes, understand the expectations of their social environments, and achieve different levels of belonging and maturity.

With Children of Globalization, I seek to deepen our understanding of the exciting influence that contemporary diasporic movements have on the coming-of-age genre in particular and literary studies in general. Additionally, it is my hope that the exploration of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels contributes to a capacious understanding of the important role of literature in the study of migration.