Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Comparative literature|German literature|Biblical studies'

This dissertation focuses on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and addresses the following questions: what does Mann’s novel have to offer to the field of comparative mythology and how might this biblical retelling be relevant for contemporary readers? One approach the dissertation takes in addressing these questions is examining the novel’s relationship to the biblical book of Genesis and to Jewish midrashic traditions. Through a biographical study of Thomas Mann, the dissertation also examines his primary motivations in writing the novel in the first place. The dissertation focuses on detailed discussion of particular stories in Mann’s retelling and how his versions expand the biblical narrative by weaving in parallels from other myths spanning multiple traditions. This ultimately leads to an exploration of the novel’s contemporary significance.

Considering modern day parallels to the nationalistic one-sidedness of Thomas Mann’s time, the study concludes that Mann’s Joseph tetralogy is just as relevant today as when it was originally written. The assertions made throughout the dissertation point to how this novel can serve as a model for how myths of diverse religious traditions can respectfully interact.

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.

In Jewish Studies in general and Jewish literary studies in particular, the autobiography has taken on renewed significance in the twenty-first century. A recent wave of Hebrew autobiographical writing has reinvigorated long-standing debates about the connections between family drama and national history in the modern state of Israel. This dissertation examines the discourse of selfhood generated by a select group of authors from the 1950s-1990s, the decades immediately preceding the genre's current boom. The "confessional mode of Israeli literary autobiography," as I designate this discourse, exposes the religious underside of early Israeli life writing.

The proposed genealogy uncovers a heretofore unacknowledged stream of autobiographical writing positioned at the nexus of public and private expression. Starting with Pinhas Sadeh's Hah&barbelow;ayim kemashal (1958), I deconstruct the author's sacred-profane terminology and his embrace of sacrificial tropes. I then explore David Shahar's Kayitz bederekh hanevi'im (1969) and Hamasa le'ur kasdim (1971), two works engaging with the Lurianic kabbalistic mythology of fracture and restoration ( tikkun). The next turn in my discussion, Hanokh Bartov's Shel mi atah yeled (1970), focuses on the development of individual memory and artistic identity. Haim Be'er's confessional oeuvre anchors the final two chapters, which reveal the therapeutic and theological motivations behind Notsot (1979) and H&barbelow;avalim (1998).

My interdisciplinary engagement offers fresh readings of these autobiographical performances. The narratives by Sadeh, Shahar, Bartov, and Be'er deploy memories as a conscious, aesthetic act of self-construction. Riffing on the portrait of the artist as a young man, each author reveals the intimate connections among memory, trauma, and artistic creation. Concurrently, they mediate their religious identities in the new Jewish state, Oedipally rejecting the father's faith. The combination of literary self-reflexivity with spiritual self-accounting (h&barbelow;eshbon nefesh) links these Israeli writers with the classic confessional "double address," which engages both God and the human reader. My analysis thus contributes a new consideration of the relationship between author and audience in modern Hebrew culture.

By reconsidering the concept of a “women’s literary tradition,” this study aims to uncover the links binding together Austen, Brontë, and Gaskell in a shared, female project of literary inquiry and political reformation. Reading the physical, material dimensions of the fictional environments (female movement, bodies, and socially defined spaces) in Mansfield Park, Villette, and North and South, we can see that all three novels engage in acts of subversive recuperation. After problematizing incumbent systems of masculine authority, these texts all work to infuse fresh relevancy and import into traditional value systems. Old is made new again as the influence of the novels’ heroines is seen to initiate processes of thoughtful social renovation able to rescue these young women from positions of threatening marginalization and able to realign existing patriarchal constructs with evolving communal needs.

My dissertation “Seventy Years of Swearing upon Eric the Skull: Genre and Gender in Selected Works by Detection Club Writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie” shows how the texts produced by Detection Club members Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie challenge assumptions about the value and role of popular genre fiction and demonstrate how the detective novel engages pressing social issues related to gender in modern Great Britain. Sayers and Christie addressed serious concerns of gender in relation to topics including war and an emerging market economy in inter-war Britain; however, because they were doing so in genre fiction, their insights have not been fully explored. The popularity of detective fiction, according to critics, has resulted in a lack of criticism and a distrust of the popular. Christie, more so than Sayers, has been ignored by critics because of her popularity and the formulaic nature of her fiction. Glenwood Irons claims that Christie's popularity is responsible for the “general ignorance of the sheer volume of detective fiction written by women” (xi), while Alison Light theorizes that the dearth of Christie criticism, because of her popularity, is “an absence which the growth of 'genre' studies of popular fiction has yet to address” (64). My goal is to understand how Sayers and Christie responded to modern issues through their writing and to set their writing in context with contemporary concerns in inter-war Britain. I advocate for a reexamination of Sayers and Christie that goes beyond their popularity as writers of genre fiction and analyzes the ways in which their fiction incorporates modern concerns.

This is a study of the rise of science fiction as a subculture in the 1960s through an analysis of the first and longest-running commercial science fiction magazine in Japan: SF Magazine. Much of the research on science fiction in Japan focuses on the boom in the 1980s or on the very first science fictional texts created in the early years of the twentieth century, glossing over this pivotal decade. From 1959-1969, SF Magazine ’s covers created a visual legacy of the relationship of the human body to space that reveals larger concerns about technology, science, and humanity. This legacy centers around the mediation of human existence through technology (called the posthuman), which also transforms our understanding of gender and space in contemporary works. I examine the constellation of Japanese conceptions of the body in science fiction, its manifestations and limits, exploring how the representation of this Japanese, posthuman, and often cyborgian body is figured as an absence in the space of science fiction landscapes. SF Magazine was used by consumers to construct meanings of self, social identity, and social relations. Science fiction illustration complemented and supported the centrality of SF Magazine, making these illustrations integral to the production the of science fiction subculture and to the place of the body within Japanese science fiction. Their representation of space, and then in the later part of the 1960s the return of the body to these covers, mirrors the theoretical and emotional concerns of not just science fiction writers and readers in the 1960s, but the larger social and historical concerns present in the country at large.

The horrifying and painful mutability of bodies that came to light after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki manifests, in the latter years of the 1960s in science fiction, as the fantastically powerful mutating bodies of super heroes and cyborgs within the science fictional world. The bombed spaces of the postwar (largely ignored in mainstream 1960s media) were reimagined in productive ways on the covers of SF Magazine, mirroring the fiction and nonfictional contents. It is through this publication that a recognizable community emerges, a particular type of identity becomes associated with the science fiction fan that coalesced when the magazine began to offer different points of articulation, both through the covers and through the magazine’s contents. That notion of the science fiction fan as a particular subjectivity, as a particular way to navigate the world, created a space to articulate trauma and to investigate ways out of that trauma not available in mainstream works.

My work seeks to build on literary scholarship that considers the role commercial and pulp genres fiction play in negotiating and constructing community. I contribute to recent scholarship in art history that investigates the close relationship of Surrealism to mass culture movements in postwar Japan, although these art historians largely center their work on advertising in the pre-war context. Furthermore, my project reconsiders the importance of the visual to a definition of science fiction: it is only when the visual and textual are blended that a recognizable version of science fiction emerges – in the same way the magazine featuring the work of fans blurred the boundary between professional and fan. Hence, although the context of my study is 1960s Japan, my research is inseparable from larger investigations of the visual and the textual, the global understanding of science fiction, the relationship between high art and commercial culture, and contemporary media studies. This work is therefore of interest not only to literary science fiction scholars, but also to researchers in critical theory, visual studies, fan studies, and contemporary Japanese culture.

This study examines the representation of women in Emile Zola’s famous series Les Rougon-Macquart. Critics have described Zola’s novels and their presentation of women as misogynist, yet this judgment obscures many of the textual details establishing the female protagonists’ relationships to industrial capitalism and the rapidly changing social landscape in late nineteenth century France. This study reexamines the narrative synthesis between Zola’s naturalist “objective” narrator and his female protagonists. It also highlights one particular pairing that of Adelaide Fouque and her opportunist daughter-in-law, Felicité Puch: Whereas Adelaide, the biological matriarch of the family who figures in each of the twenty novels, does not have an active voice, Felicité as maternal protectrice of the family speaks frankly, even aggressively. Zola uses this pairing to link one generation to the next, a key structural element of his naturalist project. Ultimately, Zola’s representation of women is more complex than might otherwise be understood.

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.

My dissertation contends that diaspora, perhaps the most visible spatial paradigm for theorizing black constructions of identity and self, is inherently limited by the historical conditions of its rise as well as the preoccupations with which it has been most closely associated. I propose that we expand our theoretico-spatio terms for constructions of blackness to include the space of the home, the space of the plantation and the space of the prison (what I call the space of justice). These three spaces point to literary themes, characters, and beliefs that the space of diaspora alone does not explain. Each chapter analyzes the work of three or four writers from the United States, Brazil and Mozambique. These writers include: Paulina Chiziane, Conceição Evaristo, Octavia E. Butler, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Bernice McFadden, Wanda Coleman, Ifa Bayeza and Asha Bandele.

I pursue the double bind of the political institution through one of its symptoms, guilt, and the relationship between the attribution of guilt and the very law which announces and justifies the double bind of the political institution. My dissertation is an interdisciplinary engagement with various contemporary—explicitly political—invocations of the notion of guilt. Specifically, I'm interested in the ways in which the attribution of guilt to subjects, to leaders, and to institutions operates in various discourses and disciplines, including politics, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and law. These various political uses of the concept of guilt – as criminality (chapters 1 and 2), as femininity (chapter 3), and as homogenized resistance (chapter 4) – are a kind of shorthand, a cover, for the law. I will be arguing that "guilting" operates dominantly as justification, erecting a screen on which the undecidability of the law is simultaneously displaced and projected as the certainty of guilt. The irony is that guilt always reveals the law only in its failure. By guilting "the sovereign" revolutionary movements inaugurate and certify a new law; similarly, the government (judicial, police, and military bureaucracy) preserves the law through the guilting of its supposed others (criminals, the enemy). This desire for the law that the analysis of guilt reveals is a desire to master contingency and difference: it is a desire for a purified, contained, predictable, and thoroughly utopian space of relationality, a site where difference is rendered docile. In following the nuances of different political iterations of guilt as well as its political uses as justification for violence and force, each chapter reveals guilt as a crisis endemic to the law itself. However, in so far as it is a crisis of identity, each chapter, I hope, provides openings through which our own personal and phenomenological attachments to those very identities can be considered and challenged, perhaps allowing for the possibility of a working through those very attachments and the recognition of the irretrievable heterogeneity of their meanings.

With the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, T Bone Burnett spent his cultural capital on repurposing traditional American music in subsequently successful soundtracks and artistic productions, providing a spark for a 21st century cultural movement that moves beyond music. This study aims to position Burnett has a cultural catalyst by grounding his work, and those abiding by a similar ethic, in the American South. In the process, I examine what Burnett’s soundtracks and select artistic productions communicate about contemporary Southern cultures and identities, while negotiating the ever-enigmatic generational issues of identity and authenticity. By extending the analysis to artists, producers, and cultural tastemakers who operate by a similar ethic as Burnett as well, I also address the characteristics of and spark igniting the preservationist, heritage movement in contemporary roots music, and how this music community contributes to ongoing conversations regarding contemporary Southern identity? The purpose of my study is to explore these connections, the culture in which they reside, and most specifically the role T Bone Burnett plays in a contemporary cultural movement which seeks to (re)present a traditional American music ethos in distinctly Southern terms. Furthermore, I will set the movement within the contemporary context in which such sounds, symbols, and narratives reside. Within this study, I read films, songs, soundtracks, albums, fashion, and performances, each loaded with symbols, archetypes, and themes that illuminate intersection past and present issues of identity. By weaving ethnographic interviews (with musicians, producers, and other cultural tastemakers) with cultural analysis, I investigate how relevant cultural issues are being negotiated, how complicated discussions of history, tradition, and heritage feed the ethic, and how the American South as a perceived distinct region factors in to the equation.

Anglophone, Protestant literary traditions figure heavily in the historicization of the novel and the central role privacy plays in the narrativization of concealment. Protestantism’s focus on piety through individual self-reflection has been credited as the catalyst for the nineteenth-century inward turn of the novel and its invention of private life and the private individual. Within this Protestant-influenced novel, privacy constitutes one’s political legitimacy and is a concept that has also dominated how literature within and beyond the Anglosphere has imagined the interior qualities that constitute race and racial difference.

A different tradition, influenced by a Catholic context that sees black self-identity and interiorities as inherently insurgent in their inscrutability, opacity, and secrecy, subverts this Protestant literary tradition. While the literary invention of interiority during the inward turn of the novel depends on evolution of public and private divisions, this dissertation will examine how several Catholic-influenced novels posit that the invention of black interiority depends on secrecy not only as disruptive but also as generative, where the language and specter of black humanity emerge as racialized threat after the Haitian Revolution and as a means of undermining the racism and patriarchalism within privacy and the inadequacy of the fixed ideals it creates.

Narratological Techniques in the Modern Gulf Novel: A case study of the narrative works of Fawziyya Shuwaish al-Sālim Narratology began to take shape as a discipline in 1966 when the French journal Communications printed a special issue titled "The structural analysis of narrative." The term narratology (“narratologie” in French) itself was coined three years later by one of the contributors to that issue, Tzvetan Todorov, in his subsequent structuralist manifesto, Grammaire du Décaméron, which was published in 1969.

In this dissertation, I attempt to analyze the narrative texts of the Kuwaiti author Fawziyya Shuwaish al-Sālim, which include five fiction novels and one biography-autobiography, by applying modern narratological techniques suggested by leading narratologists, mainly Mieke Bal. My aim is to provide a systematic and objective assessment of her narrative techniques and style in an attempt to gauge her contribution to the Gulf novel and, perhaps, the modern Arab novel as a whole based on her use of technical and thematic aspects.