Dissertations / Theses: 'Literature, Comparative. Literature, Modern'

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Wallen, James Ramsey. "Beyond completion| Towards a genealogy of unfinishable novels." Thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3617121.

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This dissertation examines strange literary phenomena I call "unfinishable novels," or novels whose very structure and/or worldview would seem to prohibit the possibility of their own "successful" conclusion. Famous examples include Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Franz Kafka's The Trial, and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Focusing on a canonical and historically diverse selection of Euro-American texts and authors ranging from Rabelais to Thomas Pynchon, my project not only contributes to the critical literature on my primary texts by examining and contextualizing their "unfinishability," but also suggests a new historiography of the novel by focusing less on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the zenith of the novel's cultural and political importance, but also a period dominated by linear plotlines--and more on periods (early modern and twentieth century) in which the status of endings was far more uncertain, thus tracing something like a "backstage history" of the genre.

To develop a theoretical-historical framework in which to read these texts, both on their own terms and in the context of the history of the novel, my dissertation puts into practice a "prosaics of unfinishability," a critical methodology that privileges prose and the novel and attempts to be less weighed down by what I call "the poetic prejudice," i.e. the assumption that all literary texts worthy of the name should form organically unified totalities. This prejudice has historically dominated the discourses surrounding unfinished works, which, when they are acknowledged at all, are traditionally described in terms of an author's "failure" to achieve perfection.

The dissertation is divided into three section ("The Modern Novel," "The Modernist Novel," and "The Postmodern Novel,"), preceded by an Introduction that uses Pessoa's unfinishable Book of Disquiet to articulate a theory of both unfinished works and unfinishable novels, which I define as "novels that can only be completed as unfinished works." The Introduction offers a critique of the traditional poetics of the unfinished work and its corollary rhetoric of failure before describing my own "prosaic" methodology and outlining my project.

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Chen, Jingling. "An Acropolis in China: The Appropriation of Ancient Greek Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493311.

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This dissertation explores the transcultural relationships between modern China and ancient Greece, with a view toward appreciating how Greek philosophical and literary visions have been received, reformulated, and repurposed by Chinese writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The project is a combination of intellectual inquisition and textual analysis. Contextualized in the narrative of modern Chinese intellectual history, my study focuses on critical analysis of certain literary texts that contain or appropriate Greek elements. The objective of this study is to uncover the sophisticated transcultural practice in Chinese writers’ creative representation of what they consider the original source of the Western civilization. This in turn has contributed to the making of new intellectual trends that characterize modern Chinese culture. While constructing “a Greek layer” in the characteristics of Chinese modernity, these intellectuals’ reception of Greek imagery was also conditioned by their own political and cultural purposes. This reception was a process of appropriation that turned ancient Greece into an integral element in the formulation of a new cultural subjectivity of modern China, a course defined by David Damrosch as to mobilize elements derived from the foreign works within a vital and ongoing home tradition. This dissertation considers the Chinese translations of, introductions to, and commentaries on texts of Greek antiquity as recreations adapted to the domestic context. My study does not only analyze what has been rendered and changed in the translations of the broad term when compared with the original texts, but also treat the translations as reformulated texts that succeeded in representing Greek imagery as an internal part of the intellectual history of modern China. As the first comprehensive study of the multi-layered literary relationships between ancient Greece and modern China, this study aims to better understand the modernization of Chinese literature and culture in the context of transculturation.
East Asian Languages and Civilizations

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Levin, Janina. "Modern Reinterpretations of the Cuckold." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2010. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/91450.

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English
Ph.D.
The cuckold has been a neglected character in Western literary history, subject to derision and often cruel comic effects. Yet three major modern novelists portrayed the cuckold as a protagonist: Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary, Henry James in The Golden Bowl, and James Joyce in Ulysses. This study compares their portrayal of the cuckold with medieval storytellers' portrayal of him in the fabliau tales. The comparison shows that modern writers used the cuckold to critique Enlightenment modes of knowing, such as setting up territorial boundaries for emerging disciplines and professions. Modern writers also attributed a greater value than medieval writers did to the cuckold's position as a non-phallic man, because he allowed his wife sexual freedom. Finally, they saw the cuckold as the other side of the artist; through him, they explore the possibility that the Everyman can be a vehicle for reflected action, rather than heroic action. This study combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology to analyze the cuckold as a subject and as a compositional resource for modern novelists.
Temple University--Theses

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Leggette, Amy. "Scenes, Seasons, and Spaces: Textual Modes of Address in Modern French, American, and Russian Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19274.

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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.

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Al-Hussamy, Raghad. "Images of self and other the journey to Europe in modern Arabic prose narratives /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3215219.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2006.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1325. Adviser: Fedwa Malti-Douglas. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

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Vondrak, Amy Margaret Edmunds Susan. "Strange things: Hemingway, Woolf, and the fetish (Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf)." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.

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Lagapa, Jason S. "Inarticulate prayers: Irony and religion in late twentieth-century poetry." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280295.

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Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.

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Bouchard, Valérie. "Femme-sujet ou femme-objet Le corps féminin chez Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Nelly Arcan et Clara Ness." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27504.

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Dans plusieurs romans québécois récents, nous observons une tendance chez les auteurs féminins à exploiter le corps de la femme dans des écrits, souvent à connotation érotique. Ce corps devient un outil de séduction et sert au personnage féminin dans une quête quelconque (attention, affection, admiration, etc.) Cette approche surprend si nous considérons la démarche entreprise par les féministes des années 1970-80 pour libérer la femme de l'emprise qu'exercaient les hommes sur son corps et pour la faire passer d'objet à sujet, entre autres au sein d'une littérature féministe. Nous abordons donc, dans cette analyse d'oeuvres de nouvelles écrivaines, la conception du personnage féminin ainsi que son rôle, pour savoir si ce dernier renvoie à une fonction de sujet où s'il exerce plutôt un retour à la fonction d'objet, idéologie véhiculée par les valeurs patriarcales. À l'aide de romans contemporains, Borderline de Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Putain de Nelly Arcan et Ainsi font-elles toutes de Clara Ness, nous constatons que les personnages féminins donnent l'impression d'être sujets par la façon dont ils usent de leur corps pour se forger une identité et une personnalité forte. Par contre, les romancières récupèrent des idées misogynes entourant la femme, la ramenant à sa condition de femme-objet dont le corps sert au plaisir des hommes. Des études sur l'érotisme et la pornographie permettent de déterminer les limites et les différences entre ce qui est conçu pour le regard masculin et ce qui renvoie aux intérêts féminins. De plus, les théories sur l'agentivité qui étudient le pouvoir et le contrôle qu'exercent les personnages féminins sur leur propre vie nous permettent de mieux délimiter les frontières entre femme-objet, femme-objet "volontaire" et "assumée" et femme-sujet.

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Schwakopf, Nadine. "Poetry Unbound| Sounding the Language of Materiality in the Works of Man Ray, Henri Chopin and Gerhard Ruhm -- A Reading through Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Kittler." Thesis, Yale University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10783465.

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This dissertation is meant to be the scene of an experiment. It is meant to be a scene of observation and auscultation striving to fathom the work of poiesis as it manifests itself in select pieces of experimental poetry created by artists and writers of the 20^th-century avant-gardes. Our study notably poses the question of how poiesis draws on, and seeks to incorporate the experience of sensible things, examining also how this accentuation of perception in the making of a poem feeds into, viz. falls in line with the accentuation of the poem's sensible thing-ness. We will investigate how the abovementioned artists undertake to "make sense" of their experience of the things of the life-world, namely by grounding the signifying of their poetry in the mattering of poietic matter. We will investigate how their poems come to produce sense qua their mere being sensible, i.e. qua their being sensible as visual and/or aural matter that matters to us by virtue of its very visual and/or aural phenomenality.

As we will argue, with this emphasis on the production of a sensible presence, these poetic experiments not only establish the primacy of perception, but – more important – they also prove to loosen, and oftentimes even cut the close ties that poiesis is commonly considered to have with the semiotic order. Thus, instead of fabricating a communicational language, the experiment called poiesis giving rise to these works is in the first place destined to create the poem as a material thing. We will show that, as such a material thing, the experimental poem interpellates the senses via a language of materiality that, for its part, translates the materiality of the things of the life-world. We will show that, in lieu of straightforwardly abiding by the laws of semioticity, the poietic language of the works we are about to encounter rather emanates from the poems' very physique; i.e., that this "physical" language forged in defiance of the semiotic order thus rather proves to be consubstantial with the mattering of the matter that gives shape to the body of the poem.

In the course of our study, we will pay particular attention to how the work of poiesis – as it comes to crystallize and persist in the bodiliness of the respective poem – is, namely, pregnant with the gestures and the flesh of the body that conceived it. Beginning with the surface analysis of the physiognomy of a work by Man Ray, we will then turn to delving into the depths of the poems' corporeality. Anatomizing pieces from the oeuvres of Henri Chopin and Gerhard Rühm, we will discover – step-by-step and layer-by-layer – how both the scriptural and the oral practices constituting their work are infused with the pulsating of the human body. As we will suggest, the sensing of the scriptural and aural anatomies that build the body of Chopin's and Rühm's works always involves the sensing of the displaced and disfigured human body. This turn of poiesis to the human senses thus allows for a sensitization of the works themselves – in the sense that they become sensible bodies whose very bodiliness embraces, re-appropriates, and exudes the materiality of the life-world.

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Reed, Kristin. "The rhetoric of grief Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Yves Bonnefoy, and the modern elegy /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3386713.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: David Hertz.

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Albert, Sylvie Carole. "La litterature immigrante en langue etrangere au Canada: Etude comparative de Walter Bauer et de Jorge Etcheverry." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26563.

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Dans cette étude, je souligne la manière dont l'expérience d'immigration est représentée dans la poésie de Walter Bauer et de Jorge Etcheverry. Ces deux écrivains immigrants ont publié au Canada, en allemand et en espagnol respectivement, et il n'existe aucune étude comparant les oeuvres des deux auteurs. Je soutiens que le poème "Canada" consiste en un discours mélancolique de l'écrivain immigré et que le poème "Perro con alas", quant à lui, consiste en un discours nostalgique de l'écrivain exile. Je m'appuie sur les notions de nostalgie et de mélancolie en littérature de Walter Moser et d'Idelber Avelar. J'ai recours à l'analyse du discours d'Émile Benveniste pour étudier et interpréter la dichotomie formée par, d'une part, le pays et la culture d'origine et, d'autre part, le pays et la culture d'accueil. En plus de présenter une analyse de l'expérience littéraire d'immigration, cette recherche livre une réflexion générale sur les relations ethniques au sein de l'institution littéraire du pays et sur la place de la littérature en langue étrangère au Canada.

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Awwad, Abd al-Hussein M. "The theoretical bases of applied criticism of modern Arabic poetry : a comparative study." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.280753.

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Bonilla, Victoria. "The Succubus and the Suckers: the Soul-Siphoning Leeches in the Stories of Modernist Text." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2014. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1851.

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This paper explores the various relationships found in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire," Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." The exploration of each demonstrates the common theme of parasitic relations and the toll this dynamic takes on the persons involved.

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Moudry, Nick. "A Foreign Mirror: Intertexts with Surrealism in Twentieth-Century U. S. Poetries." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/202600.

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English
Ph.D.
In the latter half of the twentieth-century, fewer U. S. poets translated foreign poetry than their modernist predecessors. The scope of their translation projects correspondingly narrowed. Gone, for example, were projects like Ezra Pound's reaching back to thirteenth-century Italy to see how U. S. poets could push forward. Instead, translations of European and Latin American modernism prevailed. Often, multiple translations of the same author were produced by different translators at the expense of presenting a more well-rounded vision of national literatures. Of these translations, a surprisingly large number were of poets who were either loosely or explicitly connected to surrealism as a literary movement. This dissertation locates this explosion of interest in surrealism as an attraction to the surrealist emphasis on reconciling binaries. This emphasis allows American poets a convenient frame through which to confront the difficult questions of place and nation that arise as the U. S. position in the field of world literature shifts from periphery to core. Previous researchers have traced the history of surrealism's early reception in the United States, but these studies tend to not only focus on the movement's influence on American art, but also stop shortly after surrealist expatriates returned to Europe following WWII. This dissertation extends these approaches both by bringing the conversation up to the present and by examining the key role that translation and other forms of rewriting play in mediating the relationship between surrealism and American audiences. As surrealism enters the U. S. literary system, the transformed product is often not what one might expect. U. S. rewritings of surrealist literature are primarily carried out by poets and critics whose fundamental interest in the movement lies in finding a foreign mirror for their own aesthetic or ideological preoccupations. This in turn provokes the development of a strand of surrealist-influenced writing whose aims and goals are vastly different from those of the movement's founders.
Temple University--Theses

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Yudkoff, Sunny. "Let It Be Consumption!: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467299.

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Let it Be Consumption!: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis investigates the relationship between literary production and the cultural experience of illness. Focusing attention on the history of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, this study examines how a diagnosis of tuberculosis mobilized literary and financial support on behalf of the ailing writer. At the same time, the disease itself became a subject of concern in the writer’s creative oeuvre and literary self-fashioning. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, I argue that the role played by disease in these traditions is best understood through the paradox of tubercular capital. The debilitating and incurable illness proved a generative context for these writers to develop their literary identities, augment their reputations and join together in a variety of overlapping and intersecting genealogies of tubercular writing. I map this transnational network of disease, opportunity and creativity over the course of four chapters. Chapter One turns to the life and legacy of the Yiddish humorist Sholem Aleichem, who grew his reputation and defined his literary persona while taking “the cure” in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Moving from Central Europe to British Mandate Palestine, Chapter Two investigates the tubercular space of the sickroom as both setting and subject for the Hebrew poet Raḥel Bluvshtein, who generated a poetic legacy and literary support network from her garret apartment. Chapter Three directs attention back across the ocean to a cohort of Yiddish writers affiliated with the Denver Sanatorium. These writers, such as Yehoash, H. Leivick and Lune Mattes, would find that a tubercular diagnosis created new possibilities for them to see their work read, cited, translated and performed across the United States. Returning to Europe, Chapter Four examines the life and writing of the tubercular modernist David Vogel. The Hebrew writer drew on his own sanatorium experience in Merano, Italy (formerly: Meran, Austria) to enter into an intertextual conversation with German writers, such as Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Mann, if only to challenge precisely the possibility of that Hebrew-German exchange.
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

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Rapson, Jessica. "Topographies of suffering : encountering the Holocaust in landscape, literature and memory." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2012. http://research.gold.ac.uk/8025/.

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As the Holocaust passes out of living memory, this thesis re-evaluates the potential of commemorative landscapes to engender meaningful and textualised encounters with a past which, all too often, seems distant and untouchable. As the concentration camps and mass graves that shape our experiential access to this past are integrated into tourist itineraries, associated discourse is increasingly delimited by a pervasive sense of memorial fatigue which is itself compounded by the notion that the experiences of the Holocaust are beyond representation; that they deny, evade or transcend communication and comprehension. Harnessing recent developments across memory studies, cultural geography and ecocritical literary theory, this thesis contends that memory is always in production and never produced; always a journey and never a destination. In refusing the notion of an ineffable past, I turn to the texts and topographies that structure contemporary encounters with the Holocaust and consider their potential to create an ethically grounded and reflexive past-present engagement. Topographies of Suffering explores three case studies: the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial, Weimar, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. These landscapes are revealed as evolving palimpsests; multi-layered, multi-dimensional and texturised spaces always subject to ongoing processes of mediation and remediation. I examine memory’s locatedness in landscape alongside the ways it may travel according to diverse literary and spatial de-territorializations. The thesis overall brings three disparate sites together as places in which the past can be encounterable, immersive and affective. In doing so, it looks to a future in which the others of the past can be faced, and in which the alibi of ineffability can be consigned to history

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Hales, Barbara 1962. "War and death: A comparison of Freud's ideas with four works of German World War I literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291638.

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Sigmund Freud has much to say about the subject of war and death in his later work, written after 1914. Freud explores the effect of war on the soldier, his adjustment to war, his retreat to the primitive, the development of neuroses in combat, and the soldier's reaction to death. War and death are also important subjects found in German literature of the First World War. The aim of this thesis is to briefly review Freud's ideas on the individual in war, and to juxtapose these ideas to various accounts provided by German soldiers of the First World War. The four works of German World War I Literature used in this comparison are: Im Westen Nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque, Feuer und Blut by Ernst Junger, Seelenleben des Soldaten an der Front by Ludwig Scholz, and Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten edited by Philipp Witkop.

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Taggart, Robert J. "Marilynne Robinson's Gilead as Modern Midrash." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2445.

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It is the intent of this project to show that Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead might be profitably read within the context of the rabbinical exegetical tradition of midrash. It examines Gilead as a midrashic retelling of the Abraham story in the Bible, and shows how reading it in this light illuminates some of the key theological and social concerns at play in the novel. Midrash offers a unique model for reading Gilead because it combines elements of intertextuality, narrative theology and formal exegesis. Since midrash provides the framework for such a reading of Gilead, the first chapter discusses some of the theoretical issues surrounding the practice of midrash. The second chapter traces elements of the Abraham story from Genesis as retold in Gilead. Finally, the third chapter discusses the theological and social implications of reading Gilead as a midrashic retelling of the biblical story, thereby revealing Robinson's theology which emphasizes the holiness of the everyday.

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Law, G. "Mystery and uncertainty in modern fiction : A comparative parallel case study of the relations between popular mystery forms and modern non-classical fiction." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371196.

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Hashimoto, Satoru. "Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064962.

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This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries' deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries' writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity. The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region's changing linguistic conditions. Part I, "Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s," studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao's interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shiro and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao's political literature by the historian Sin Ch'aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, "Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s," wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Soseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, "Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s," addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses.
East Asian Languages and Civilizations

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Holmes, Rachel E. "Casos de honra : honouring clandestine contracts and Italian novelle in early modern English and Spanish drama." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6318.

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This thesis argues that the popularity of the clandestine marriage plot in English and Spanish drama following the Reformation corresponds closely to developments and emerging conflicts in European matrimonial law. My title, ‘casos de honra,' or ‘honour cases', unites law and drama in a way that captures this argument. Taken from the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega's El arte nuevo (1609), a treatise on his dramatic practice, the phrase has been understood as a description of the honour plots so common in Spanish Golden Age drama, but ‘casos' [cases] has a further, and related, legal meaning. Casos de honra are cases touching honour, whether portrayed on stage or at law, a European rather than a strictly Spanish phenomenon, and clandestine marriages are one such example. I trace the genealogy of three casos de honra from their recognisable origins in Italian novelle, through Italian, French, Spanish, and English adaptations, until their final early modern manifestations on the English and Spanish stage. Their seeming differences, and often radical divergences in plot can be explained with reference to their distinct, but related, legal concerns.

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Nwosu, Maik. "The reinvention of meaning cultural imaginaries and the life of the sign /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.

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Lee, Jacob Zan Adachi. "Style, Discourse, and the Completion of the Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2013. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3629.

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Many histories of modern Japanese literature see the "completion" of the modern vernacular style in the writings of Shiga Naoya (1883--1971), Mushakōji Saneatsu (1885--1976) and Takamura Kōtarō (1883--1956). Why and how this critical-historical perception of stylistic normalcy arose and still continues is better understood, I propose, through a close reading of key texts that identifies instances and patterns of creative manipulation of-as opposed to mere determination by or complicity with-certain philosophical, social, and historical discourses.How this creative manipulation plays out varies in prose and poetry and from text to text. In Mushakōji's Omedetaki hito (1911; The Simpleton), temporal and generic transitions establish a doubled discourse of sincerity that normalizes the genbun itchi prose into the background. In Shiga's An’ya kōro (1921--37; A Dark Night's Passing), certain syntactical and lexical innovations construct a new and rigid model of intuitive interiority. Takamura's Dōtei (1914; The Journey) reverses, to its own literary historical advantage, gendered discourses on the Japanese language and Japanese literary history.

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Anderson, Keith D. "Nomadic and state ideologies: Oppositional discourses in the construction of identity." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280141.

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"A book," write Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , is "an assemblage," one that is connected to "other assemblages." Once it is understood as such, literary interpretation becomes less a quest for meanings in the form of fixed destinations as an investigation into what the book under consideration "functions with." What, in other words, is the relation of "this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.---and an abstract machine that sweeps [it] along?". Specifically, this dissertation examines the production of ethnicity in various North American literary works from the Twentieth Century. Each section juxtaposes "State apparatus-books" with "war machine" ones. The first posit the ethnic group as a minority, as an "objectively definable state", whether of language, ethnicity, or sex, as a subsystem of a Majority, and give emphasis to such strategies as centering, unification, totalization, integration, interiority, hierarchization, and finalization as the means to affirmation. The second posit the ethnic group as "minoritarian" in nature, as a "potential, creative and created," as a becoming "over which they do not have ownership" and "into which they themselves must enter". It attempts to make its reader cognizant of the various strategies by which ethnic groups both empower and delimit themselves in the process of self-affirmation.

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Morse, Daniel Ryan. "Fiction on the Radio: Remediating Transnational Modernism." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2014. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/271607.

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English
Ph.D.
The BBC was the laboratory for major experiments in modernism. Notions of aesthetics, audience, and form were tried out before the microphones of 200 Oxford St., London and heard around the world, often before they were in England. The format of the radio address and the instant encounter with listeners shaped both the production and politics of Anglophone modernism to an extent hitherto unacknowledged in literary studies. This dissertation focuses on how innovative programming by modernist writers, transmitted through instantaneous radio links, closed the perceived physical, cultural, and temporal distances between colony and metropole. Charting the phenomenon of writing for, about, and around broadcasting in the careers of E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, James Joyce, and C. L. R. James, the dissertation revises the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries of modernism. Contrary to the intentions of the BBC's directors, who hoped to export a monolithic English culture, empire broadcasting wreaked havoc on the imagined boundaries between center and periphery, revealing the extent to which the colonies paradoxically affected the cultural scene "at home." The Eastern Service (directed to India), where the abstract idea of a serious, cultural station was put into practice, was the laboratory for the Third Programme, England's post-war cultural channel. Yet the effects of Empire radio are hardly limited to its considerable impact on postwar British broadcasting. The intellectual demands of Indian listeners set the parameters of and bankrolled the literary work performed by modernist writers in England. Addressing authors and readers in India from a studio in London, Mulk Raj Anand embodied a crucial aspect of the Eastern Service, its treatment of English and Indian culture as mutually influential and coeval. Anand's broadcasts and 1945 novel The Big Heart (written during his BBC years) critique imperialism by positing the simultaneity of Indian and English temporality. In so doing, Anand's works offer a rejoinder to narratives of colonial belatedness pervasive both at the time and in the present. When tackling such transnational work, radio studies is uniquely positioned to provide an archive and a radical new model for modernist studies as it grapples with critiques of the western diffusionist model of culture. Literary production in and around the BBC registers radical cultural upheaval with a diagnostic power that reveals the attenuated ability of hypercanonical modernism alone to illuminate modernity's complex relays. Modernism on the BBC was not an exclusive canon of works, singular set of formal features, or even a unique posture. Instead, writers such as James, Forster, Anand, and Joyce offered complex responses to the pressures of modernity, including disruptions wrought by colonization, immigration, and war.
Temple University--Theses

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Huber, Marie Denise. "Bagh-e Bi-Bargi: Aspects of Time and Presence in the Poetry of Mehdi Akhavan Sales." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10965.

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Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1990) is one of the most important figures in modern Persian literature. However, his poetry is little known in the West. Even in Iran, though held in high regard, his work is considered hermetic. There is no unambiguous message, no identifiable political or aesthetic doctrine. Still, his poems exert a strange, haunting power. What do they tell us, now, two decades after the poet's death? What do they mean outside their homeland? What is their voice in world literature? These are the questions my dissertation seeks to answer. Chapters on rhythm, metaphor, time and - lyrical and epic - voice aim to place Akhavan in the comparative context of the 20th century literary movements. Following the philosophical hermeneutics of, above all, Paul Ricoeur, I attempt to tease out layers of meaning and bring Akhavan's poems to life for a contemporary reader. Aspects of time and presence throughout serve to structure my argument. In parallel, time and presence are traced as motifs that weave through Akhavan's writing. Through close readings of a wide range of poems I seek to understand Akhavan's texts as crystallisations of a historical moment. However, I also argue that his poems can no longer be explained within the linear evolution of Persian literary history: in their language and imagery, they point to an elsewhere that has not yet been mapped. Akhavan avoids ideological statements and political imperatives. All the same, an ethical stance is manifest in his poetry. Form itself takes on significance. Chapter 1 examines how Ahkavan makes the human time of rhythm converge with the time of the poem. Chapter 2 explores how definitions of metaphor affect the belief in literature's potential to describe and refigure reality. Chapter 3 elucidates the processes by which time is imagined as an unattainable space. Hope and desire belong elsewhere, as does salvation. Chapter 4 treats the genres of lyric and epic as distinct configurations of time. Akhavan's love poetry is a poetry of absence, reaching out to an elusive Other, while his narrative poems adumbrate the possibility of a different, gladder history in the interstices of language.

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Innami, Fusako. "The touchable and the untouchable : an investigation of touch in modern Japanese literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:29608446-afd6-4b05-b096-d4ffd5ccf3fd.

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This thesis examines how the experience of touch is depicted in modern/contemporary Japanese literature and culture. Employing touch-related 20th century French thought (Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy) and psychoanalytic theory (Klein, Anzieu, Kimura), it discusses how the representations of touch illuminate various aspects of human existence, specifically: the mediated nature of touch, the process of the bodily encounters, the formation of subject identity, sexual differences, and the way memories of touch depicted in literature affect our sense of temporality. Touch is a particularly interesting way of approaching Japanese literature because touching between people (apart from mother and child, called skinship) has been considerably repressed at least until after WW2, due to the relative absence of public practices of touch, authors’ aesthetic choices and censorship. Opposing this tendency, female authors born postwar write freely about touch. In comparison to Judeo-Christian cultures, Japanese culture has historically not been open to tactile communication, nor is explicit articulation of internal experience, as in psychoanalysis, particularly prominent. Japanese literary characters are thus especially self-conscious about touch. Following a theoretical and historical overview regarding touch and contact in the Introduction, Chapter 1 discusses different ways of mediating touch in the works of Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Abe Kōbō. Chapter 2 argues how high levels of mediation affect the manners of engaging in direct encounters with others in Yoshiyuki, Kawabata Yasunari, and Matsuura Rieko. Chapter 3 discusses the temporality of tactile memories in Yoshiyuki, Kawabata, and Ogawa Yoko. Reflecting on such a complicated portrayal of touch in Japanese culture will help fill a gap in the existing scholarship regarding touch in literature. By critically examining the relationship between theories and literature in the East and West, this thesis also significantly contributes to the field of comparative literature and cultural studies as an example of cross-cultural research on touch.

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Pei, Yongming. "Re-presenting China through Retranslation: A Corpus-based Study of Liaozhai Zhiyi in English." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1532818215591724.

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Nävsjö, Dana. "From Threat to Thrill : A Comparative Study of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-90929.

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The purpose of this essay was to compare the classic vampire narrative, Bram Stoker's Dracula, to a more contemporary vampire narrative using the first book, Twilight, in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series as a prime example. By looking at the world of the vampire, the figure of the vampire and the interaction between the vampire and the main female characters in each respective story, the goal was to see how much the vampire narrative has evolved. The argument was that the movement from Dracula to Twilight was from an archetypical, terrifying vampire to a more modern, sexually alluring and romantic vampire, where several aspects of terror have been removed. What has been shown is that there are many aspects that have changed once terror is not the focal point. In addition, this essay also argued that in a classroom setting one could use a modern vampire narrative, such as Twilight, to activate pupils’ interest in vampires which would naturally segue into meaningful discussions, comparisons and analyses of the prototypical vampire narrative found in Dracula. As a result, this activity would also encourage students to read literature and explore new worlds

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Modrea, Andreea. "Ideology, subversion and the translator's voice: A comparative analysis of the French and English translations of Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26718.

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For the past twenty years, there has been a growing trend in translation studies to follow a deconstructionist philosophy and give translators authorship of their work. Translation, in this sense, is no longer a target language equivalence of an 'original' text by an author, but rather a creative process of 're-writing.' In this regard, translators have the possibility of showing their own voice in the translation. The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether either of the French or English translators (Albert Bensoussan and Suzanne Jill Levine, respectively) of the Cuban novel Tres Tristes Tigres (Barcelona: 1967) intervened in the text to show their own voices; and in Levine's case, whether this intervention corresponded to a declared ideology of 'subversion.' A systematic analysis of the wordplay in Chapters 16, 17 and 18 of the two translations reveal significant differences. Whereas the French translation has only minor adjustments, the English translation shows a large number of alterations to existing source text wordplay as well as additional instances of wordplay. In the final tally, there are almost twice as many instances of wordplay in Levine's English translation than in the Spanish source text. From the results of the analysis and from Levine's own self-portrayal in her book The Subversive Scribe (St. Paul: 1991), it would appear that her extensive intervention in the text is ideologically motivated. However, closer examination of circumstances surrounding the actual translation process reveals that the author, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, greatly influenced the final 're-writing.' Therefore, Levine's translation was not so much subversion as it was a sub-version of the original.

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Bennett, Marjorie Anne 1963. "Anthropology and the literature of political exile: A consideration of the works of Czeslaw Milosz, Salman Rushdie, and Anton Shammas." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/277851.

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The effort of this thesis is to use an anthropologically non-traditional subject, written literature, to comparatively explore a cross-cultural condition, exile. In justifying the use of written literature in anthropological enterprises, I contend that we are unnecessarily constrained by assumptions we have inherited regarding the concept of culture, the consequence of which has been the denial to literature of a constitutive role in the making of social life and history. Literary narrative can be culturally constitutive, as is exemplified by the three authors considered here.

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32

Alsaad, Anwar A. J. A. "Narratological techniques in the modern Gulf novel| A case study of the narrative works of Fawziyya Shuwaish al-S?lim." Thesis, Indiana University, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10111936.

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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.

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33

Masera, Cerutti Maria Ana Beatriz. "Symbolism and some other aspects of traditional Hispanic lyrics : a comparative study of late medieval lyric and modern popular song." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.321657.

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Cooper, Jessica. "The Roles of Women, Animals, and Nature in Traditional Japanese and Western Folk Tales Carry Over into Modern Japanese and Western Culture." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/166.

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The roles of women, animals, and nature in traditional Japanese and Western folk tales continue to be parallel to the roles of women, animals, and nature in modern Japanese and Western Culture. This is a result of the values and morals that are encapsulated within these folk tales.

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Kim, John Hyong. "The Poetics of Diagram." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11590.

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This dissertation treats the diagram as a literary object. It explains how the diagram structured the conditions of possibility of a world-literary modernity as it emerged in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Caught between the competing epistemic regimes of scientific and humanistic knowledge, as well as between the clash of cultures, East and West, the diagram's potential as a scientifically neutral, and thus, "universal" language was deployed and redeployed in complex ways: just as the diagram was used to reveal the fundamental conditions of literary possibility, it was also made into a literary object itself. Thus, as both a hermeneutic tool and an aesthetic object itself, the diagram's place in literature is shown to hinge upon the necessary but ambivalent relationship between the gravitas of literary criticism and the spirit of play in literary art. Beginning with a philosophical and genealogical archaeology of the diagram, the dissertation unfolds by situating various theoretical issues elicited by the placement of the diagram in literature, such as problems of interpretation, cognition, translation, adaptation, and materiality, within an intricate matrix of historical and cultural contexts. Readings likewise draw from a wide range of disciplines, such as continental philosophy, history of science and mathematics, visual studies, as well as from a wide range of languages and literatures, from English, French, and German, to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

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Barr, Julie E. "A comparative, iconographic study of early-modern, religious emblems." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/274/.

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Vettor, Letizia. "Imperii pretium : cultural development and conceptual transformations in the myth of Eteokles and Polyneices from Aeschylus to Alfieri." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/12013.

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This thesis contextualises and explores the reconceptualization of the myth of Eteokles and Polyneices in Greek, Latin and Italian tragedy, the literary genre that more than any other offers the opportunity to trace its progressive transformation across a series of relatively continuous and consistent phases. Within these limits, this study represents the first comprehensive, systematic and detailed comparative analysis of the cultural development of this myth, charting the shaping of its key themes: war and rivalry, autochthony and patriotism, the connection between incest, parricide and fratricide, the effects of predestination/family curse, the clash between private and public interests, and the legitimate limits of power. By means of a close examination of the thesis' main corpus (constituted by Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides' Phoenician Women, Seneca's Oedipus and Phoenissae, Dolce's Giocasta and Alfieri's Polinice) this dissertation demonstrates that the brothers are not merely two stereotypical types whose characterisation as mortal enemies remains static and unvaried. Although their rivalry never stops, the meaning, dynamic and purpose of their struggle are progressively but profoundly transformed throughout the centuries. In particular, I argue that the martial component that initially defined this myth, admittedly important throughout its legacy, is variously adapted to accommodate either a warning against the horrors of violence and subjugation, a cautionary appeal against overly aggressive foreign policy, a denunciation of the unbearable price of civil strife, or an aspiration to pacifism. In parallel, I analyse how the reflection on power and power struggle becomes increasingly predominant, eventually displacing the war theme as the main focus of this myth with a warning against the dangers of tyranny.

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Schoenherr, Julie. "Aprobacion y desaprobacion del honor a la luz de la narratologia: Estudio comparativo de "El alcalde de Zalamea" de Calderon y "Cronica de una muerte anunciada" de Garcia Marquez." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26555.

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This thesis examines honour as a central theme in narrative passages of El alcalde de Zalamea (circa 1642), a seventeenth-century play by Spain's Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and in Cronica de una muerte anunciada (1981), a short novel by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. By means of a comparative study, and using narratology as the primary theoretical and methodological frame, this theme is explored through the analysis of both works at three different "levels"---that of the characters, the narrators, and the implied authors---with the intention of revealing the distinct contrast between the ideology expressed at all levels and, ultimately, at the level of the respective implied authors as the embodiment of the works' ideologies, in regards to honour as a socially-regulated code of conduct. An important portion of this analysis is dedicated to discussing the relationship between the fictional components of these works and their symbolic meaning in the external or "real"/non-fictional world in connection with said ideology.

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Puello, Alfonso Sarah L. "Poetics of the urban, poetics of the self : a comparative study of selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4316585d-51c1-4b79-ae46-f5cdaf4c55d5.

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This thesis explores the poetic representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda respectively. Its primary aim is to analyse the relational phenomenon between the construction of these poets' personal maps of the city and the concomitant formation of the poetic self. The principal point of departure is Jacques Réda's Ferveur de Borges (1987), a collection of essays and poems published individually between 1957 and 1986, where the author expresses his admiration for Borges, shows his broad and critical knowledge of Borges's works and establishes the similarities between their poetics of the urban and poetics of the self. Another important aim of this thesis is therefore to ascertain the extent of Borges's influential role in Réda's poetics, but also how reading Borges through Réda enhances our understanding of Borges's urban poetry. This comparison reveals that Borges and Réda gravitate towards places within the city, but mostly its periphery, characterised by their unpretentious, soulful and heterotopic qualities — places where the poets feel a sense of belonging. Their objective is to restore, through the prism of their minds and their physical investment in space, the provincial spirit of Buenos Aires and Paris, hidden behind the dynamism of the modern metropolises they have become. As a consequence of this communion between self and place they explore the possibility of being on the brink of a revelatory experience that speaks to the enigma of life. The wider scope of the thesis addresses the historical and cultural relationship between Buenos Aires and Paris, Borges's and Réda's redefinition of the centre/periphery dichotomy, the evening as a temporal locale and the distinction between poetic destiny and aesthetic experience.

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40

Thomas, Evan Benjamin. "Toward Early Modern Comics." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1502561240762248.

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41

Nir, Oded. "Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404773762.

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42

Snyman, Jacobus Wilhelmus Otto. "Literature of impasse : a comparative analysis of Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch, Giorgio Bassani’s Gli Occhiali d’Oro and Henri Fauconnier’s Malaisie." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80241.

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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation sets out from the assumption that there is a phenomenon one can call literature of impasse. By this is meant that there is a body of literature that can be defined as a literature of impasse because of the specific time of writing or of its setting. The definition used in this exploration is based upon the historical, social, political and psychological forces that shape literature of impasse. Broadly speaking the term refers to works of literature of which the authors are considered to be fully aware that what they were describing, analysing and exploring was the impasse which the Western individual had to navigate in order to arrive at any coherent sense of self. The authors in this study – Joseph Roth (1894-1939), Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) and Henri Fauconnier (1879-1973) – can be regarded as three such authors, and the aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate in what way they are indeed authors of impasse in the works under discussion and what the devices are that they have employed to convey their vision. Far from being a vision that (myopically) sees no resolution, the authors demonstrate a need to identify the impasse itself and its causes and consequences in a narrative style. As part of the acknowledgement of impasse, the description of the ontological impasse of the protagonists is also explored as is the central discussion of modernity and Modernism and how modernity appears to exacerbate the sense of impasse. The position of the protagonists in these works leads in turn to the exploration of individual attempts to overcome the impasse and, in so doing, the study inevitably has to explore the philosophical attributes reflected in each of the works. The comparative nature of this analysis, straddling three languages and literary traditions, and the complex contexts of “impasse”, necessitates studies in other disciplines. The works of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) seemed particularly suited to this exploration as an analytical springboard inasmuch as his works examine the anthropological and philosophical aspects which have determined the historical forces and milieux with which the three novelists have to contend in the formulation of their respective visions.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif berus op die veronderstelling dat daar ‘n fenomeen bestaan wat letterkunde van impasse oftewel van die dooie punt genoem kan word. Dit beteken dat daar ‘n korpus van letterkundige werke is wat gedefinieer kan word as letterkunde van impasse op grond van die spesifieke tydperk waarin dit tot stand gekom het of die narratiewe agtergrond daarvan. Die definisie wat in hierdie studie gebruik word is gegrond op die geskiedkundige, sosiale, politiese en sielkundige kragte waardeur letterkunde van impasse gevorm word. Die term verwys in die breë na werke wat geskep word deur skrywers wat ten volle daarvan bewus is dat dit wat hulle beskryf, ontleed en verken die dooie punt is waardeur die Westerse individu moet beweeg om enige koherente sin van die self te bereik. Die skrywers in hierdie studie – Joseph Roth (1894-1939), Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) en Henri Fauconnier (1879-1973) – kan beskou word as drie sodanige skrywers en die doel van hierdie proefskrif is om aan te toon waarom hulle inderdaad skrywers van impasse is in die werke wat bespreek word en op watter maniere hulle hierdie persepsie oordra. Dit handel hoegenaamd nie oor ‘n persepsie wat stiksienig geen uitkoms sien nie en die skrywers toon veral ‘n behoefte om die impasse, sowel as die oorsake en gevolge daarvan, in ‘n narratiewe styl te identifiseer. As deel van die erkenning van impasse, word die beskrywing van die ontologiese impasse van die protagoniste ook ondersoek sowel as die sentrale bespreking van moderniteit en Modernisme en die wyse waarop moderniteit die gevoel van impasse blyk te vererger. Die posisie van die protagoniste in hierdie werke lei weer na die verkenning van individuele pogings om die dooie punt te oorkom en gevolglik moet die studie noodwendig ook die filosofiese standpunte ondersoek wat in die werke gereflekteer word. Die vergelykende aard van hierdie ontleding wat strek oor drie tale en literêre tradisies en die komplekse konteks van “impasse” maak verwysing na ander dissiplines noodsaaklik. Die werke van Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) het besonder geskik voorgekom vir hierdie verkenning as analitiese wegspringplek aangesien sy werk die antropologiese en filosofiese aspekte ondersoek van die geskiedkundige kragte en omgewings waarmee hierdie drie romanskrywers te kampe gehad het in die formulering van hulle onderskeie sienings.

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Hemming, Ann J. McBride Lawrence W. Holt Niles R. "The evolution and dissemination of the modern concept of civilization." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9720806.

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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1996.
Title from title page screen, viewed May 30, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Lawrence W. McBride, Niles Holt (co-chairs), Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, John Freed, William Archer. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-283) and abstract. Also available in print.

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Eissa, Ashraf Abdel-Fattah. "The saga of modern literature : a comparative study of Naguib Mahfouz's The Cario Trilogy and John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.299180.

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45

Katsan, Gerasimus Michael. "Unmaking history: postmodernist technique and national identity in the contemporary greek novel." The Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1062992115.

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Savage, Tamara. "The Obstacles to and Solutions of Female Characters' Speech: Beatrice in Dante's Vita Nuova and Purgatorio and Susan in J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1156.

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This thesis analyzes the speaking and silencing of two female characters, Beatrice from Dante’s Vita Nuova and Purgatorio and Susan from J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. The texts are viewed through postcolonial and feminist lenses to show the problems with male characters speaking for female characters and the obstacles the female characters face when attempting to speak. Dante’s solution to this problem is to transform Beatrice from a silent and demure woman into a character who issues commands with a powerful voice. Coetzee’s solution is instead to refuse to provide a solution, since no one but Susan can speak for her. This thesis describes the different roles that Susan and Beatrice take on in order to gain authority and tell their true stories. The relationships of the male and female characters are explored, as well as their relationships to speaking, silence, revision, truth, and meaning.

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Cognevich, Alicia. "The Tripartite Tributaries of Ush." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1366.

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Inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s metafiction novel Pale Fire and with Joseph Campbell’s research in comparative mythology and religion in mind, I explore the act of mythmaking and the composition of metafictional text in this work of fiction. The myth aspect combines elements of Classical, biblical, medieval, Romantic, and original materials to form a product that should strike readers as both familiar and alien, demonstrating Campbell’s notion of the monomyth as well as the ongoing tradition of mythmaking that continues to captivate both readers and writers. The metafictional portion of the text emphasizes a reader’s relationship to a work of fiction, a scholar’s relationship to his or her scholarly work, and a subtext’s relationship to its primary text. Combining the texts encourages the reader to read critically and reevaluate his or her conceptions of genre in order to piece together the greater story of tyranny and rebellion.

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Dimirouli, Foteini. "Cavafy hero : literary appropriations and cultural projections of the poet in English and American literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84ca6361-a26c-4269-82da-4deb4b0c4664.

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The present thesis examines the way E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill appropriated C.P. Cavafy in writings that were disseminated and consumed amongst culturally dominant literary circles, and which eventually determined the Greek-Alexandrian poet’s international reputation. I aim to contribute a new perspective on Cavafy, by evading the text-based tradition of reception studies, and proposing an alternative method of discussing the production of Cavafy's canonical status. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory, I view literary canonization as involving a variety of factors at play beyond creative achievement: in particular, relationships of 'authorial consecration' whereby writers create and circulate cultural capital through their power to legitimize other artists. The critical and fictional texts I analyse perform readings of Cavafy's poetry alongside imaginative portrayals of the poet's life and personality. I take this complementary relationship - between the image of the poet each author projects and their reading of his work - as a starting point to explore the broader ideas of aesthetics and authorial subjectivity that inform the renderings of Cavafy generated by prominent literary figures. Rather than passive recipients of influence, these figures are considered as active agents in the production of 'Cavafy narratives', appropriating the poet according to their own agendas, while also projecting onto him their own position within the cultural field. Eventually, Cavafy becomes a point of insight into the multiplicity of networks and practices involved in the production of cultural currency; in turn, the study of the construction of Cavafy's authorial identity sheds light on the cumulative processes that have defined the way the poet is read and perceived to the present day. This duality of perspective is essential to a study concerned with the cultural contexts framing the poet's steady rise to international fame throughout the 20th century.

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Daifotis, Melanie. "The Myth of Persephone: Body Objectification from Ancient to Modern." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1529.

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Implications surrounding body ownership prove to be an enduring struggle from their prevalence in ancient literary sources through more modern, contemporary works. I analyze the notions of body ownership and its lack thereof set forth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” regarding the myth of Persephone. Then, I consider larger meanings through analysis of the following contemporary works, approached in terms of the narrators: Rita Dove’s Mother Love, Louise Glück’s Averno, A.E. Stallings’s “Hades Welcomes His Bride” and “Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother,” and D.M. Thomas’s “Pomegranate.” The complexities within the myth itself amplify the complications in the contemporary interpretations of the myth. There is a range of differing levels of accepting sentiments in the contemporary works about the idea that no one ever has complete ownership or control over his own body. Comparing the different lenses through with the contemporary authors (and ancient authors!) chose to incorporate the myth of Persephone into their works reveals overarching themes, enlightening the reader about the nuances of the arguably most famous abduction in history.

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Munoz, Victoria Marie. "A Tempestuous Romance: Chivalry, Literature, and Anglo-Spanish Politics, 1578-1624." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1479905568694913.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature, Comparative. Literature, Modern'

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