Browsing by Subject "Comparative literature"
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Item “A cousinly resemblance” : negotiating identity in literature of Russia and the U.S. South(2016-05) Leachman, Julianna Lee; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Kuzmic, Tatiana; Bremen, Brian; Livers, Keith; Pesenson, MichaelFollowing Carson McCullers’ 1941 declaration that “there is surely a cousinly resemblance” between Russian literature and literature of the U.S. South, this dissertation examines that affinity, revealing that understandings of identity in both Russia and the U.S. South have been shaped by their historic marginalization by the dominant cultural centers of Europe and the U.S. North, respectively. This oppositional definition of identity, which has labeled Russians and southerners as inferior “others” against which those in the cultural centers define themselves, has led to a cultural hybridity that wavers between allegiance to a conservative, defensive self-definition of superiority to the dominant culture and a more cosmopolitan identity that seeks to integrate fully with a multicultural and multinational global culture. Scholarly dialogue surrounding issues of regional and national identity, from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of “minor literature” to Homi Bhabha’s understanding of “minority discourse” to Edward Said’s ruminations on exile and postcolonial identity, inform my study of Russian and southern identity. Through a comparative analysis grounded in literary-historical and cultural studies, I examine literary texts by three Russian writers and three writers from the U.S. South, spanning more than a one hundred year period from 1842 to 1955. Attending closely to works by Andrei Platonov, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, this dissertation seeks to answer questions of authority and authenticity regarding the stories of Russia and the U.S. South. By insisting on a reevaluation of traditional accounts of regional or national narratives, the authors considered here demand to know who or what gets to belong to these narratives, and by whose standards.Item Beyond English : translating modernism in the global south(2014-12) Tiwari, Bhavya; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Merle),1964-My title echoes Agha Shahid Ali’s sentiment of needing to move beyond the linguistic nationalism of “English” toward a more varied understanding of Anglophone writing within multiple contexts in the world. In three theoretical case studies from four linguistic and literary traditions (English, Bengali, Spanish, and Hindi-Urdu), I explore the dimensions and definitions of comparative Anglophone and world literature, comparative poetics, and a comparative study of novels – in the global postcolonial world. I focus on moments of translatability and untranslatability to question traditional models for studies in English and comparative literature that do not account for translation. Each of my chapters shows how texts in the “original” or “translation” do not always circulate from a homogenized metropolitan center to a marginalized periphery, and unlike in the elite North American and Parisian world where untranslatability often inspires terror and loss of language, translations can act as connecting forces that create organic dialogue in the global south on modernism and postcolonial discourses that go beyond Europe and AmericaItem Hacia Cervantes : confluence of the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions in the Quijote(2011-05) Meierhoffer, Lynn Vaulx; Zimic, Stanislav; Litvak, Lily; Lindstrom, Naomi E.; Harney, Michael D.; Biow, Douglas G.Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615) has delighted readers for centuries. The literary criticism analyzing just this one product of Cervantes’s literary genius is voluminous. In particular, the novel’s structure has received significant scrutiny, and discussions regarding its unity, or lack thereof, abound. This debate rages today with Cervantine experts still espousing various theories. Puzzling over this quandary and asking why a truly convincing explanation regarding the structure has not emerged, we arrive at a partial answer. We believe that there is unity in the Quijote and that Cervantes created a unified work by ingeniously taking full advantage of the elements of both the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions, combining them in a harmonizing synthesis. Moreover, he resolved the problem of unity within variety by establishing thematic consistency throughout. The purpose of our study is to explore the confluence of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions in works that precede Cervantes and to examine how Cervantes innovatively worked with this element in the Quijote of 1605. We present a panoramic view of works written between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, which reveal writers’ efforts to combine, consciously or unconsciously, the various characteristics of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions. For this project, we look at six representative works written in Spanish or Italian that represent significant antecedents to the Quijote and Cervantes’s unique method of synthesizing the traditions: Libro de Apolonio, Libro del caballero Zifar, Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Palmerín de Olivia, Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y los trabajos de la sin ventura Isea. We investigate each author’s approach at coupling the two traditions and determine his/her degree of success in merging them artistically to produce a coherent whole. Our analysis reveals that not only does Cervantes systematically integrate the two literary traditions in his parody, but he also skillfully devises a way to unify thematically the delightful variety in his work. To wit, Cervantes embraces the theme of literature (fiction) and life (reality) and explores the need for distinguishing judiciously between them.Item Impossible harmonies: music, race and nation in the neobaroque novel(2015-05) Strong, Franklin Wallace, III; Salgado, César Augusto; Friedman, Alan; Moore, Lorraine; Moore, Robin; Wilks, Jennifer“Impossible Harmonies: Music, Race and Nation in the Neobaroque Novel” addresses questions of national identity and the literary uses of music as they apply to the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Alejo Carpentier and Ralph Ellison. I argue that each of these authors uses literary techniques that can be called neobaroque to interrogate the notion of harmony as a metaphor for national identity formation. While the idea of the Neobaroque is generally associated with Latin America, I take advantage of critical spaces opened up by recent work on the global Neobaroque to see Baroque traces in other postcolonial areas. And while the Neobaroque is described by Severo Sarduy and Linda Hutcheon as an art of disharmony, I argue instead that as these authors consider nationality from multi-racial perspectives, they work to reproduce the impossible harmonies (the phrase comes from a line in Carpentier’s 1974 novel, Concierto barroco) that dominate African-based music forms in the Americas. This dissertation addresses continuing controversies in the interpretation of each author’s work. Critics, for example, have read Carpentier’s preoccupation with form, which is closely connected to his love of music, as a reflection of un-subversive, even elitist tendencies. The charges makes sense: it is hard to reconcile the Beethoven-loving Carpentier who argued that novelists, like musicians, should work within predetermined forms in order to conform to “pressing spiritual needs” with the Carpentier who celebrated the formlessness of Havana’s cityscape in “La ciudad de las columnas” (“The City of Columns,” 1964). Similarly, Salim Washington argues that Johnson’s narrator’s quest for a music form that would combine black American music with Western classical music reflects Johnson’s assimilationist, “mulatto-based American nationalism.” This charge resonates with the central complaint of Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997): that white Cubans intellectuals and artists, including Carpentier, appropriated black music forms in their construction of a mixed-race national identity. Where Johnson is accused of cultural betrayal, Moore argues that Carpentier participates in a sort of cultural hijacking. Without putting aside those objections, “Impossible Harmonies” recuperates the revolutionary potential of these authors’ texts.Item Predatory portraiture : Goethe's Faust and the literary vampire in Gogol's [P]opmpem and Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray(2010-12) Anderson, Matthew Neil, 1983-; Garza, Thomas J.; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M.Despite the fact that there seems to be no direct link between the works of Nikolai Gogol and those of Oscar Wilde, Gogol’s novella, Портрет (The Portrait) and Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, share many elements in common, most notably the device of the predatory portrait. This report explores the parallels that exist between these two texts and argues that they mutually derive from elements found in Goethe’s Faust and the trope of the literary vampire.