Browsing by Subject "Exiles"
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Item Imaginative appropriation : confronting otherness through the female body in the works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino(2011-05) Abell, Lynn Valerie; Raffa, Guy P.; Bini, DanielaThis report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order to confront complex cultural differences. Italy is the site of this gendered inscription in Pavese’s Il carcere, while various real and imagined foreign lands are made female in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili. In Pavese’s novella, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the failure of the protagonist to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his simultaneous rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s two works, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and psychologically. By linking woman and terrain, Pavese and Calvino attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion.Item Reading urban environments : French exiles in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and ethnography of Léon-Gontran Damas(2016-05) Reyes, Michael; WILKS, JENNIFER M., 1973-; WETTLAUFER, ALEXANDRAThis report examines how urban environments create a sense of exile for marginalized communities in the work of French poet Charles Baudelaire and the ethnography of French Guianese Creole writer Léon-Gontran Damas, Retour de Guyane. Through a comparative literary analysis informed by an environmental justice framework I examine how urban decay prompts the development of discourses on public health in nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century French Guiana. A main question I address is: How do representations of exile in French and Francophone literature indicate the process of nation-building? I foreground the discriminatory legacy of French colonialism in my analysis of Retour de Guyane to highlight how governmental neglect resulting in Guiana’s infrastructural decay constitutes an act of environmental racism and social exclusion. By using French Guiana as a case point, I illustrate examples of deliberate environmental degradation of racialized communities today in the twenty-first century and describe how Charles Baudelaire and Léon-Gontran Damas transmit the value of environmental awareness for the sake of intergenerational well-being.