Browsing by Subject "Literature"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 44
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A critical review of the oral interpretation of nonfiction literature in selected textbooks 1934-1979(Texas Tech University, 1979-08) Hyde, Julian HawthorneNot availableItem Air-borne bards : Anglo-Irish writers and the BBC, 1931-1968(2012-08) Bloom, Emily Catherine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Friedman, Alan W; Hutchison, Coleman; Savage, Robert JThis dissertation defines and explores “radiogenic aesthetics” in late modernism that emerged alongside radio broadcasting, World War II era propaganda, censorship, and paper shortages, and the transnational networks forming in the shadow of British imperial collapse. The Anglo-Irish writers in this study—W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—addressed a changing media environment that mapped on to the socio-cultural flux of the period following Irish Independence. Transcending the newly minted national boundaries between Ireland and England, the British Broadcasting Corporation became a locus for shaping transnational literary networks, this in spite of the nationalist rhetoric surrounding broadcasting. By analyzing broadcasts alongside print literature, I identify a circuit of influence coursing between modernism and broadcasting, rather than a unidirectional flow. This body of work, which includes drama (radio and stage), feature broadcasts, poetry, and fiction, offers a counter-narrative to literary historical theories that position modernist aesthetics as a reaction against popular mass media. Motifs of uncanny repetition—returns, echoes, and hauntings—are typical of these radiogenic aesthetics and reveal tensions between orality and literacy, embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, ephemerality and permanence, and tradition and “the now.” These tensions become definitive features of late modernism as the self-assurance of modernism’s first practitioners gives way to troubling questions about the future of literature in the unstable media environments surrounding World War II. Adapting traditional literary forms from the novel, poem, and play for the broadcast medium and incorporating radio’s epistemologies into their literary theories, Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen, and Beckett draw attention to fundamental questions about mediation itself. In so doing, they anticipate the hypermediacy of postmodernism without, however, relinquishing the modernist pursuit of authenticity or the quest for forms capable of transcending the widening distance between author and audience.Item Assembling place : Buenos Aires in cultural production (1920-1935)(2009-12) Poppe, Nicolas Matthew; Shumway, Nicolas; Bernucci, Leopoldo; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Pereiro Otero, José Manuel; Zonn, LeoIn works of cultural production, interpretations of the built, natural, and social environment engage a hierarchy of readings of place. Formed by a totality of interpretations—accepted/unaccepted, dominant/subordinate, normal/abnormal, and everything in between—this hierarchy of readings frames place as a social understanding. Interpretations of place, therefore, are social positionings: kinds of individual delineations of the meaning of place as a social understanding. Collectively, these social positionings compose and comprise our understanding of the meaning of a place. In this study, I examine the different ways in which the understanding of Buenos Aires as a place shapes and is shaped by the avant-garde urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry of the 1920s, the five plays of Armando Discépolo’s dramatic genre of the grotesco criollo, Robert Arlt’s dark and portentous binary novel Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas (1929/1931), and three early Argentine sound films [Tango! (Mogila Barth 1933), Los tres berretines (Equipo Lumiton 1933), and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth 1934)]. To get at the mechanisms that drive the interaction between these works of cultural production, which are social positionings, and the social understanding of Buenos Aires as a place, I draw from Manuel De Landa’s notions of assemblage theory and non-linear history. Wholes such as porteño society of the 1920s and 1930s are assemblages of an almost limitless number of parts whose functions within the greater entity are not always clear. Place, therefore, is an assemblage whose meaning is made up of indeterminable interpretations of space. It is also a non-linear social understanding in that its meaning is irreducible to its components (i.e. social positionings). The mutual interactions and feedback within assemblages such as Buenos Aires are indicative of how meaning is ever changing through processes of destratification, restratification, and stratification in its components, including Borges’ early poetry, Discépolo’s grotesco criollo, Arlt’s Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas, and the films Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo.Item Border fiction : fracture and contestation in post-Oslo Palestinian culture(2013-12) Paul, William Andrew; El-Ariss, Tarek; Grumberg, KarenThis dissertation delves into a body of Palestinian literature, film, and art from the past two decades in order theorize the relationship between borders and their representations. In Israel and Palestine, a region in which negotiating borders has become a way of life, I explore the ways in which ubiquitous boundaries have pervaded cultural production through a process that I term “bordering.” I draw on theoretical contributions from the fields of architecture, geography, anthropology, as well as literature and film studies to develop a conceptual framework for examining the ways in which authors, artists, and filmmakers engage with borders as a space to articulate possibilities of encounter, contestation, and transgression. I argue that in these works, the proliferation of borders has called into question the Palestinian cultural and political consensus that created a shared set of narratives, symbols, and places in Palestinian cultural production until the last decade of the 20th century. In its place has emerged a fragmented body of works that create what Jacques Rancière terms “dissensus,” or a disruption of a cultural, aesthetic, disciplinary, and spatial order. Read together, they constitute what I term a “border aesthetic,” in which literature, film, and art produce new types of spaces, narratives, and texts through the ruptures and fractures of the border. I trace the emergence of this aesthetic and the new genres and forms that distinguish it from earlier Palestinian literary, political, and intellectual projects through analyses of the works of Elia Suleiman, Sayed Kashua, Raba’i al-Madhoun, Emily Jacir, Yazid Anani, and Inass Yassin. In their attempts to grapple artistically with the region’s borders, these authors, directors, and artists create new codes, narratives, vernaculars, and spaces that reflect the fragmentation wrought by pervasive boundaries. These works, fluent in multiple mediums, genres, and languages, reveal both the possibilities and the limits of this aesthetic, as they seek to contest borders but nevertheless remain bound by them.Item Carried meaning in the Mahābhārata(2015-12) Rudmann, Daniel Adam; Selby, Martha Ann; Brereton, Joel P., 1948-; Freiberger, Oliver; Talbot, Cynthia; Hiltebeitel, AlfThe Mahābhārata describes itself as both a comprehensive and exhaustive text, incorporating a range of genres while presenting diverse perspectives through a matrix of interacting narratives. Its main story and subtales are the subject of productive contemporary studies that underscore the significance of the Sanskrit epic, though this scholarship is also famously criticized for overlooking literary inquiry. The following dissertation enacts a close reading of four subtales, Nala’s Tale, Rāma’s Tale, Sāvitrī’s Tale, and The Yakṣa’s Questions, in context with the larger work to uncover the implications of a literary study of the Mahābhārata. By conducting translations of passages from the epic, this dissertation builds sites of alliance among frame and subtale, literary and translation theory, critical analysis and contemporary scholarship, as well as the Mahābhārata and other works of literature in order to consider the ways in which meaning is generated throughout the text. Language, constituent parts, and operative principles are found to reverberate in the epic, eschewing didacticism and stasis for literary vitality. Themes of loss, love, disguise, and discovery veer throughout the subtales as sideshadows that at once collaborate and contradict to continuously redefine one another. The Mahābhārata’s self-conscious and reiterative reinterpretation of its own constructs presents critical insights on translation as dialogical correspondence, occurring within utterances as well as between languages. The act of translation, utilized by the poem itself to develop and proliferate significance, reveals difference and bears legibility within the epic.Item Demonic tendencies of the grim fantasy : writing Black women in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Alexis De Veaux's Yabo(2015-08) Mosley, William Harold, III; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Minich, Julie AThe grim fantasy genre was once a product of Butler's resistant strategies against women's erasure from science fiction, fantasy, and slave narratives. The baton has been passed to De Veux in this never ending-fight against neoliberal impulses to white wash a horrid history of anti-black torture and the destruction of women's selfhood. Connecting Butler's concept, grim fantasy, with Wynter's concept, demonic grounds, allows for a productive reading of Kindred and Yabo's ambiguous and complex conclusions. Exploring the unwritten geographies with literature reveals a lacking in black women subject formation that was a product of systematic onslaught against them.Item Distances and proximities : Havana and San Juan from the point of view of literature and oral histories(2015-05) Mercado Diaz, Mario Edgardo; Salgado, César Augusto; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-Cuba y Puerto Rico have for long been considered sister islands, fighting together against the influences of the Spanish Empire and the United States. The decade of the 1950s, however, proved to be the splitting point for both islands, sending them into very different trajectories of development. In their shared experience of Spanish colonization and USA interventions, how do San Juan and Havana residents perceive and use space today in their particular socio-political contexts and how does this affect the resident's sense of citizenship? I closely engage with the different urban spaces using ethnographic data and photographs taken during my recent fieldwork, creative texts describing said spaces and case studies examining the formation of racial, gender and class identities. Focusing on a specific place on the Malecón, Havana's iconic esplanade, I examine how practices of leisure, intimacy (e.g. erotic homosexual and heterosexual encounters), and self-expression challenge the revolutionary rhetoric of "sameness" (i.e. absence of race, class, crime or gender violence). As for San Juan, I dissect the layers of significance in public visual representation, as exemplified in the artwork painted over an abandoned house in Santurce, the site for queer, artistic and marginal expression. The scene, two black women drinking on the porch, rescues a sense of citizenship lost to the class and racial polarization, fragmentation, and the "ruination" of San Juan. Finally, I argue that an archipelagic city, composed of the descriptions of specific places in different cities, has been created in the sea, a space of crossing, endurance and death, within these inter-capillary exchanges of people, cultures and habits. This archipelagic city, not spoken about directly but referenced semantically, aids in the construction of trans-national identities and perspectives, specific perceptions on time and space, and the production of media and cultural forms of expression. My goal is to tie together these narrative strands linking trans-oceanic places into an urban map surpassing its own geographical context.Item El mesticismo en la novelística de Jorge Icaza(2010-05) Ortiz, Claudia O. T.; Perez, Alberto J.; Perez, Janet; Zamora, JorgeAlthough Jorge Icaza is well known and recognized by his indigenismo, it would not be fair to classify all his work in the same way. Therefore, opening new patterns which look at mesticismo allows readers to see Icaza under a broader and more diverse creative light. My interest is to re-classify Icaza’s novels and define the spectrum of his whole body of work to include not only indigenismo, but show the process of mestization. This process is based on the mestizo and the problem caused by mestizaje. My study describes the process of mestization in order to support the concept of mesticismo in Icaza’s novels. My dissertation establishes how the mestizo develops in Icaza’s work. I adopted the concept mesticismo from the neologism introduced by Angel Rama in his critical study Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982). According to Rama, indigenismo was a construct shaped by the worldview of authors from the new rising middle class, such as Icaza. This is what Rama has called mesticismo. However, I propose a new variation of mesticismo as a concept that encompasses novels that show the process of mestization. Mestization applies to the postcolonial period and is understood in this study as the process of acculturation resulting from conquest and colonization, the strain between whites, Indians, blacks and mestizos, as well as the formation of the political process that ensured the hegemony of theoligarchic power groups. Such circumstances were leading Ecuador to create a national identity that leans on the National State. Four of Icaza’s novels can be classified as mesticistas. The novels which show the process of mestization are En las calles (1935), Cholos (1937), Media vida deslumbrados (1942), and El chulla Romero y Flores (1958). I agree that Huasipungo (1934) is an indigenist novel; however, Huairapamushcas (1948) shows the shift in emphasis toward Icaza’s treatment of the mestizo. Thus, analyzing Icaza’s work in this way gives the author the merit of being considered indigenista as well as mesticista.Item Embodied cognition, Latin pedagogy, and the rhetorical foundations of medieval vernacular poetry(2015-05) Garbacz, Robert Scott; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Johnson, Michael A; Walker, JeffreyThis dissertation uses the insights of recent cognitive science to illuminate narrative and rhetorical strategies in the Eclogue of Theodolus, a Latin debate poem, and its French and English literary descendants. The Eclogue was wildly popular in classrooms throughout the Middle Ages and modeled for students ways to respond to stories with counter-stories, demonstrating rhetorical virtuosity by transforming images, words, and ideas. In doing so, it prepared the way for vernacular literary production. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the ways the Eclogue’s narrative rhetoric, and particularly its imagery, was processedby medieval students using mental capacities recently revealed by modern cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. In the Eclogue, a character representing Christian truth triumphs over one representing pagan falsehood precisely through her ability to transform the cognitive and affective effects of the work’s visual and spatial rhetoric. Yet if the Eclogue emphasizes Christian superiority, the early French Roman d’Enéas deploys a similar specular rhetoric for a less respectable purpose. Lush descriptions of funeral monuments lure the reader away from what is otherwise the text’s central concern: legitimizing the French political order. These chapters show both the sophistication of medieval imagery and the discourses deployed to limit its power. Chapters 3 and 4 consider medieval theories of cognition. Chapter 3 focuses on the Owl and the Nightingale, a debate poem generally considered the first great work of Middle English literature. This poem undercuts the Eclogue’s lofty rhetoric by presenting myopic protagonists whose avian nature (in keeping with Neo-Aristotelian theory) is most clearly shown in their stubborn emphasis on their desires to live and kill. Similarly earthbound in its orientation is Chaucer’s House of Fame. This work, which begins with a survey of scholastic cognitive science and which offers a climactic ekphrasis in which the Eclogue takes a prominent place, offers both a deeply skeptical account of the ability of embodied humans to know the truth and a tour de force of medieval narrative rhetoric. Taken together, these discussions offer a survey of the power of medieval images on medieval brains and unearth a significant force in medieval intellectual culture.Item Exclusionary acts: Gender, race, and epidemiology in literary spaces(2005-05) Wisecup, Kelly E.; Purinton, Marjean D.; Silva, Cristobal; Shu, YuanClearly, there is something about the phenomenon of an epidemic that makes it not merely an isolated scientific occurrence, but one with social and discursive ramifications. The tendency of both popular and authoritative treatments of disease to collapse the language and considerations of science, politics, and ideology demonstrates how disease and its discourse have permeated language and culture. The language of epidemics and quarantine are central to cultural and literary definitions of exclusion and identity, so integral, in fact, that they have failed to be examined by both consumer and critical audiences.Item Exclusionary acts: gender, race, and epidemiology in literary spaces(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Wisecup, Kelly E.; Purinton, Marjean D.; Silva, Cristobal; Shu, YuanNot available.Item From the countryside and city to the edges and interstices : places and spaces of the quotidien in contemporary French film and literature(2013-05) Jones, Claire Catherine; Wettlaufer, AlexandraThis dissertation examines the use of the quotidien (the everyday) in contemporary French film and literature to understand its relationship with notions of place and space. Defined as the paradoxical process of how one repeatedly constructs each day "anew" on a routine basis, the quotidien in the texts of my analysis is not static, but rather a means for articulating changes in French communities and ways of life, while further reflecting ongoing changes to attitudes, politics, and identity. I advance current readings of the quotidien by viewing it as both descriptive, a recurring manifestation of change, as well as transformative, able to effect change. I argue that, in these depictions, the quotidien effectively erodes traditional spatial categories to create and reveal new and less stable versions. Specifically, places lose their real and symbolic sway to indeterminate spaces in which meaning is uncertain, in flux, or non-existent. My dissertation is novel for its interest in tracing the quotidien across spatial categories, so that its chapters move from the more "stable" categories of the rural and the urban to those in more obvious flux, edges and interstices. Chapter 1 studies the depicted quotidiens of rural France in Agnès Varda's film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), and Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougare's film series, Profils paysans (2000-2008). Chapter 2 investigates the quotidiens of urban centers in Cédric Klapisch's film, Chacun cherche son chat (1996), Patrick Modiano's novel, Dora Bruder (1997), and Laurent Cantet's film, Entre les murs (2008). Chapter 3 examines everyday France at the periphery of Paris in Gérard Gavarry's novel, Hop là! Un deux trois (2001). The Conclusion addresses the emergence of a new space, the interstitial, in which its dwellers float, move, or exist between places on a daily basis, such as a commute to work. I analyze Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's short film, Loin du 16ème (2006), Abdellatif Kechiche's film, La Graine et le mulet (2007), and Alain-Paul Mallard's film, L'Origine de la tendresse (1999). These mini-ethnographies of French society reveal a France grappling with issues related to globalization, shifting populations, the relative newness of the European Union, and consequently, identity. Who is French, and where does "authentic France" lie?Item Gender and class : translation and analysis of "Phislan" and "Lihaaf"(2015-05) Maredia, Farhana Noordin; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Mohammad, AfsarAfter the publication of her short story "Lihaaf" in 1942, Ismat Chughtai was tried by the British Crown on charges of obscenity. Muhammad Hasan Askari's "Phislan," although published a year earlier, was never leveled with these charges and the short story generally flew under the radar in comparison to its notorious counterpart. Throughout the years, both readers and critics alike have simplified and reduced "Phislan" and "Lihaaf" as prime examples of homoerotic Urdu literature. The vast majority of literary criticism and work on gender that references these stories maintains the view that both stories are markedly homoerotic. However, the fact that the characters in both stories negotiate arguably homosocial spaces suggests that it might be more important to focus on the issues of sexuality and gender taking place rather than fixating on labeling the sexuality itself. To refocus this attention more broadly toward these issues exposes the importance of class, an aspect of the two stories that does not receive its due, proportionate interest. This paper presents original translations of Askari's "Phislan" and Chughtai's "Lihaaf," and then undertakes an analysis of the aforementioned issues of sexuality, gender and class.Item Harboring narratives : notes towards a literature of the Mediterranean(2015-08) Lovato, Martino; Tissières, Hélène; Ali, Samer; Bonifazio, Paola; El-Ariss, Tarek; Harlow, Barbara; Bouchard, NormaThrough the reading of several novels and movies produced in Arabic, French, and Italian between the 1980s and the 2000s, in this dissertation I provide a literary and transmedia contribution to the field of Mediterranean studies. Responding to the challenge brought by the regional category of Mediterranean to singular national and linguistic understandings of literature and cinema, I employ a comparative and multidisciplinary methodology to read novels by Baha’ Taher, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Abdelmalek Smari, and movies by film directors Merzak Allouache, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Vittorio De Seta. I define these works as “harboring narratives,” as they engage with the two shores of the Mediterranean in a complex process of interiorization and negotiation, opening routes of meaning across languages, societies and cultures. As they challenge constructions of otherness that materialize in present-day conflicts in the region, the works of these novelists and filmmakers give voice to a perspective on the Mediterranean radically different from that upheld by the “paradigms of discord.” Whereas according to these paradigms there is nothing in the Mediterranean but an iron curtain, these works present migration and conflict, historiography and religion, intimacy and translation as experiences shared across countries and societies in the region. By following routes of meaning that draw together the linguistic, the geographical, the economic, the historical, and the religious, I study how these novelists and filmmakers establish relationships between “horizons of belonging” and “elsewhere,” selfhood and otherness. In so doing, I respond to Kinoshita and Mallette’s call for challenging the “monolingualism” inherent in our contemporary ways of reading linguistic and literary traditions. As I show how the routes of meaning opened by these novelists and filmmakers across the region lead to hope that one day we will rejoice in sharing a common Mediterranean shore, however, I caution against easy enthusiasms. These novelists and filmmakers urge us to respond to the challenge of the present-day conflicts they address in their works, and a shared Mediterranean shore will eventually appear on the horizon only after we overcome monolingual conceptions of selfhood and otherness, setting sail towards a shore we have never seen.Item Identification in Posthumanist Rhetoric: Trauma and Empathy(2012-11-21) Larsen, Amy Marie 1984-Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans? superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though ?post-? implies after, like other ?post-? terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them. The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another?s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring. his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.Item Kurt Vonnegut in the U.S.S.R.(2012-08) Skorobogatov, Yana; Neuberger, Joan, 1953-; Lawrence, Mark ASince the mid-twentieth century, Kurt Vonnegut has enjoyed a permanent spot on the list of history’s most widely read and beloved American authors. Science fiction classics like Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) turned Vonnegut into a domestic counter-cultural literary sensation in the United States at mid-century. The presence of a loyal Vonnegut fan base in America, and in the west more broadly, is a well-documented fact. What is less well known among scholars and those familiar with Vonnegut’s work is his popularity in a far more distant place: the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1960s, Soviet citizens developed a voracious appetite for Vonnegut’s. Translations of his novels appeared regularly in daily newspapers and highbrow literary journals alike; a play adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five enjoyed a multi-season run in the Moscow Army Theater; average citizens competed for membership in Vonnegut’s karass. These examples are suggestive of the ways that Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction literature can serve as a gateway for scholars seeking to understand the Soviet Union during the 1970s. This report contends that Soviet interest in Vonnegut’s dystopian science fiction reflected larger shifts in Soviet attitudes towards pacifism, technology, individual wellbeing, human rights, and past and present wars. It situates these ideas in the context of domestic and global events to illustrate how the peculiar political conditions of the 1970s made this ideological convergence possible. It employs original American and Russian language sources, including Russian newspapers and journals, letters written by Vonnegut’s Russian translator, and Kurt Vonnegut’s own fan mail. At its core, this report challenges the assumption that political and ideological differences precluded Soviet and American citizens from identifying the conditions necessary for ensuring social and technological progress and a future without war.Item La literatura de viaje española del siglo XIX, una tipología(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Roussel-Zuazu, ChantalThis typology of the XlXth century peninsular travel literature offers a model for possible fiiture studies of the travel literature of different centuries and different countries and leads to the tracking of a possible evolution of the subgenres proposed. In the light of numerous previous and recent efforts of classification by authors such as: Angela Pérez Mejía, Femando Cristovaô, Lily Litvak, Otmar Ette, Charles Batten and many more, and as they transcend a chronological order or an evolution according to the literary trends of the century, the subgenres are based on content, which was determined to be the best way to proceed. The findings of this study show that what determines the subgenres is, besides the examination of the content, the didactic intention of the author combined with the specific reader horizon of expectations for the particular travel book. The travel book of the "aesthetic-cuitural" type includes authors such as el Duque de Rivas (Angel de Saavedra), Pedro de Alarcôn, Amôs de Escalante and Benito Pérez Galdôs; the travel book of the "economic-social" type includes authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Ramon de Mesonero Romanos, and Angel Ganivet; the travel book of the "scientifîc-historicar" type includes authors such as Felix de Azara, Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, Manuel Almagro, and Ciro Bayo, and the travel book of the philosophical-political type includes authors such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Miguel de Unamuno and Federico García Lorca. Works that belong to the "costumbrismo" movement that are classed as "artístico-literarias" have not been included in this study because of their remote relation to the main body of travel literature. The authors are famous writers of the nineteenth century well knovm to Spanish readers of the time.Item Las Escrituras del Margen. En Torno a los Territorios Can?nicos de la Literatura Latinoamericana(2013-12-09) Ayarza-Riveros, Luis CarlosLas Escrituras del Margen: En torno a los territorios can?nicos de la literature contempor?nea Latinoamericana. Lorenzo Garc?a Vega, Jorge Gait?n Dur?n, and Nicol?s G?mez D?vila, is the study of some works that have been marginalized in contemporary Latin American canons. These writings, without being absolutely unknown however, occupy a marginal level of attention to secular junior and academic criticism (and therefore are rarely studied or proposed in the reading lists of literature programs ). Among these texts are the following: memoirs, diaries, travel journals and epigrammatic writings such as scholia, and aphorisms. In this project are analyzed the oeuvres of three Latin American authors: Diario de Viaje by Jorge Gait?n Dur?n (travel diary), El Oficio de Perder (memories) by, Lorenzo Garc?a Vega, and Escolios a un texto implicito (scholia) by Nicol?s G?mez D?vila . This thesis examines how the historical and geopolitical contexts in which these texts were written, and also, the life experience of the authors, contribute to determining not only its marginalization of the canons, but also, how these texts, because of their unique nature, enter into an active dialogue with their respective traditions, and in the process of this dialogue enrich them, but also problematize them. As a result, new ways to think the canons and canonical criteria are opened. As main theoretical sources the works of authors, Gilles Deleuze, F?lix Guattari, Edward Said and Harold Bloom were used. From the first authors, their ideas on minor literature, the rhizome and flows. From Edward Said's his works on late style, exile and from Harold Bloom the books: The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence. During the investigation was paid special attention to concepts such as exile, acculturation and literary influences. Were also investigated topics such as travel, relationships between age and creative processes, writing and the visual arts, distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, sedentary lifestyle, and nomadism among others.Item Let the waters flow : (trans)locating Afro-Latina feminist thought(2013-12) Zamora, Omaris Zunilda; Arroyo, JossiannaWhen thinking specifically of transnationalism, African diaspora and the fluidity of identity: Where do we locate Afro-Latina women? The answer for this question would seem to come from a Black or Chicano feminist thought, nonetheless, these theoretical frameworks have static spaces where fluid subjectivities like that of Afro-Latina women are not recognized. This report frames a theoretical conversation between these two frameworks through a dialectic discussion of their empty spaces or limits and proposes a new approach to Afro-Latina feminism based on the processes and intersections of Black consciousness, sexuality, and the knowledges that are created through the body and its fluidity. More importantly, paying close attention to the roles of translocation, transformation, and the fluidity of identity. In furthering this theoretical conversation, under the theme of Afro-Latina women, this report takes on the case of Dominican women’s transnational experiences and their different dimensions as represented in novels like, Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Ana Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Looking specifically at the relationships between women and women, and women and their bodies as being transformed through the sacred, this report concludes that the centrality of Afro-Latina women’s experience is in recognizing that the body as an archive, is a place from where knowledges are re-created and disseminated creating a feminist epistemology for themselves.Item Letters from the Goodwill Brothers of Basra : a medieval Islamic message of tolerance and pluralism(2012-05) Fares, Michael James; Ali, Samer M.; Spellberg, Denise“We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.”Newt Gingrich said the above words in reference to the recent “ground-zero mosque debate”, a heated media controversy which surrounded plans for the Park 51 Islamic Community Center to open in downtown Manhattan on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Assuming a necessary enmity between America and Islam, Gingrich’s claims seem rooted in the theory of a “Clash of Civilizations”. This theory envisions “the West” and “Islam” as diametrically opposed entities with no common values, and has become widely pervasive in informing much of post-9/11 America’s political and academic discourse. When chalked up against the social, cultural, and literary history of Islam, however, the Clash of Civilizations theory is a poor fit. For medieval Arabo-Islamic culture saw a vast rise of humanistic literature bearing a clear multi-civilizational influence. The Letters of the Goodwill Brothers of Basra constitute one of the most overlooked of these works. Composed by a group of 10th century Abbasid Muslim littérateurs, the 52 Letters draw parallels between the teachings of Islam and those of prior great wisdom traditions, including Indian and Ancient Greek wisdom, Judaism, and Christianity. Focusing on the way the Letters frame Islam in the context of perennial human wisdom, I show how this text is ultimately an irenic text aimed at promoting religious tolerance and cooperation in the tumultuous sectarian atmosphere of 10th century Abbasid Iraq. I argue ultimately that the irenic message of the Letters presents an alternative narrative to the Clash of Civilizations theory, a narrative of tolerance from the Islamic past by which our own society may benefit when it comes to the relationships between American Muslims and non-Muslims.
- «
- 1 (current)
- 2
- 3
- »