A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles delineates the correspondences between Los Angeles spaces--exterior, topographical, architectural, and imaginary--and aspects of the self--interiority, identity, experience, and desire--in fictional and non-fictional depictions of Los Angeles. Through close readings of key Los Angeles novels, essays, and films, this project emphasizes how the narrative "I" traverses urban space, focusing on the dissolution of boundaries between self and place. Los Angeles' sprawling, decentralized layout and rapidly-shifting landscape have a profound influence on narrative identity, generating a volatile and disquieting sense of self; this project also explores how the city's unique spatial orientation contributes to a literature and cinema of disillusionment exclusive to Los Angeles.
Making Conversation: The Poetics of Voice in Modernist Fiction
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation examines the function of dialogue within modernist fiction, and argues that it can be seen to assume a substantially expanded and diversified role in early twentieth-century narrative texts. While existing accounts of fictional speech stress its capacity to develop character or advance plot, I contend that modernist authors began using speech differently than it had historically been used in the novel: less for characterizing and plot-advancing purposes, than for rhetorical and poetic ones. My primary case studies include a cross-section of British and American modernist texts - including Henry James's The Ambassadors, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, James Joyce's "The Dead," Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! - as well as examples from post-War Italian narrative, which reflect the influence of Anglophone modernism. Through close, comparative analyses of how fictional voice is deployed in these texts, and by drawing on a range of literary and narrative theory (by Mikhail Bakhtin, Franco Moretti, and Sharon Cameron among others) I demonstrate that these writers frequently "make" conversation less to express character, than to communicate ideas or affects that exceed character. In particular, I disclose the tendency for discourse within these fictional environments to belong to more than one speaker - or conversely, to none. By challenging the attributive logic used to make sense of represented speech, these texts encourage us to refocus our critical attention away from discrete utterances, and toward the larger system of utterances that emerges in a given work. In this way, I argue, modernist fiction seems to demand (and reward) a new mode of reading and interpreting fictional dialogue: one which takes into account how characters say, as well as what they say, and which treats dialogue's form as at least as rich a source of meaning as its content.
The Politics of Laughter in Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" and Cervantes' "Don Quixote"
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Abstract
"Double Consciousness" and "Dual-Voice": Ambivalence and Free Indirect Style in Novels and Films
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
This project compares and analyzes five novels and three films: Jane Austen's Emma, Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment and Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's. This dissertation describes a link between the uses of free indirect style, a "dual-voiced" narrative mode that combines two distinct perspectives into one instance of discourse: that of a narrator and that of a character, and psychological ambivalence, the back and forth wavering of a fictional character. This dissertation focuses on novels and narrative fiction films that center on one character, and it shows the ways in which these works call attention to a character's ambivalence and hesitations while relying on free indirect style, a formally ambivalent narrative mode, to expose and, at times, to create ambivalence in the mind of the reader or viewer. As an interdisciplinary project, this dissertation locates free indirect style in prose and cinematic narration, and it also explores the implications of analyzing a traditionally linguistic and literary mode within cinema.
A SPIRIT OF THE EARTH: VITALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Author:
Anastassiya Andrianova
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Felicia Bonaparte
A Spirit of the Earth: Vitalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature studies a movement that began in reaction to Mechanism, the view that all natural phenomena, including life, could be explained by observable physical causes. Due to its emphasis on material causation, Mechanism is interchangeable with empiricism, which holds that knowledge is based on experience and regular observation, and, by extension, with the Positivist application of the scientific method outside the natural world. Unlike the Mechanists, Vitalist scientists insisted that there was more to life than physico-chemical processes; life demanded a special cause: what Henri Bergson called the élan vital and Bernard Shaw--"the Life Force."
Postmodern Metafiction Revisited
Author:
Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Program:
Comparative Literature
By its ostensible definition, metafiction is fiction that dramatizes its own construction, proffering constant reminders of its artificiality. The term "metafiction," however, is hardly transparent. "Metafiction" is in danger of having an array of definitions, and, because it is believed to be equated with postmodern fiction, it is often associated with the literature of the eighties and therefore appears outdated. Through an examination of various novels mainly from the twentieth century and literature of the West, this dissertation unifies the multiple definitions that have been assigned to the term and provides a typology that facilitates the identification of the metafictional novel. In addition, this dissertation revisits certain assumptions that have clung to the term arbitrarily, namely that metafiction is ahistorical and apolitical because it is self-referential. Beginning with a theoretical approach that views metafiction as a postmodern phenomenon borrowing from structural and post-structural thought, this study comparatively explores metafiction's most recent manifestations and concludes by questioning metafiction's affinity to postmodernism.
The Ethical Pact: Storytelling in Contemporary Autobiography
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Abstract
Dead Man's Space and the Language of Democracy on the American Frontier
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Daniel E. Colleran
On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's complex involvement with the politics of historical representation and of historiography in general. It demonstrates how both authors repeatedly offered alternative visions of history so as to contradict prevailing meta-narratives about social progress in eighteenth-century France and, subsequently for Shelley, in early nineteenth-century England. Their historical thought not only shaped the political arguments they put to their own contemporaries, but also provides us with a framework in which to reconfigure their political relevance today. In this way, this dissertation responds to the work of James Swenson, Susan Wolfson, Mark Kipperman, and Jerome Christensen, by offering a new direction for the recent critical debate about the political potency of Romantic texts in the twenty-first century. The first two chapters explore Rousseau and Shelley's interest in histories that are politically contentious and how they construct their political arguments as well as their own political identities within historical frameworks. The third chapter charts the intellectual history that links the planting of corn, or large-scale agriculture, with imperial progress, starting with Defoe, who celebrates corn in Robinson Crusoe as Providence's prompt for Western colonial expansion. In his discourse on inequality, Rousseau historicizes the planting of corn, or blé, as the moment of social and economic debasement and corruption, thereby rejecting Defoe's politics and vision of historical progress. Shelley's father-in-law, William Godwin, delineates in his historical novel, St. Leon, the process by which governments have subjugated populations through subsidizing large-scale agriculture time and time again. The forth chapter lays out how Shelley adopts the radical agrarian politics of Rousseau and Godwin, and the historical frameworks in which these politics are configured, in such melancholy reflections on social degeneration. The final chapter argues that Shelley's historical drama, The Cenci, is not only a critique of the degeneration of popular theater, but also a radical recasting of theatrical poetics that agitates for a political response from the audience through a reenactment of social history.
L'ossessione della frode. La menzogna nel romanzo moderno
Author:
Angelo Raffaele Dicuonzo
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
The subject of the dissertation is the art of lying in literature, specifically in the modern novel and its Italian variant in particular. First, it examines authorial condemnation of the dishonesty of power, its fraudulent ends, means and mechanisms, and second, analyses the language and style employed in such a denouncement, in which the rejection of the artificial quality of literature is itself embedded.