The Eye, the Street, and the Modern Painter: The City from Poe to Joyce.
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
This thesis examines the development of the image of the modern metropolis in conjunction with a unique type of literary hero who appears in literature during the eighteenth century: the city spectator. While investigations of the urban observer have surfaced in many divergent contexts and literary periods, most accounts of the subject rely, to varying degrees, on the same core narrative and assumptions implicit to Walter Benjamin's seminal theorizations of the figure of the flâneur. Drawing attention to the distinction between historical and literary spectators of metropolitan spaces, this dissertation proposes an alternative approach to the genesis and development of the figure of the urban observer in Western fiction. Offering a corrective to the discourse of the flâneur, this study argues that the origins of the historical and the literary spectator are dramatically different and evaluates the latter figure as a fluid motif that presupposes a wide range of gradually changing assumptions about subjectivity, visuality, and urban presentation.
The Movie Men: The Male Body as Spectacle in European Cinema
Author:
Giorgio Galbussera
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation is a study of the ways in which several European directors have put the male body at the center of their cinematic vision, potentially reversing the traditional mechanism of filmic objectification of the female body. My analysis traces the display of the male body in a selection of films by Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, Pedro Almodóvar, and several contemporary French filmmakers. While all of these directors engage in a more or less open voyeurism in the way they offer attractive male bodies to the visual enjoyment of the spectator, highlighting the homoerotic potential of the cinematic gaze, they simultaneously use the exposed bodies to promote a critique of the mechanisms of mainstream narrative cinema, in particular as it relates to masculinity and the construction of gender.
Truth, Lies, and Issues of Authenticity: A Study of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
This is a study of the lie at the intersection of philosophy and literature, as it applies to Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus, especially as embedded in the system of thought of each author. A sub-theme of this investigation is the application of the terms as it applies to gender issues and examples. Thus there is a feminist lens of scrutiny in this study. The logical paradoxes, inconsistencies, and tensions found in each author are uncovered, as well as the strengths of each. The study ends with implciations for future reseaerch.
(Re)Forming Italians: Children's Literature in Italy, 1929-1939
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Eugenia Paulicelli
My dissertation argues for the centrality of children's literature under Fascism as a tool to bring about the ultimate goal of forming the "new" Italian. This project examines the relationship between children's literature, the creation of culture and the transmission of ideology in Fascist Italy. I chose the period 1929-1939 because this decade encompasses the years the regime actively sought consolidation of power and consensus, as well as the years of the fascistization of Italian schools. These novels are conduits of fascist ideology veiled as adventure stories, historical novels, bildungsroman or romantic fiction for children and young adults and deserve scholarly attention.
A Literary History of the Trojan War from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
"A Literary History of the Trojan War from Antiquity to the Middle Ages" analyzes the various renditions of the mythical and historical accounts of the Trojan War from Homer to Shakespeare. It contains a discussion of the stylistic, literary and generic changes these stories underwent as authors over time and across Europe translated and adapted their sources to make them relevant to contemporary audiences. The work also examines two important political and historical themes: the use of a Trojan genealogy to justify claims of political legitimacy and the use of Troy to critique and comment on the author's age. Both are present in The Iliad and The Odyssey; they also play an important role in Pindar's odes, wherein athletic competition is often compared to martial combat, and in Attic tragedy, wherein the sack of Troy serves as a cautionary exemplum for Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
Resistance Histories: Contemporary Literary Reconstructions of National History
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Eugenia Paulicelli
This study identifies and analyzes methods by which contemporary literary works contest officially sanctioned national histories and present alternative national histories. The dissertation uses the term "resistance histories" to refer to literary texts that participate in critiques of traditional modes of historical and literary representations of the nation, while also interrogating the connection between history and story. The resistance histories discussed in the dissertation include novels, poetry, criticism, and hybrid works by: Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Eavan Boland, Antonio Tabucchi, Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Vincenzo Consolo. While many studies of the connections between literature and national historical identity discuss these issues either in primarily theoretical terms or by focusing on one national (or regional) context, this dissertation incorporates a comparative emphasis, placing diverse texts in conversation with each other to investigate the reasons for their confluence of style despite different national referents. The techniques explored include a rejection of traditional literary realism through the use of alternative generic elements (including magical realism, science fiction, telenovelas, comics, and hybrid works that draw on various genres), nonstandard national language (foreign languages, dialects, vernaculars, and different registers), and the explicit questioning of historical representation (often equating narrative and historical representation by focusing on the element of artifice contained in the construction of both types of narration). The dissertation draws on scholarship in areas related to historiography, nationalism, genre, culture, gender, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.
MAKE ROOM FOR MOTHER: A STUDY OF MOTHERHOOD AND THE MATERNAL INSTINCT IN 20th CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Eugenia Paulicelli
Abstract
To Have and Have Not: A Poetics of Ambivalence in the Ciné-écriture of Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Abstract
Varieties of Ecstatic Autobiography: James Joyce to Jean Genet
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation examines how Modernist autobiographical prose texts centralize ecstasy, the paradoxical experience of being beyond the normal awareness of self and time. Even seminal autobiographers such as Augustine and Rousseau confront problems in self-representation that are themselves rooted in both the limitations of linear time for articulating certain moments in a life and narrative reliance on absolute distinctions between the sentient subject and the world's objects. Alternative modern models on literary subjectivity and perspectives on discontinuous time are distilled from essays by Walter Pater, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin. I integrate these literary interventions with phenomenological theories of subject-object collaboration in sensation and perception and Leo Bersani's theory of reciprocity between the self as an 'aesthetic subject,' and the world. The project then turns to a reexamination of autobiographical projects by James Joyce, Colette, and Jean Genet. Even it in its earliest draft forms, Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) equates the spontaneous linguistic inventions in childhood with a foundational, sense-based form of body-world association that is severely undermined by the civilizing maturation of Stephen Dedalus, a predicament informed by Joyce's interest in cyclical theories about human history. Turning to the work of Colette, I evaluate how her novel about music-hall pantomime and dance, La Vagabonde (1910) and her pictorial and poetic memoir La Naissance du jour (1928) depict ecstatic experience in figurations of silence and solitude, breaking with the representational style around dialogue and sociability most associated with her literary self-portraits. Jean Genet's first and final memoirs Journal du voleur (1947) and Un Captif amoureux (1986), as well as his hybrid fragment essays on perception and the visual and plastic arts exemplify how lived experiences achieve significance only when their latent ecstatic properties are articulated in a nonlinear lyrical form. The dissertation concludes by suggesting how the force of authorial presence and the ecstatic dimensions of experiences are reconciled in the materiality of a highly personalized language, a perspective made paradigmatic by the idiosyncratic style of autobiographer Michel Leiris.
DOUBLE-DEALINGS AND DOUBLE MEANINGS: DOUBTING AND KNOWING IN EUROPEAN `ANALYTICAL' FICTION
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation is a survey of what I call "analytical fiction" in nine representative texts: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, Lyly's Euphues, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, Lafayette's Princess of Clèves, Richardson's Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Austen's Persuasion, and Stendhal's Armance. My thesis examines the underlying motifs and narrative temperament of a sub-genre that depicts how narrators and characters dissect, anatomize, and interpret their own thoughts, motivations, and actions in literature written well before the formalization of psychoanalytic theory. Analytical fiction is ultimately about reading; it is concerned with the relationship between knowledge and feeling in characters, and the networks of understanding between authors and readers, between narrators and characters, and between one character and another. The plots of analytical fiction comprise narrators and characters who are constantly faced with false, incomplete, or withheld information, misprision, doubt, and confusion, leading to self-deception, jealousy, and crises of love. Above all, what these works share is a tendency on the part of the narration to keep characters apart, to trap them in a closed, confusing society, and to defer, for as long as possible, any chance of intimacy, finality, or resolution.