The Insular Iscariot: Judas in Medieval British and Irish Literary Traditions
Author:
Christopher Leydon
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Because the betrayal is closely connected to the crucifixion and the resurrection, Judas Iscariot, perhaps the most infamous personage of the New Testament, occupies a privileged place in the Christian imagination. Judas figures prominently in patristic commentaries and exegetics, as well as in a number of extra-canonical texts and traditions from late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and beyond. This project considers the matter of Judas in two apocryphal legends of the later Middle Ages, situating them between canonical and extra-canonical traditions, and focuses on their circulation in British and Irish manuscripts. This original research rests upon a philological foundation, correcting a number of errors in previous scholarship on these texts.
An Algerien Primer: Mouloud Feraoun's Le Fils du pauvre, Translation Commentary
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
My 2005 translation of Mouloud Feraoun's Le Fils du pauvre, Menrad, instituteur kabyle, sought to correct an historical error by presenting this Algerian Francophone classic to an American audience for the first time since its publication in 1950. A central figure of the first generation of Algerian intellectuals to compellingly represent in fictional form the internal lives of native people during the era of French colonialism, Feraoun (1917-1962) embodied a moderate, humanist, culturally situated viewpoint that was ultimately sacrificed by all sides to the extremism and violence of decolonization. Choosing to work from the original edition, rather than the edition edited for French audiences on the eve of the Algerian revolution, my translation restores an entire section of the novel and offers a new glimpse of Feraoun's larger literary project.
Dante's Transmutation of Classical Friendship
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Caught in the Crossfire: A Critical English Translation of the New York City Prison Letters of St. John de Crèvecoeur
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
The present study is a critical edition and translation into English of the New York City prison letters of St. John de Crèvecoeur. The letters were first published in French in the 1784 and 1787 editions of Lettres d'un cultivateur américain. Until now, these five autobiographical stories of the author's 1779 incarceration by the British during the American Revolution have been unavailable to English readers. Consisting of a critical introduction, annotated translation, photographs, illustrations, and an appendix, this dissertation fuses the literary with the historical. St. John de Crèvecoeur's suspenseful, impassioned account of the most harrowing experience in his life is amplified by historical research that fleshes out wartime events and the actual lives of his fellow sufferers in the notorious Provost Gaol.
The Rise of the American Culture of Sensationalism: 1620-1860
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
Much has been written about the unprecedented proliferation of sensationalist literature in the nineteenth century but very little about its origins. Such an oversight leaves our sense of early American literary history incomplete and even distorted by some persistent misconceptions about the concept of sensationalism and its place in American culture. In this dissertation I devise methodical ways of approaching this subject and explain its significance in the formation of American literary conventions. My project expands the scope of recent scholarship on sensationalist literature by examining the two areas which have so far been neglected in American studies: the origins of the American tradition of sensationalism and its place in the transatlantic context. As I demonstrate, the spectacular rise of sensationalist literature in the nineteenth century was not a spontaneous development. It grew out of a long domestic tradition of sensationalist rhetoric that emerged in the colonial period--much earlier than what is commonly perceived as the first significant outbreak of literary sensationalism in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Furthermore, patterns of provocative rhetoric, which also emerged early in the colonial period, formed an enduring rhetorical tradition whose proponents relied on a set of recognizable conventions that made a notable impact on American literary history.
Religiously Based Morality in the Theatre of Alexander Ostrovsky
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Abstract
Blood: A Victorian Idea in the Flesh
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Felicia Bonaparte
Abstract
The Stability of Laughter, On the Comic Aesthetic in Modernist Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
This dissertation looks at European Modernism in light of one of its more neglected priorities: its rethinking of the nature of comedy and humor. The use of comic elements in the work of Luigi Pirandello, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Samuel Beckett betrays a radical rethinking of the meaning of laughter and humor. As such, the theoretical predecessor to the Modernist use of the comic is Baudelaire, whose essay, "Sur l'essence du rire," details a complete upending of traditional ideas of laughter. No longer merely the representative phenomenon of "happiness" and "joy," laughter becomes the signpost par excellence of modern notions of ambiguity and instability which implicates the laugher as much as the laughed-at. Since Baudelaire's essay also reads laughter as a marker of character, it anticipates the Modernist use of one's sense of humor as a way of dramatizing one's subjectivity. What makes one laugh at nine years old is not always what makes him laugh at twenty-nine, the same way a Chinese man may not find the same thing funny as a man from Argentina. When a character laughs at something, an unconscious mode of communication is on display, one that dramatizes that character's specific subjectivity at the moment of the laughter. This is what Joyce works off of when he contrasts Bloom's playful sense of humor with the more violent mockery of his fellow Dubliners in Ulysses. This is about forging an emotional link or a profound disconnect between the psyches of individuals that is recognized in purely dramatic fashion. The exclusivity of the relationship between laugher and laugher, or between laugher and laughed-at, coupled with the comic's appeal to the universality of human laughter--we are the only species that laughs according to Aristotle and Darwin, which means as a species we all laugh--is what makes of the comic into a remarkably ambiguous aesthetic that operates in that no-man's land between the danger of life's myriad ironies and the safety of traditional comic values of community and happy endings. This dissertation deals with this in-between zone.
The Sage and the Fool: Antithesis, Paradoxy, and Reconciliation in a Dialectical Poetics of "Moriasophia"
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
This study places the text and method of The Praise of Folly in a European context of folly-and-wisdom discourse, called here “moriasophia.” Moriasophia is a perennial theme with literary-historical origins, often depicted as two opposing figures in debate, or as a single, free-thinking individual confronting the dominant social, moral, and political order, or as a literary author writing in the ironic mode of truth-in-fiction. This study analyzes the literary trope on a theoretical level, demonstrating how a bivalent discourse of jest and earnest functions rhetorically and dialectically to explore and verify metaphysical, moral, and epistemological inferences. At issue is whether the breach between literary and logical methods may be reconciled by Folly, as she transforms images of ignorance and malice into likenesses of holy idiocy. Thematic continuity and cultural synthesis is demonstrated in ancient through early modern literature. The discussion emphasizes the seminal figures of Socrates, Diogenes, St. Paul, and Dionysius the Areopagite, with particular attention paid to Plato's Parmenides, Petrarch's On his own Ignorance, and Nicholas of Cusa's On Learned Ignorance and Idiota on Wisdom. The Praise of Folly represents a cultural high point not only because of its command of precedents, literary creativity, and rhetorical sophistication, but because Erasmus invents novel ways of engaging the reader in substantial questions about language, knowledge, and faith. The result is a new generic blueprint, a dialectical poetic which invites theoretical speculation even as it provokes an affective response to human experience.
Scrivere la diversità: autobiografia e politica in Clara Sereni
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Eugenia Paulicelli
This monographic study provides a thematic examination across Clara Sereni's texts of life writing (autobiographies and one memoir) and fictional works. As the dissertation aims to demonstrate, writing is for Sereni a political act. The text, in fact, becomes her space to develop a female stance that asserts the importance of the private realm, reevaluate interpersonal and intergenerational relations, and show that diversity can be seen as a positive resource in society.