The Aesthetics of Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
ABSTRACT
Tempo della Morte e Spazio dell'Azione: Francis Ford Coppola in Tulsa
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Abstract
From Theater to Cinematography: the Disquiet of Modernity in Pirandello and His Contemporaries
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
GIANCARLO LOMBARDI
From Theater to Cinematography: The Disquiet of Modernity in Pirandello and His Contemporaries investigates visual perception from the mid-nineteenth century until 1929, tracing the developments and controversies that would lead to the first talking films. Defining
Fairy Tales: a world between the imaginary-Metaphor at play in Lo cunto de li cunti by Gianbattista Basile
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Giuseppe DiScipio
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
The Bungled One: Failure and the Fictional Impetus
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
Fictional narrative is the ability to see what "I" cannot. If in "life," that is, in space and in time, we cannot see where we are precisely because we are spatially and temporally situated, fictional narrative permits an Archimedean point, a perspective from outside, allowing us a product: a beginning, middle and end that we, real flesh-and-blood readers, cannot have in our own lives. The paradox, then, is that this narrative vision cannot represent our vision. This, we might say, defines the realm of the fictional. The same applies to the relationship between the writer and what he/she writes: the voice, the "I" of the author necessarily is elided, consumed in its own creation. In the end, narration is always incomplete. One can never create a narrative that includes the act of writing, or even the impulse to write. To recount anything requires a super-human stance, a fictional stance if fiction is understood in its broadest sense. The narratorial position is diaphanous in relation to that which it narrates; it is a position that is not simply outside the act of narration, but of a different modality. As narration approaches the moment of narrating, expression fails; just before the ultimate silence, the narrative's last words could only approximate, "I am writing, I am writing, I am writing..."
The Mysteries of History: Adaptations and Reconfigurations of Contemporary Crime Fiction on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Eugenia Paulicelli
ABSTRACT
Warscapes: Perspectives on a Literature of Postcolonial Violence
Author:
Bhakti Shringarpure
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
My dissertation explores civil violence in the postcolony and its representation in contemporary literature. Whether in the form of civil war in Algeria, genocide in Rwanda or religious riots in India, these events are a direct result of the political, legal and intellectual foundation of colonialism. Representation of this internecine violence is widespread in novels, poetry and drama, but it remains an under-explored topic in postcolonial studies. Firstly, my dissertation offers a historical and theoretical approach to locate the origins of this phenomenon through a re-reading of the writings of thinkers and leaders of decolonization, especially Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi and Amilcar Cabral. A scrutiny of the climate and theories of this period allows for an understanding of why most former colonies failed to make successful transition into independent nation-states and have instead become settings of gruesome civil conflicts. This section becomes the theoretical context within which my chosen corpus of literature can be placed. Secondly, drawing from approximately thirty postcolonial novels about civil violence, I examine their representations of the nation, the figure of the "other," space and architecture, violence, gender and children. Lastly, I formulate a critique of the field of postcolonial studies and simultaneously expand its scope by including this hitherto under-examined literature.
FREEDOM TURNED AGAINST ITSELF: STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE OF SUICIDE
Author:
Christopher Trogan
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Vincent Crapanzano
By the late eighteenth century, with the growing emphasis on the self, suicide had become a widespread topic of literary and philosophical debate in Europe. Not since antiquity had references to self-death occurred with such frequency and commanded such serious intellectual attention. Major Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Kant, Mill, Rousseau, and Voltaire contributed to a budding discussion of suicide and personal freedom which led to a variety of literary stances over the next three centuries in the works of Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, Ibsen, Camus, and Sartre. Each of these authors approached suicide within the context of various forms of individual freedom - moral, social, spiritual, and existential.
Reexamining `The Dancer and the Dance': Postmodern Considerations in Contemporary Irish and Italian Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Comparative Literature
Advisor:
Giancarlo Lombardi
Adviser: Professor Giancarlo Lombardi
Writing the Acoustic Self in English Modernism
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Program:
Comparative Literature
The dissertation maps the different modes employed for the musicalization of fiction in English modernism, mainly focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. While music is usually present on the level of structure and characterization in these texts, I claim that even its structural applications are related to characterization and address modernist dilemmas regarding the notions of self and identity. I delineate three modes of musicalization in English modernist fiction-the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk-and argue that they are interrelated with an emerging modernist critique of the subject. Employing methods of narrative theory, semiotics, and musical semiotics, I aim to show how music, in its paradoxical relationship with representation and language, generates an interference within fictional texts, creating an aporia that allows for an analogy with the constitution of human subjectivity.