Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations
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Browsing Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations by Author "Allan, Michael"
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Item Open Access Borders of the Global Anglophone: Locality, Language, and Feminist Futures in Namibian Literature(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Ndakalako, Martha; Allan, MichaelBorders of the Global Anglophone considers the radical possibilities of three post-independence Anglophone literary works by Black Namibian women—at the intersection of debates in global Anglophone literature, African Studies, and transnational feminisms. Across the three chapters, I show how these paradigmatic texts employ innovative storytelling practices to envision feminist community and decolonized futures. In their unconventional use of form, language, media, and publishing formats, these texts call attention to the politics of local and global literary production and the potentials of transnational feminist theory for conversations about literary form and postnational identity. I consider how print culture informs the reception of texts, and I emphasize how multilingual language-use both reframes encounters with empire and negotiates between global English and local vernaculars. In so doing, I gesture to the borders of the global Anglophone and demonstrate how these literatures at the edges of the literary world engage the gendered, linguistic, and local politics of writing and reading in Namibia.Item Open Access 'Here is the Story': Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Sturgis O'Coyne, Laurel; Allan, MichaelWell into the late-twentieth century, monolingualism persists as an organizing principle for national community even as the intrinsic multilingualism of the Americas nourishes interconnected histories and political imaginaries. My dissertation—'Here is the Story’: Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures—is a comparative study of a transnational and multilingual Americas. Across three chapters, I compare three authors’ works in which narrations of kinship unsettle a monolingual imaginary and disrupt settler colonial patrimonies. I explore English interlaced with Nahuatl and Spanish in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); French woven with Antillean Créole in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia (1996); and English-language narration imbued with Laguna Pueblo language and cosmologies in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). The features of these multilingual texts imagine interrelated histories among hemispheric American languages, cultures, and ecologies and at once articulate differing shapes of kinship: a linear shape in Anzaldúa’s invocation of hybrid Aztec (Nahua) and Spanish ancestry; a networked, rhizomatic shape evoking eco-feminist relationality in the Creolized French of Pineau’s memorial novel; and multi-scalar webs of matter-energy wovenness in Silko’s narrative that produce a spiraling shape of kinship inclusive of more-than-human relations and nonlinear temporalities. This project centers on a study of language and epistemology through which I analyze postcolonial and decolonial modes of affiliation in familial, political, historical, and ecological imaginaries, and which ultimately promotes a practice of comparison that asserts hemispheric literariness in terms of epistemological (re)weavings of self, ancestry, and place.Item Open Access Hydropoetics: Myth, Reality, and Literature in the Eastern Nile Basin(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Endalew, Yewulsew; Allan, MichaelHow do literary and folkloric traditions of the Nile inform the region’s water politics? My dissertation answers this question by analyzing poetry and songs from Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt—three of the five countries of the Eastern Nile Basin. I take the Nile as a quintessential site for comparison across regions, languages, and genres at the intersection of African Studies, comparative literature, and global cultural studies. In the various chapters of my project, I consider how poetry is, at times, inseparable of the nationalist projects of respective governments and, at other times, a challenge to the constraints of cultural and linguistic identity, nationalism, and the legacies of historical water treaties. Hydropolitical debates regarding water policy anchor my project, and each poem and song I examine demonstrates some of the cultural and literary impacts these forms have on imagining relationships to the Nile. I take seriously the linguistic, formal, and generic dimensions to the poetry and songs I address, spanning Amharic, English, Ge’ez, Arabic, and Nubian, as well as lyric, free verse, prose, and popular song. I weave historical and political documents together with mythology and other folkloric expressions as a crucial backdrop to discussions of the present-day situation in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. My project thus considers the dynamic interplay between historical and mythological moments that reemerge in the 20th century in the eastern Nile basin.Item Open Access Repetition Beyond Representation: Media, History and Event in Iran, 1951-1990(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Nadalizadeh, Ahmad; Allan, MichaelMy dissertation draws together postcolonial theory, film and visual studies, and questions of aesthetics and politics in the modern Middle East. Looking closely at Iran in the latter half of the 20th century, I explore literary and artistic works concerned with the limits of representation and the political possibilities of aesthetic remediation. These various works are not simply representations of historical events, but are themselves instrumental in shaping history. For scholars across the political spectrum, Iranian modernity has often been understood as a process of becoming Western, and postcolonialism has tended to frame modern Iranian history as a response to Western imperialism. In either of these two accounts, Iranians cease to be historical agents unless they either adopt or reject a modernist project understood to be Western. My dissertation refuses this contrast and considers history as a process that is not independent from literary and cinematic locutions. Across my three core chapters, I am drawn to writers and artists whose work explores the complex dynamics connecting aesthetic form (in Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s poetry, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel, and Abbas Kiarostami’s films) and historical events (the 1953 coup, the 1979 revolution, and the 1990 earthquake). Weaving together texts and events, I consider how each of these aesthetic forms (poetry, novels, and films) challenges a linear conception of historical progress with an alternate figuration of time. I argue that at the heart of these various textual examples is an aesthetics of repetition that capitalizes upon the unexpected. These various media, I suggest, not only engage and represent, but ultimately embody the form of the event itself.Item Open Access The Cross-Currents of Exilic Storytelling: Multilingual Memory and the Maritime Shift(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Reid-Olds, Tera; Allan, MichaelThis dissertation examines the discursive practices of multilingual communities in the novels of seven contemporary women writers: Marie-Célie Agnant, Gabriella Ghermandi, Gisèle Pineau, Erminia dell’Oro, Assia Djebar, Aḥlām Mustaghānamī, and Huda Barakāt. Each of these postcolonial authors evokes the sea linguistically, stylistically, and thematically through diverse articulations of exile and belonging. Across three chapters, I pair linguistically disparate texts to explore the negotiation of language politics and mobility as a means of resisting canonical cultural memory. From Italian to French to Arabic, the project is an intervention in discussions of world literature with attention to oral storytelling as a means of constructing a sense of belonging out of the experience of exile. I develop this intervention along the intersecting axes of history, identity, and language. First, I take up the refraction of colonial histories through the circulation of the sea and of collective memory. Then, I explore a destabilization of identity stemming from cultural métissage and the storyteller’s subversion of border spaces. Finally, I explore disruption between languages, dialects, and registers occurring in interactional contexts at the juncture of urban and maritime. Throughout each chapter, I contend that reading the sea itself as a creative frame most closely reflects the spirit of mobility at play in each novel. The project overall proposes a practice of reading “comparative seas” in Mediterranean and Caribbean studies to illuminate other texts situated at maritime margins and to orient literary study away from the fixity of geographical determinism.