Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Thinking through the Affective Skin: Affect-Based Literacy and Literary Orientations
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Habib, Mushira; Wood, Mary
My dissertation, “Thinking through the Affective Skin: Affective Literacy and Literary Orientations,” proposes affective ways of orientating our thoughts and skins to literacy practices, literary analysis, media consumption, and subjectivity formation. It contributes to the affective paradigmatic shift in critical theory by proposing its incorporation into education and the mechanics of knowledge production to acknowledge and accommodate multiple, alternative modes of producing and sharing knowledge, demonstrating comprehension, and projecting intelligence. I suggest that an affective orientation can shift affect’s analysis as an object of study to affect as study and analysis. The analogy of the skin envelops the mind-body duality to refer to affectivity as an open layer over and beyond corporeality or embodiment. Thinking through the affective skin, as an encompassing model, thus allows multiple affective regimes to be points of entry to thought and all thought to become points of reference for affectivity. It is an inter-disciplinary and multilingual project in its conception through an engagement with various genres of writing, literature, and media. In this project, I attempt an organic integration of critical theory, affect theory, composition theory, gender theory, postcolonial theory, media theory, cultural studies and writing studies. It is a multicultural project that situates my work in Comparative Literature within larger frameworks of literacy, intersectionality and affect. Thinking through the affective skin as an orientation brings to the forefront marginalized histories and forms of knowing and theorizing processes and purposes. It offers a multiplicity of groundbreaking models for pedagogical innovations and affective accommodations. It provides attention to previously ignored or under-researched details, nuances, and analyses of affective engagements. It can rationalize affectivities misunderstood, or not understood, prior to the affective orientation. In three chapters, I experiment with and exemplify different ways of engaging with affective writing. These chapters are thematically divided into three varied modes of literacy and literary engagements, while affectively connected via my affective orientation. It is a demonstration of thinking through my affective skin.
Open Access
Living and Dying without a Care in the World: Twenty-first Century Sinophone Cinema’s Affective Attunement to the Growing Deficit Yet Enduring Feminization of Care
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Lee, Kwan Yin; Chan, Roy
This project asserts that recent Sinophone narrative films — Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011), Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) and Oliver Chan’s Still Human (2018) — lauded for portraying domestic workers respectfully warrant critical attention not for their ostensibly progressive representations, but the affective resonance they create among middle-class viewers in response to the care deficit under neoliberal austerity. Rather than approaching the films as players in the realm of representational politics or international film festival circuits, my analysis attends to their affective registers, from what I term as reticent nostalgia to bearable awkwardness to tears of joy, as validation of and misgivings about the neoliberalism’s disregard for social reproductive needs unless they come with profit-making prospects. Without scrutinizing these texts’ promotion of acquiescence, albeit conflicted, to the privatization of and inequitable access to care, the transnational domestic work industry using Southeast Asian women of color and in poverty to ensure low-cost care for white-collar workers and their offsprings or those who have fallen through the cracks of the porous social safety net in East Asia would remain a well-oiled machine.
Open Access
Hydropoetics: Myth, Reality, and Literature in the Eastern Nile Basin
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Endalew, Yewulsew; Allan, Michael
How 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.
Open Access
Authors and the Meta-Literary: The Politics of Publication in Contemporary Francophone Literature
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Lejeune, Nadège; Moore, Fabienne
Literature written in the French language has often been divided into a hierarchical dichotomy valuing French literature (written by metropolitan French authors) over Francophone literature (other writers writing in French). Under the influence of postcolonial studies and of the works of Francophone writers themselves, this hierarchical dichotomy has gradually been deconstructed. Traces of the French colonial history that triggered this dichotomy linger, however. The codes, constraints and conventions of the French literary system influence and weigh upon global Francophone works published in this system. My dissertation focuses on how the history of French colonialism still manifests in contemporary Francophone texts from the Caribbean, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and how Francophone authors resist the ensuing conventions. This dissertation thus considers contemporary works by transnational authors published in metropolitan France by major publishing houses such as Gallimard, Grasset or Le Seuil. Their texts engage and resist the national structures embedded in the way they are published, framed, distributed, and read. I identify three strategies that Francophone writers deploy to challenge the persisting colonial structures of the French literary system: they showcase contemporary colonial power dynamics in the stories they write, they challenge the genre of the novel that is intrinsically tied to the nation state; and they metamorphose the so-called standard French language, simultaneously also challenging the monolingual status quo tied to nationalism. Ultimately, this dissertation strives to add to the literary and academic conversation in the field of Francophone literature, to consider both the conceptualization work authors do, and the haling and political influence of French publication houses.
Open Access
Experiments with China in American Modernity
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Lester, Jason; Peppis, Paul
Experiments with China in American Modernity explores formulations of China within America’s early and interwar modernist period. I propose the concept of “transpacific experimentalism” to identify an emergent, sustained aesthetic engagement with China, grounded in empiricist, scientistic, or otherwise humanist claims, which can be understood through John Dewey’s theory of creative imagination. This dissertation resonates with the continuing expansion of new modernist studies, offering new methodological approaches and archival challenges to a field which has been historically constricted to a narrow high modernist canon. By tracing a constellation of texts situated on the disciplinary interstices of modernist studies, Chinese area studies, and Asian American studies, I do not intend to further horizontally expand the category of American modernism, but to reveal the extent to which it has always already been historically, culturally, and aesthetically transpacific–a term which, following Hua Hsu, “describes a physical space” connecting the United States to Asia, “as well as a horizon of possibility.” From the transpacific birth and circuits of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and Ezra Pound’s living Chinese character, to Witter Bynner’s collaboration with Jiang Kanghu and the recovery of Sino-US poets and scholars of American modernism, this dissertation argues for a new mode of reading which unearths the horizontal aesthetic relations which emerged across American and Chinese modernity.
Open Access
'Here is the Story': Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Sturgis O'Coyne, Laurel; Allan, Michael
Well 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.
Open Access
Utopian Relationality: Intercorporeal Subjectivity in French Feminist Fiction
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Okumu, Robin; Hester, Nathalie
Feminist fiction has always entertained a delicate relationship with the utopian literary genre since the traditional definition of “utopia” as a perfect but imaginary place runs contrary to feminist struggle for concrete change. My project builds upon the theoretical foundations of recent theorists of feminist utopias, Francis Bartkowski and Lucy Sargisson, by analyzing the novels of three French authors—Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, and Marie Darrieussecq, whose texts range from 1969-1985, 1975-1983, and 1996-2005 respectively. I read their fiction as positively and profoundly utopian, through the lens of “utopian relationality:” my own concept that I define and develop as an interpretive framework and methodological tool. Utopian relationality describes a radical way of being-together in the world that acts as a core component of each writer’s feminism. It presents visions of utopia as revitalized intercorporeal relations with the self, the other(s), and the wider world. The connections these authors describe are equally as important as the textual acts of narrating them; my methodology proceeds through detailed close readings that are attentive to their poetic strategies and linguistic experimentation, or the ways they rework language within language. By locating and tracing utopian relationality in their novels, I argue for a reconceptualization of the content, form, and function of their fiction, along with a reinterpretation of the ways the label “utopian” has been applied negatively to Wittig’s and Cixous’ work. Since Darrieussecq has been widely described as a dystopian writer, interpreting utopian moments in her fiction casts her writing in a nuanced light. It also provides an understanding of the ways utopia and dystopia intermingle in her contemporary fiction, as it is representative of a broader 21st century feminist consciousness. Utopian relationality thus enables productive comparative readings of these three different authors, and it lays a foundation for future explorations of feminist fiction.
Open Access
Repetition Beyond Representation: Media, History and Event in Iran, 1951-1990
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Nadalizadeh, Ahmad; Allan, Michael
My 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.
Open Access
Borders of the Global Anglophone: Locality, Language, and Feminist Futures in Namibian Literature
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Ndakalako, Martha; Allan, Michael
Borders 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.
Embargo
Truth Disguised as Lies: How Aesop's Life Shaped Russian Aesopian Literature (1884-1984)
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Larson, K.; Hokanson, Katya
My dissertation examines the origins of so-called “Aesopian,” or covertly subversive, narratives. While scholars have focused on fables as prototypes for these narratives, my project addresses the role played by the Vita Aesopi (Life of Aesop), composed during the early Roman Empire. Through an analysis of literary works spanning three censorship regimes in Russia, I investigate how this narrative shaped the truth-telling strategies of suppressed writers. According to his biography, Aesop was mute and enslaved yet became an adviser to kings, only to be framed and executed by corrupt authorities who wanted to silence him. I find these events to be central to key works by Saltykov-Shchedrin, Bulgakov, and Shalamov, shaping these writers’ self-presentation and providing a literary touchstone for their coded political critiques. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s identification with Aesop is central to his intersecting critiques of serfdom and censorship, and his figure of the Aesopian littérateur embodies three aspects of Aesop’s Life: overcoming muteness, divination, and critiquing “the logic of the parasite.” In contrast with Saltykov-Shchedrin’s abolitionist sympathies with Aesop, Bulgakov’s satire Heart of a Dog travesties Aesop’s life as part of a reactionary critique of postrevolutionary Russia. Through Orientalizing tropes and a racializing travesty of Aesop’s Life, Bulgakov’s novella lodges an Aesopian critique of the Soviet novyi chelovek ideal and, more riskily, of Stalin. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales enlist Aesop to confront the paradox of writing about the Gulag, while his poetry invokes Aesop when it speaks out in a third language, a language “known to trees and birds.” My research contributes to debates surrounding resistant narratives by addressing how literary culture creates political agency. Although political agendas are frequently thought to feed parasitically on their literary hosts, my study reframes this relationship as symbiotic. Additionally, my research makes an original distinction between Aesopian literature, which tells truths disguised as lies, and propaganda, which tells lies disguised as truths. Besides opening up a more capacious account of Aesopian literature by relating it to Aesop’s Life, my dissertation challenges assumptions behind devaluations of Aesopian discourse as “the language of slaves” and instead underscores the power of this discourse to subvert the language of the oppressor.
Open Access
Paris by Way of the Moon: Translations of French Popular Fiction in Late-Qing China (1899-1912)
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Moore, Robert; Chan, Roy
During the final years of the Qing dynasty, works from outside of China were finding greater and greater popularity among Chinese readers, due in large part to the fact that translators altered them significantly. I confront the tendency of scholars who see these translations as either a betrayal of their source material or target readership by elevating the importance of the reader and source culture. By doing so, we see not only how the idea of fidelity in translation should work both to and from the translator, but also how source cultures were each translated differently. I focus on French works so as to demonstrate how French cultural authority in the 19th and early 20th centuries was preserved, but put into dialogue with traditional Chinese literary forms so as to both challenge and accommodate the Chinese reader simultaneously.
Open Access
Before the World: Kaga No Chiyo & the Rustic-feminine Margins of Japanese Haiku
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-29) Crowson, Michelle; Walley, Glynne
This dissertation tracks the transformation of the merchant-class female poet, Kaga no Chiyo, from a minor supplementary position as a collected feminine object to an interlocutor and exemplar of post-Bashō poetics in regional circulation. I argue that discourses on the fall of haikai poetry among eighteenth-century male practitioners, combined with the rise of an eccentric bunjin “literati”) consciousness, led to a pattern of rural male poets collecting women as casual supplements to masculine-coded poetic communities, part of a larger valorization of a poetics of simplicity and lightness. Chiyo’s early encounters with male collectors delimited the value of her work to an unrevised, spontaneous simplicity, a simplicity she was actively discouraged from honing. Yet Chiyo acted against this advice, instead drawing on three forms of poetic sociality (travel, correspondence, and preface-writing) to enact a nested bunjin subjectification, ultimately subverting both state and subcultural discourses through a nuanced poetics of eccentric marginality. By 1774, she had cultivated a female bunjin identity that transcended well beyond her initially prescribed role, becoming one of the genre’s most notable figures in two key related capacities: first, she became a widely acknowledged representative of women poets of the Bashō legacy, acting as interlocutor for both sides of the mid-century Bashō Revival movement. Second, she authored a collection of poetic art objects that circulated beyond the borders of Tokugawa Japan to the Korean Peninsula in 1764, which was subsequently read by domestic readers as further evidence of her significance as a haikai figure. Furthermore, when viewed within a larger East Asian literati context, I argue that Chiyo’s Joseon collection can be read as the manifestation of a local aesthetic with regional complementarity, a phenomenon which foreshadows haiku as national-linguistic representative of Japan in world literature.
Open Access
The Singing Bone: Collective Creativity & the Creation of a Queer Imaginary
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Howard, Elizabeth; Dugaw, Dianne
This dissertation examines how oral folklore and supernatural elements open to view queer ways of imagining in works by French writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650-1705), Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796), and Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940). Through their re-writing of supernatural stories from oral tradition, these authors articulate queer imaginaries that envision alternative configurations of identity and desire, in which eroticism expands beyond a binary framework, and in which equality is established between humans and nature. By reimagining oral materials in a literary form, these authors demonstrate the complexity of the interrelation between oral and literary texts and engage creativity as a collective rather than individual practice. Each author’s marginalized position contributed to their use of popular genres (such as fairy tales, ballads, and folktales) to convey their critiques of the dominant culture in which they lived. All used the supernatural to reimagine the worlds they’d been excluded from. D’Aulnoy’s literary fairy tales emerged out of the oral context of the Parisian salons, and used the magical setting of the merveilleux to articulate political critiques of women’s position in seventeenth-century France. Through the transformations of her characters, D’Aulnoy’s tales illustrate new capacities for erotic attachment, queering heteronormative sexuality by expanding sensuality and desire beyond the human. In his Ossian poems, eighteenth-century Gaelic poet James Macpherson recreated the oral tradition of the Highland bards within a literary context. Through his evocation of Ossian as an intermediary with the dead, Macpherson’s poems convey a queer poetic imaginary in which the boundaries that separate humans from nature, and the living from the dead, are fluid. Nineteenth-century Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf reimagined storytelling traditions from her native Värmland in her novels to depict a liminal world, in which the boundaries between men and women, humans and nature, and the material and spiritual world, are constantly shifting. Through this examination of queer texts with roots in oral folklore, my project provides a theoretical model for recognizing this phenomenon in other literary works.
Open Access
The Language Zone: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Smirnova, Daria; Presto, Jenifer
My dissertation unites several aspects of Joseph Brodsky’s writing under the arc of his development as a bilingual and transnational writer. I make the case that Brodsky’s poetic sensibility was originally transnational, i.e. exhibited an affinity with both foreign and domestic poetic traditions in pursuit of its own original poetics. I establish the trope of a speaker alone in a room as a leading poetic concept of Brodsky’s neo-Metaphysical style. The poems that are centered on this trope do not refer explicitly to the poetry of the British Baroque through intertextual references or imitation, which attests to the ability of Brodsky’s transnationally oriented poetry to process foreign traditions with subtlety and to incorporate key elements of it fully within his own idiom. I follow the new generation of researchers (Ishov, Berlina) in their attempt to “put Brodsky on the map of American studies” by paying close attention to Brodsky’s self-translation strategies and the reasons behind the negative reception of Brodsky’s English-language poetry during the time of its publication. Drawing on Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson’s concept of the bilingual text, I discover in the “English Brodsky” the tendencies characteristic of most Modernist bilingual writing. My comparative analysis of the archival materials pertaining to the translation of the poem “Dekabrʹ vo Florentsii” (“December in Florence”) shows that Brodsky’s solutions as a self-translator aim at preserving the conceptual and stylistic unity of his bilingual oeuvre. I further read Brodsky’s English prose as an attempt to rehabilitate and explain his poetic credos: the insistence on formal versification, the importance of the continuity of the poetic tradition, and estrangement as the main function of the poetic utterance. I show that Brodsky’s English writing on Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva is self-revealing as it discloses the poet’s own motivations for writing prose. Analyzing Brodsky’s autobiographical essays “Less than One” and “In a Room and a Half,” I return to the trope of a room and read his prose as a form of translation commentary that provides his new audience with a rich cultural context that is essential for a full understanding of his bilingual project.
Open Access
The Cross-Currents of Exilic Storytelling: Multilingual Memory and the Maritime Shift
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Reid-Olds, Tera; Allan, Michael
This 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.
Open Access
Critical Climates: Sturm und Drang and the Radical Poetics of Nature
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Baumeister, Anna-Lisa; Klebes, Martin
The dissertation develops a new reading of the status of nature in the Sturm und Drang period of the 1770s, in texts by authors ranging from the early Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, to J.M.R. Lenz, Friedrich Müller, and Karoline Flachsland. Against prevailing interpretations that dismiss Sturm und Drang’s nature-affinity as outdated, irrationalist, and apolitical, I reframe the period through attention to European colonial geopolitics, emergent natural sciences such as hydrology and meteorology, and innovative material writing practices. I propose a reading of Sturm und Drang as an unparalleled attempt to ground modern culture in nature, one noteworthy for its epistemic sensitivities and anti-essentialist commitments. In this way, I not only argue that the poetics of Sturm und Drang offers a radical environmental critique of the project of Enlightenment from within—one that speaks directly to pressing contemporary concerns. I also make a new case for the distinctiveness of the period from the episteme “around 1800,” highlighting its socio-critical focus and its international outlook.
Open Access
Transnational Peripheries: Narratives of Countryside, Migration, and Community in American and Nordic Modernisms
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Pöllänen, Iida; Whalan, Mark
Scholarship in modernist literary and cultural studies tends to privilege urban spaces while excluding rural regions from mappings of world literature. Regional writing has been both effeminized as a genre and seen as contrary to the transnational nature of modernism, leaving little consideration for the role of the countryside in modernity. My dissertation broadens the spatial scope of modernist studies by showing how the countryside functioned as a place for women authors in peripheral locations of the world to both critique the uneven development of modernity as well as to provide alternative visions of future communities. I examine how the countryside and its communities became imagined in American and Nordic modernist literary texts written by and about linguistic and ethnic minorities in the first half of the twentieth century. My main case studies are Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Hagar Olsson’s Träsnidaren och döden (1940, The Woodcarver and Death), and as I engage with these works, I draw from the fields of feminist regionalism, transnational modernist studies, and narrative theory. By choosing the American and Northern European countryside and their transatlantic connections as sites of comparison, my project connects linguistic-national literary archives typically not associated with one another, while showing how women authors in various cultural contexts employed regionalism and transnationalism as a form of feminist praxis to negotiate their place in modernity. Far from being antagonistic to modernity and cosmopolitanism, as often represented in the white and masculine canon of modernism, rural regions were used in these texts as sites for considering gendered and racialized questions of immigration, (trans)nationality, and community. Thus, my approach maps a new cartography of modernism that highlights the artistic critiques and networks of authors writing about the intersections of various historically marginalized identity categories.
Open Access
Ruling Aesthetics: Intermediality, Media Modernity and Early Thai Cinema (1868-1942)
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Chunsaengchan, Palita; Gopal, Sangita
My dissertation investigates the unexplored connections among cinema, prose and poetry in Thai history, extending from the period of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) through the decade following the Siamese Revolution of 1932. Across the various chapters, I expand the archives both of early Thai cinema and Thai literary history. I draw together readings of Sanookneuk (1886), the first fictional work of Thai prose, film reviews written as Thai poetry (1922), governmental letters calling for censorship of the purportedly first Thai film (1923), as well as promotional essays in English on the state-sponsored film, The King of the White Elephant (1941). I consider how early cinema not only destabilizes a rigid structure of a national historiography, but also shapes interactions between different social classes. The dissertation traces three pivotal conceptions of cinema: first as a disciplinary technology, then as popular culture, and finally as a nationalized mass medium. My dissertation accounts for cinema’s entanglements with other media, for how these entanglements profess aesthetic instructions that become a dispositif of the modernizing Thai state as well as for how cultures of cinema and media in Siam manifest and respond to the national project of modernization. The negotiation between cinema, media and modernity reveals natures of different sovereign powers as well as complexities of the institutional politics in staging and managing the formation of Thai modernity. I, therefore, deploy the term “media modernity,” in my dissertation to capture such problematics and discussions of the intertwinement of early cinema, media and modernization and, yet, to also complicate some hegemonic accounts in Thai history that often isolate cinema from the epistemological constructions and sensibilities of modernity as well as separate aesthetic regimes from the politics of the nation.
Open Access
Speaking After Silence: Presidential Rhetoric in the Wake of Catastrophe
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Myers, Bess; Crosswhite, James
This dissertation examines eulogies President Barack Obama delivered after instances of human-perpetrated catastrophe: violent events so cataclysmic that they rendered the rhetorical arena unsafe and thus impeded productive communication. Each chapter explores one of Obama’s speeches delivered after instances of gun violence—his speech in 2011 in Tucson, Arizona after the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords; his speech in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 after the shooting at Emanuel AME Church; and his speech in 2016 concerning common-sense gun safety reform—through the lens of what I argue are the three primary functions of post-catastrophe eulogy: pedagogical, deliberative, and unifying. Obama’s speeches recall the classical Athenian funeral oration (epitāphios lōgos) and, in particular, Pericles’ epitāphios in Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This dissertation explores how Obama negotiated classical and contemporary models of democratic citizenship, and illustrates how Obama’s post-catastrophe speeches are a model of one possible process of rebuilding communication on a national scale, the aim of which is the continued deferral of reactive violence. This dissertation reveals how approaching ancient and modern political rhetoric from a comparative perspective highlights the ostensibly shared mission of such rhetoric, while also uncovering sites where the presidential rhetorical tradition subordinates and suppresses nonwhite, non-masculine identities in its establishment of a single national identity.
Open Access
The Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut] and its Cinematic Afterlife
(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Germen, Baran; Gopal, Sangita
Proposing melodrama as an aesthetics of victimhood, my dissertation examines the intermedial itineraries of notable feminist Halide Edib’s Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut]. Originally serialized in 1923 and published as a novella in 1926 in Ottoman Turkish, Vurun Kahpeye was translated into modern day Turkish in 1946. The melodramatic story was then adapted for screen three times in 1949, 1964, and 1973, respectively, by Ömer Lütfi Akad, Orhan Aksoy and Halit Refiğ. With the circulation of these films on TV, the title Vurun Kahpeye has since the 90s morphed into an idiom designating the unjust treatment of the innocent. The persistent repetition of Vurun Kahpeye across media, I suggest, signifies melodrama’s aesthetic durability due to its affective excess: its efficacy in making a disaffected public experience its own victimhood. Thus, my dissertation provides an archeology of melodrama as a political technology through a reading of each of Vurun Kahpeye’s media iteration as embedded in its socio-historical context. In this account, the affective medium of cinema emerges as the main site for the formation of a secular mass public by linking secularism to structures of feeling rooted in victimization, suffering, and injury. And yet, the affective excess of melodrama, I demonstrate, renders Vurun Kahpeye’s normative project unstable and uncontainable with each iteration. At different moments in time, Vurun Kahpeye is a queer text exposing the heteropatriarchal nature of secular nationalism; lays the infrastructural, spectatorial, and aesthetic foundation of the classical cinema of Turkey; and serves as the project of a social realist, counter-populist, and anti- Western theory of cinema. Therefore, this dissertation traces the conflicting projections, aspirations, and feelings central to Turkish republican modernity that congeal and clash in, through, and around Vurun Kahpeye.