Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations by Subject "American literature"

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    Performing Literariness: Literature in the Event in South Africa and the United States
    (University of Oregon, 2011-09) Rayneard, Max James Anthony
    In this dissertation "literariness" is defined not merely as a quality of form by which texts are evaluated as literary, but as an immanent and critical sensibility by which reading, writing, speaking, learning, and teaching subjects within the literary humanities engage language in its immediate aesthetic (and thus also historical and ethical) aspect. This reorientation seeks to address the literary academy's overwhelming archival focus, which risks eliding literary endeavor as an embodied undertaking that inevitably reflects the historical contingency of its enactment. Literary endeavor in higher education is thus understood as a performance by which subjects enact not only the effect of literary texts upon themselves but also the contingencies of their socio-economic, national, cultural, and personal contexts. Subjects' responses to literature are seen as implicit identity claims that, inevitably constituted of biases, can be evaluated through the lens of post-positivist realism in terms of their ethical and pragmatic usefulness. Framing this reoriented literariness in terms of its enactment in higher education literature classrooms, this dissertation addresses its pedagogical, methodological, and personal implications. The events of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the literature arising from it serve as a pivotal case study. The TRC Hearings, publically broadcast and pervasive in the national discourse of the time, enacted a scenario in which South Africans confronted the implications for personal and national identities of apartheid's racial abuses. The dissertation demonstrates through close reading and anecdotal evidence how J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull formally reactivate this scenario in the subject in the event of reading, while surveys of critical responses to these texts show how readers often resisted the texts' destabilizing effects. A critical account of the process that resulted in Telling, Eugene - a stage production in which U.S. military veterans tell their stories to their civilian communities - analyzes the idea of literariness in the U.S. and assesses its potential for socially engaged literary praxis.
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    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.