Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Afterlives of the Sandman: Re-Figuring the Fantastic-Sublime
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Toepfer, Yvonne; Ostmeier, Dorothee
This comparative project investigates different representations of the sandman between the 19th century and the 20th century. My discussion focuses on Romantic texts, in particular E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 literary tale "Der Sandmann." While the traditional scholarship on Hoffmann uses both psychoanalytical and feminist approaches, I show how Friedrich Schlegel's concept of chaos and Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the postmodern sublime help us to understand Hoffmann's complex narrative structure. I argue that in Hoffmann's tale there is no unified sandman figure. However, different storytellers in the tale shape the sandman's various depictions. In a way, the sandman figure becomes a fluid character whose enigma the narrative's structure sustains. Paul Berry's 1991 stop-motion animation "The Sandman" visualizes Hoffmann's narrative. However, the film also reintroduces a unified sandman figure that is characterized by uncanny strangeness. My analyses both of Hoffmann's literary and Berry's cinematographic narrative show that their complex structures allow for ceaseless interpretations. This leads me to conclude that fantastic narratives lend themselves to insightful and critical ponderings.
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
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
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.
Open Access
Creating Female Community: Repetition and Renewal in the Novels of Nicole Brossard, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau
(University of Oregon, 2015-01-14) Odintz, Jenny; McPherson, Karen
In this project I explore the creation of female community in the novels of four contemporary feminist writers: Nicole Brossard, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau. I contend that in their diverse representations of female community, these women writers provide collaborative feminist models of resistance, creative transformation, and renewal. Building on Judith Butler's articulation of agency as variation on repetition, I argue that these writers transform the space of the novel in order to tell these stories of community, revitalizing this form as a potential site of collaborative performance of identity. They offer an alternative vision that is not only feminist and collective, but also transnational, translinguistic, historical, and epistemological - challenging and reconfiguring the way in which we understand our world. I develop the project thematically in terms of coming-of-age through and into female community (what the communities in these novels look like and the relationship between individuals and communities, seen through the process of individual maturity). I then consider the formal construction of female community through the collective narrative voice (both within the novels and outside them, in the form of each writer's collective body of engaged feminist dialogue in interviews and theory). Finally, I explore female community through alternative genealogies and quests for origin (demonstrating the implications of these novels' vision for transforming a more traditional worldview, with transnational communities and the transmission of historical knowledge across generations of women).
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
Dear Reader, Good Sir: Birth of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-27) Bhattacharya, Sunayani; Gopal, Sangita
My dissertation traces the formation and growth of the reader of the Bengali novel in nineteenth century Bengal through a close study of the writings by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay that comment on—and respond to—both the reader and the newly emergent genre of the Bengali novel. In particular, I focus on the following texts: two novels written by Bankim, Durgeśnandinī (The Lady of the Castle) (1865) and Bishabṛksha (The Poison Tree) (1872), literary essays published in nineteenth century Bengali periodicals, personal letters written by Bankim and his contemporaries, and reviews of the novels, often written and published anonymously. I suggest that by examining the reader of the Bengali novel it becomes possible to understand how the individual Bengali negotiates the changes occurring in nineteenth century Bengal—an era in which traditional beliefs collide with the intellectual and technological innovations brought on by colonial modernity. As my dissertation shows colonialism is far from being a disembodied institution operating at the level of governments and ideologies. Instead, it becomes evident that with the novel, colonial modernity enters the Bengali home in the form of changing moral paradigms. What the Bengali reader chooses to read, and how she performs her reading come to have a real import in her quotidian life. The three sites of reading I examine—the reader as a textual event in the novels, the reader as imagined in the literary essays, and the anthropological reader writing and responding to the reviews of the novels—revitalises the overdetermined field of the postcolonial novel by shifting the focus from the novel as a stable literary object being consumed by a relatively passive reader, to an active reader whose reading practice shapes both the genre and the subject reading it.
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.
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Herbs and Beauty: Gendered Poethood and Translated Affect in Late Imperial and Modern China
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Xiong, Ying; Wang, Yugen
My dissertation is a comparative analysis of the juncture at which Chinese poetry became “modern.” The catalyst for this development was the early twentieth-century translation into Chinese of the European Romantics, which was contemporaneous with changes and permutations within the “herbs and beauty” myth crucial to the conception of the Chinese poet. I argue that the convergence of the two serve as an anchor for examining China’s literary responses, in both form and content, to drastic social change brought about by rapid modernization and dramatic revolutions. Through a diverse selection of written and visual texts, I scrutinize and accentuate two ambivalences that, I argue, China’s struggle for modernity required and to which the “herbs and beauty” myth gives form. On the one hand, I locate a moment when the essential femininity of the traditional Chinese poet (man or woman) came to be displaced onto the Western new woman, as the Southern Society, a large community of Chinese poets in the early 20th century, revamped the “herbs and beauty” allegory through their project of translating the European Romantics into Chinese. On the other hand, I investigate how modern Chinese poets and intellectuals, torn between their residual attachment to a hallowed national literary tradition and their new quest for non-indigenous (European) sources, partook in the difficult moments of China’s modern transformation by constantly redefining the interconnections between the beautiful and the virtuous through translation and transcultural relation. In each instance in question, the influence of translation causes a shift in modes of representation that require new definitions of what it means to be a poet in an increasingly unspiritual and commodified world: together, these examples enable me to conceptualize the poetics and politics of what I call “translated affect” and “affective 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
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
La vita agra-dolce: Italian Counter-Cultures and Translation during the Economic Miracle
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Richards, Jamie; Lollini, Massimo
My dissertation research focuses on Italian literature of the 1960s, specifically translations from the American counterculture and poetry of the neo-avantgarde. Through a detailed study of three specific translational moments--Fernanda Pivano's translations of Allen Ginsberg's counterculture poetry, Luciano Bianciardi's translation of Henry Miller's controversial Tropic of Cancer, and the neo-avantgarde poets Edoardo Sanguineti and Alfredo Giuliani's translations of British high modernist writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot--I explore the literary-historical period of the post-World War II economic boom in Italy. While recent translation studies scholarship focusing on Italy has addressed the Fascist period and the upsurge of translations under censorship, I build upon the idea of translation as cultural resistance in order to examine the relationship between translated and original texts during a period where the explosion of industry and prosperity led intellectuals to reconsider the ideological function and purpose of art. My study is framed within polysystems theory as developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, which reconfigures the organization of literatures to include all the literary works produced in a given language (i.e., to include translations). My notion of translation is informed by the position continually theorized by Lawrence Venuti, that is of translation not as an equivalent reproduction of a source text but a type of interpretative writing that radically transforms a text, placing it within an entirely new literary, linguistic, social, and historical context. While the polysystems approach is well-established within translation studies, it can offer a new perspective in Italian literary scholarship by combining pivotal author-based and translator-based case studies. This is grounded in a historicizing approach whereby I situate the economic miracle within its connection to a rise in literacy, readership, and reading practices, and therefore the world of publishing and translation, a virtual print revolution that gives rise to the "translation culture" that characterizes the globalized Italy of today.
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
Lyric Poetry, Conservative Poetics, and the Rise of Fascism
(University of Oregon, 2014-10-17) Lisiecki, Chet; Librett, Jeffrey S.
As fascist movements took hold across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there emerged a body of lyric poetry concerned with revolution, authority, heroism, sacrifice, community, heritage, and national identity. While the Nazi rise to power saw the deception, persecution, and brutalization of conservatives both in the Reichstag and in the streets, these themes resonated with fascists and conservatives alike, particularly in Germany. Whether they welcomed the new regime out of fear or opportunism, many conservative beneficiaries of National Socialism shared, and celebrated in poetry, the same ideological principles as the fascists. Such thematic continuities have made it seem as though certain conservative writers, including T. S. Eliot, Stefan George, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were proto-fascist, their work cohering around criteria consonant with fascist ideology. My dissertation, however, emphasizes the limits of such cohesion, arguing that fascist poetry rejects, whereas conservative poetry affirms, the possibility of indeterminacy and inadequacy. While the fascist poem blindly believes it can effect material political change, the conservative poem affirms the failure of its thematic content to correspond entirely to material political reality. It displays neither pure political commitment nor aesthetic autonomy, suspending these categories in an unresolved tension. Paul de Man's work on allegory hinges on identifying a reading practice that addresses this space between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. His tendency to forget the immanence of history, however, is problematic in the context of fascism. Considering rhetorical formalism alongside dialectical materialism, in particular Adorno's essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," allows for a more rounded and ethical methodological approach. The poetic dramatization of the very indeterminacy that historically constituted conservative politics in late-Weimar Germany both distinguishes the conservative from the fascist poem while also accounting for its complicity. Fascism necessitated widespread and wild enthusiasm, but it also succeeded through the (unintentional) proliferation of political indifference as registered, for example, by the popularity of entertainment literature. While the work of certain conservative high modernists reflected critically on its own failures, such indeterminacy nonetheless resembles the failure to politically commit oneself against institutionalized violence and systematic oppression.
Open Access
The Melodrama of Care in Contemporary Global Cinema
(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Chang, Jeong; Li, David
This project focuses on films that reveal concerns about care and subjectivity in a world transformed by neoliberalism, flexible capital, and globalization. As these films show, care is still necessary, but under the logic of neoliberalism and globalization, it becomes a fungible commodity that can be outsourced and delegated--often according to the cost-benefit analyses necessary for life under the entrepreneurial subjectivity espoused by neoliberalism. These films utilize melodramatic modes of expression to articulate the ethical imperative for care; the necessity for this articulation suggests that something is wrong with contemporary institutions and stances toward care, that the means to care falls short of the ideal of caring for loved ones. The Savages focuses on middle-aged siblings forced to take care of their estranged father after he develops dementia. The film serves as a critique of the neoliberal idea that subjects are only responsible for themselves by supporting a more communal vision of subjectivity through reassembling the family. Dirty Pretty Things shows how immigrants face a hostile reception in the wealthy nations to which they migrate. The film illustrates how draconian immigration policies force many into the black market not only for services that are denied them but also to barter their own bodies in hope of becoming full members of the global citizenry. Nobody Knows extends this discussion of the abdication of the state's role in caring for its own citizens. Through the neglect of the children first by the family and then society as a whole, the film illustrates how even the most vulnerable members of society are isolated and forced to fend for themselves. Finally, Take Care of My Cat explores how the care between friends becomes increasingly instrumental as part of the construction of the self. The solidarity of their days as students erodes as each enters the work force, and class differences lead to a breakdown in friendships as self care becomes the dominant ethic. In this context, care, friendship, and family become fungible commodities that can be discarded if they no longer serve in the project of the self.
Open Access
The 'monstrous Other' speaks: Postsubjectivity and the queering of the normal
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Adkins, Roger A., 1973-
This dissertation investigates the cultural importance of the "monstrous Other" in postmodern literature, including novels from Sweden, Finland, and the United States. While the theoretical concept of "the Other" is in wide circulation in the humanities and social sciences, the concept has only recently been modified with the adjective "monstrous" to highlight a special case of the Other that plays an important role in the formation of human subjectivity. In order to better understand the representational legacy of the monstrous Other, I explore some of the principal venues in which it has appeared in western literature, philosophy, folklore, and politics. Using a Foucauldian archaeological approach in my literature survey allows me to trace the tradition of the monstrous Other in such sources as medieval bestiaries, the wild man motif in folklore and popular culture, and the medicalization of intersexual embodiment. In all cases, the monstrous Other is a complex phenomenon with broad implications for the politics of subjectivity and the future of social and political justice. Moreover, the monstrous Other poses significant challenges for the ongoing tenability of normative notions of the human, including such primary human traits as sexuality and a gendered, "natural" embodiment. Given the complexities of the monstrous Other and the ways in which it both upholds and intervenes in normative human identities, no single theoretical approach is adequate to the task of examining its functioning. Instead, the project calls for an approach that blends the methodologies of (post)psychoanalytic and queer theory while retaining a critical awareness of both the representational nature of subjectivity and its material effects. By employing both strains of theory, I am able to "read" the monstrous Other as both a necessary condition of subjectivity and a model of intersubjectivity that could provide an alternative to the positivism and binarism of normative subjectivity. The texts that I examine here reveal the ways in which postmodern reconfigurations of the monstrous Other challenge the (hetero)normativity of human subjectivity and its hierarchical forms of differentiation. My reading of these texts locates the possibilities for a hybridized, cyborgian existence beyond the outermost limits of positivistic, western subjectivity.
Open Access
Narrating the National Future: The Cossacks in Ukrainian and Russian Literature
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Kovalchuk, Anna; Hokanson, Katya
This dissertation investigates nineteenth-century narrative representations of the Cossacks—multi-ethnic warrior communities from the historical borderlands of empire, known for military strength, pillage, and revelry—as contested historical figures in modern identity politics. Rather than projecting today’s political borders into the past and proceeding from the claim that the Cossacks are either Russian or Ukrainian, this comparative project analyzes the nineteenth-century narratives that transform pre-national Cossack history into national patrimony. Following the Romantic era debates about national identity in the Russian empire, during which the Cossacks become part of both Ukrainian and Russian national self-definition, this dissertation focuses on the role of historical narrative in these burgeoning political projects. Drawing on Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava (1828), Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1835, 1842), and Taras Shevchenko’s Haidamaky (1842), this dissertation traces the relationship between Cossack history, the poet-historian, and possible national futures in Ukrainian and Russian Romantic literature. In the age of empire, these literary representations shaped the emerging Ukrainian and Russian nations, conceptualized national belonging in terms of the domestic family unit, and reimagined the genealogical relationship between Ukrainian and Russian history. Uniting the national “we” in its readership, these Romantic texts prioritize the poet-historian’s creative, generative power and their ability to discover, legitimate, and project the nation into the future. This framework shifts the focus away from the political nation-state to emphasize the unifying power of shared narrative history and the figurative, future-oriented, and narrative genesis of national imaginaries.
Open Access
Narratives of Desire: Gender and Sexuality in Bugul, Aidoo and Chiziane
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Da Silva, Meyre; Gilman, Lisa
Colonial narratives and nationalist rhetoric in Africa have always associated female sexuality with male desire and consumption, aberrance, or perversion. While historical narratives suggested that native women's bodies should be tamed and possessed, African nationalist narratives usually equated female bodies with land, nature, and spirituality. In different ways, both colonialists and nationalists appropriated the female body and sexuality to convey ideologies concerning the conquest of distant lands or related to the dignity of the colonized people. This dissertation examines how African women writers' representation of female desire counternarrates colonialist and nationalist tales while disturbing gender conventions and defying social norms in African contexts. By using feminist theories, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory, I examine the ways that Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: Uma Historia de Poligamia, and Ken Bugul's Le Baobab Fou reveal female sexuality while simultaneously subverting discourses that often define female bodies as sexual objects or as spiritual entities-- as the Mother Africa, a trope widespread in the speeches of the Negritude movement. Through the analysis of these literary works, I present how these African women writers have used discursive strategies about female desire to demonstrate the consequences of the colonial encounter and post-independence policies on neo-colonial women's bodies and minds as well as to reveal the exclusion of women's voices from national affairs. These works not only confront history but also interrogate the role of literature and the work of art. Through their literary works, Bugul, Chiziane, and Aidoo bring to literature characteristics of African arts, reinventing the literary in order to forge a medium that is able to give sense to African women's experience.
Open Access
Occult Invention: The Rebirth of Rhetorical Heuresis in Early Modern British Literature from Chapman to Swift
(University of Oregon, 2011-09) McCann, Michael Charles, 1959-
The twentieth-century project of American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, grounded in a magic-based theory of language, reveals a path to the origins of what I am going to call occult invention. The occult, which I define as a symbol set of natural terms derived from supernatural terms, employs a method of heuresis based on a metaphor-like process I call analogic extension. Traditional invention fell from use shortly after the Liberal Arts reforms of Peter Ramus, around 1550. Occult invention emerged nearly simultaneously, when Early Modern British authors began using occult symbols as tropes in what I refer to as the Occult Mode. I use six of these authors--George Chapman, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift--as examples of how occult invention arises. In appropriating occult symbolism, authors in the Occult Mode began using the invention methods of the occult arts of magic, alchemy, astrology, and cabala to derive new meanings, transform language, develop characters and plots, and reorient social perspectives. As we learn in tracking Burke's project, occult invention combines the principles of Aristotle's rhetoric and metaphysics with the techniques and principles of the occult arts. Occult invention fell from use around the end of the eighteenth century, but its rhetorical influence reemerged through the work of Burke. In this study I seek to contextualize and explicate some of the literary sources and rhetorical implications of occult invention as an emergent field for further research.
Open Access
Origin Stories: Narrative, Identity, and the Comics Form
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Gilroy, Andrea; Saunders, Benjamin
My dissertation argues that comics’ unique formal properties are particularly suited toward exploring and representing the complex nature of identity. Just as the comics form is broadly defined by a peculiar tension between word and image, so identity can be conceived as a constant negotiation between abstract (“unrepresentable”) concepts that define identity and an individual’s attempts to represent that identity. Due to its formal negotiation of word and image, the comics form is thus uniquely suited to address the problems of identity and its representation. I begin this project by examining the relationship between word and image in comics. Some comics scholars have argued verbal and visual signification are hybridized, while others go so far as to claim the distinction between word and image is unsustainable. Still others reject these claims, arguing comics’ hybridity necessitates a strict separation of word from image. I argue that words and images in comics function on a spectrum in which the line between word and image must be able to be hybridized and distinct at the same time. This definition of the word/image relationship can describe the most straightforward, illustrative comics as well as the most experimental comics texts; it also provides the methodological framework for my project. In this dissertation, I examine the representation of gendered identity in Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories and Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arguing both authors’ injunction that the reader look at the mothers in their works is evidence of their demand that we understand the women as whole, ambivalent subjects. I explore the way the Gene Yang and Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Shadow Hero addresses the repressive and racist history of superhero comics. In doing so, Yang and Liew’s text reveals the ways superhero texts constantly negotiate the genre’s conservative instinct to protect the status quo and its revolutionary vision for a better world. Finally, I contend Greg Rucka and J. H. Williams III's Batwoman: Elegy reveals at least one intrinsically progressive theme in superhero genre: its performative and inherently queer conception of identity.