The Cross-Currents of Exilic Storytelling: Multilingual Memory and the Maritime Shift

dc.contributor.advisorAllan, Michael
dc.contributor.authorReid-Olds, Tera
dc.date.accessioned2020-09-24T17:13:23Z
dc.date.available2020-09-24T17:13:23Z
dc.date.issued2020-09-24
dc.description.abstractThis 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.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/25618
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectArabic Literatureen_US
dc.subjectCaribbean Studiesen_US
dc.subjectFrancophone Literatureen_US
dc.subjectItalian Literatureen_US
dc.subjectMediterranean Studiesen_US
dc.titleThe Cross-Currents of Exilic Storytelling: Multilingual Memory and the Maritime Shift
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Comparative Literature
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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