Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785
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Item THE REPRESENTATION OF NAZI VILLAINY IN AMERICAN COMICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ONGOING STRUGGLE OF GERMAN TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE “POST” TRUMP ERA(2022) Foster, Jordan Maxwell; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past 80 years, Nazis have been cast as the ultimate prototype for villainy in popular culture, especially in American comic books. The fetishization of Nazis in global popular culture has impeded the difficult tasks of coming to terms with the past and establishing a new transnational identity in Germany. However, recent publications, such as Freedom Fighters (2019) from DC Comics and Secret Empire (2017) from Marvel Comics demonstrate how manipulation, propaganda, fearmongering, and indoctrination powered the Nazi Party and continue to run rampant in modern-day fascist organizations. If mainstream comic books begin to consistently showcase these less sensational aspects of Nazism, they could highlight the subtle dangers of contemporary fascism, including neo-Nazism and far-right extremism, which have recently experienced a resurgence in mainstream politics all over the world. By doing so, mainstream comics could begin to emulate the sophisticated critique of works like Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman.Item Machtverhältnisse und die Problematik des postkolonialen Blicks in Uwe Timms Morenga (1978) und Gerhard Seyfrieds Herero (2003)(2016) Sellman, Eileen; Frederiksen, Elke P; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using a postcolonial methodology within a German Cultural Studies framework, this thesis applies a close reading to Uwe Timm’s 1978 novel Morenga and Gerhard Seyfried’s 2003 novel Herero. Both novels narrate the colonial experience in German Southwest Africa during the 1904-1907 Herero and Nama uprising through the eyes of a German male protagonist. I investigate how notions of the ‘other’ become ingrained in the collective cultural imaginary of a nation and manifest themselves as inherent truths used to justify methods of subjugation. I also examine the conflicts that arise due to the clash between these drastically different cultures in the “contact zone”, a term I borrow from Mary Louise Pratt. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the ways in which the natives’ use of mimicry allows for the creation of a cultural hybridity in which power relations are constantly negotiated and re-evaluated. I also problematize the difficulty both protagonists demonstrate in their quest to abandon the colonial gaze in favor of adopting a postcolonial perspective, an attempt that often appears ambivalent at best.Item Rilke's Russian Encounter and the Transformative Impact on the Poet(2014) Finney, Victoria; Beicken, Peter U; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Russian culture had a pivotal role in the development of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetic perception and evolution. As late as 1922, Rilke emphatically claimed that Russian culture made him into what he is. Decades earlier, during his visits to Russia in 1899 and 1900, Rilke encountered many Russians from different walks of life: writers, artists, intellectuals and ordinary folk. Having immersed himself in the study of Russian language, literature, visual arts and religious ritual, Rilke prepared himself for a most intensive acculturation of Russia as a cultural other. This cultural encounter often has been critiqued as shallow and tainted by the poet's preconceived Western ideas. In contrast, by examining opposing critical views, this study investigates, interdisciplinarily and from the perspective of transculturation, how three central concepts of Rilke - poverty, love, and the artist's role - were substantially transformed by his absorption of Russian cultural and literary discourses. Russia is defined here as a `representational space,' employing Henri Levebvre's concept of geographical space consisting of both physical attributes and imaginary symbols. Using Wilhelm Dilthey's concept of `lived experience', the study approaches Rilke's Russian encounter as a holistic intercultural experience on both conscious and unconscious levels. Incorporating these theoretical aspects into a modified concept of transculturation, the study transcends the question of accuracy of Rilke's Russian depictions so often raised in biographical studies that insist on positivistic factuality. Instead, approached transculturally, Rilke's Russian encounter highlights the transformative changes that the poet's subjective perceptions and poetic development underwent. This is enhanced by the references to and analyses of Rilke's works informed by his Russian encounter. Most significantly, Rilke's transculturation as informed by his transformative Russian encounter generates the development of the concept of a compassionate imagination based on the idea of universal interconnectedness. This fostered Rilke's unique view of the individual as an integral part of a universal unity, by which the individual is considered inherently worthy regardless of limiting attributes such as social class or gender. This perception channeled Rilke's idea that the tragedy of the poor and the root of modern inability to love are to be found in the constant construction of identities imposed on an individual by others. For Rilke, after his Russian encounter, art's purpose was to create awareness of the individual's place in the universal unity.Item ArteletrA: The Politics of Going Unnoticed in the Latin American Sixties(2014) Bartles, Jason A.; Demaría, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the long 1960s in Latin America to ask about forms of political and ethical interventions that went unnoticed in the cultural debates of the era. Within the vast Latin American cultural markets of the sixties, I study four authors who works were overlooked both critically and popularly at the time. Calvert Casey (1924-1969), a gay Cuban-American writer, worked and published in Havana from 1958 to 1965 when he went into self-exile. Juan Filloy (1894-2000), the Argentine "writer from three centuries," returned from a thirty year editorial silence in the sixties. Héctor Manjarrez (1945) returned to Mexico City from London and began to publish only after the massacre at Tlatelolco. Armonía Somers (1914-1994), a female, Uruguayan writer of dark and erotic tales, was originally dismissed by many of her contemporaries for her provocative themes. What unites these diverse authors is a common problematic, unique to them, which appears throughout their works--a practice I call "the politics of going unnoticed." Political philosophy from Plato to Rancière highlights the process of passing from invisibility to visibility within the public sphere. However, these authors imagine subjects who purposefully avoid the spotlight and still engage in dissensus. While reading the Latin American cultural archive against the grain, my analysis is guided by three questions: (1) How can a seemingly unimportant subject enact a radical critique while, paradoxically, going unnoticed by dominant institutions? (2) How do these authors promote an ethics that open dialogues among political adversaries in a democratic framework without relying on exclusive categories? And (3), what are the formal strategies they employ to reflect the politics and ethics of going unnoticed? I contend that these authors imagine new possibilities for political action far from entrenched ideologies (e.g., Peronism, the Cuban Revolution) and violent acts of aggression or repression (e.g., the Tupamaros, the massacre at Tlatelolco). Moreover, they generate the conditions of possibility for agonistic, democratizing transformations of existing institutions and epistemologies that exceed exclusive national and identitarian boundaries.Item Quevedo y su recepción y huella en la poesía del Siglo XX (De Rubén Darío a José Emilio Pacheco)(2013) Echazú, Alejandra; Sánchez Martínez de Pinillos, Hernán; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The metaphysical and love poetry of the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) has exceeded all the dynamics that writing at that time had imposed: its rhetoric shows the intimacy of the poet's feelings and his anguish in a way that it approaches him to the existentialist pain of a contemporary man. Quevedo was valued as a Humanist thinker and an original concept-maker both, in his own life as well as in his writings; thus, Quevedo's verbal inventions, ideological perspectives, and innovative expressions that renewed the Petrarchan and Cancioneril traditions, have been intensely reread by Contemporary poets. First, I delimit some of Quevedo's poetics that called the attention of 20th Century poetic generations, contextualizing them in the Baroque period. Stemming from Dámaso Alonso's seminal study, "El desgarrón afectivo en la poesía de Quevedo," I focus on the term "affective tearing" in the context of Renaissance anthropology (affectus is defined as the rhetorical, semantic and syntactical lyrical expressions that manifest the breakup of the analogical traditional world view). The influence of Quevedo at the beginning of the 20th century is explored in the second chapter in the figure of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío through the legacies of the Baroque time during the Modernist period. Having broken the link between the symbol and the symbolized, Darío had to reformulate some poetic concepts. In the third chapter, I concentrate on the term "sincerity" as a rhetorical trope that connects passion and intellect, after Gracián's theory of poetical language, a motto for the avant guard poets, both Spanish and Latin Americans, living in Europe before WWII. I explore their poetics and the legacies from the Baroque and the Romanticism as they had to work in a diverse symbolic horizon, very different from their predecessors. In the fourth chapter I focus on the poetic dialogue between Quevedo and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo regarding the transcendence in death and through the body. Finally, I trace the legacy of Quevedo in the second half of the 20th century in the poems of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. Some of Quevedo's topics are glossed, others are rethought, others are adapted to new contexts, but all these poets recognize their debt to the Spanish Baroque poet. In order to demonstrate that Quevedo's poetry continues to be reread and rewritten, I conclude my study with the works published in the 21st century by the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco.