UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL HISTORY IN EARLY TURKISH EPICS: REMEMBERING GENDER, FAMILY AND SOVEREIGNTY(2022) Johnson, Leo; Karamustafa, Ahmet; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early Turkish epic tradition is relatively understudied, and many existing works focus on using Turkish epics to reconstruct earlier eras without fully understanding their role in the period from which the manuscripts date. Using a translation of Battalname based on the earliest fifteenth and sixteenth century manuscripts, and a translation of two sixteenth century manuscripts of The Book of Dede Korkut , this work examines the social context of Turkish literature in Anatolia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as its relation to the social world of epic society. A memory studies framing is used to situate the works and understand their role as a fifteenth and sixteenth century depiction of the past. Chapters are devoted to the role of literature in society, including circulation and reading practices, creation of Turkish literature and the vernacularization process, as well as to the role of women, men and gender, and to the structure and political significance of the family.Item Figures of Excess: Subversive Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Iranian Women's Literature and Cinema(2018) Sarabi, Niloo; Keshavarz, Fatemeh; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study seeks “formal” and “thematic” excess in the works of contemporary Iranian novelists and filmmakers, including Shahrnush Parsipur, Moniru Ravanipur, Fariba Vafi, and Marzieh Meshkini. It strives to develop new critical perspectives on the literary contributions of these works in terms of female resistance through their employment of figures of excess. Exploring excessive woman-subjects, the first chapter of this study engages with Shahrnush Parsipur’s, novel, Women without Men and a number of her other novels, which provide fertile sites for extraordinary and defiant women, who subvert standards of womanhood in Iranian culture. Seeking excess, embodied in strange themes, the second chapter of this study investigates Moniru Ravanipur’s magical realist novel, The Drowned in conjunction with Parsipur’s science fiction novel, Shiva. It argues that excessive/strange themes enable each author to articulate her particular message: favoring fast-paced social and economic progress through highly advanced technologies in Shiva, and the preservation of long standing tradition in The Drowned. The third chapter of this study engages with Fariba Vafi’s novels, My Bird and A Secret in the Alleys, in terms of excessive non-verbal and verbal acts, such as “internal monologue” and “verbosity.” It demonstrates that in both novels the protagonists’ active engagement with traumatic experiences, facilitated by memory and internal monologues, enables them to ultimately process trauma into language. The fourth chapter of this study examines the representations of women in Jafar Panahi’s film, The Circle (2000), and Marzieh Meshkini’s film debut, The Day I Became a Woman (2000). It argues that in both films excess not only manifests in “circular” narrative forms, but also in themes and images that evoke the motif of the circle. It argues that these themes speak to the perpetual sense of captivity and despair many women feel in the post-revolutionary Iranian society, for example, those belonging to the rural poor as in The Day, or, the urban poor and lower-middle classes as in The Circle.Item MEN WRITING WOMEN: “THE WOMAN QUESTION” AND MALE DISCOURSE OF IRANIAN MODERNITY"(2016) Allamezade, Sahar; Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I explore “The Woman Question” in the discourse of Iranian male authors. A pro-modernity group, they placed women’s issues at the heart of their discourse. This dissertation follows the trajectory of the representation of “The Woman Question” as it is reflected in the male discourse over the course of a century. It discusses the production of a literature that was anchored in the idea of reform and concerned itself with issues pertaining to women. These men challenged lifelong patriarchal notions such as veiling, polygamy, gender segregation, and arranged marriages, as well as traditional roles of women and gender relations. This study is defined under the rubrics of “The Woman Question” and “The New Woman,” which I have borrowed from the Victorian and Edwardian debates of similar issues as they provide clearer delineations. Drawing upon debates on sexuality, and gender, this dissertation illustrates the way these men championed women was both progressive and regressive. This study argues that the desire for women’s liberation was couched in male ideology of gender relations. It further illustrates that the advancement of “The Woman Question,” due to its continuous and yet gradual shifting concurrent with each author’s nuanced perception of women’s issues, went through discernible stages that I refer to as observation, causation, remedy, and confusion. The analytical framework for this project is anchored in the “why” and the “how” of the Iranian male authors’ writings on women in addition to “what” was written. This dissertation examines four narrative texts—two in prose and two in poetry—entitled: “Lankaran’s Vizier,” “The Black Shroud,” “‘Arefnameh,” and “Fetneh” written respectively by Akhundzadeh, ‘Eshqi, Iraj Mirza, and Dashti. Chapter one outlines the historical background, methodology, theoretical framework, and literature review. The following chapters examine, the advocacy for companionate marriage and romantic love, women and nationalistic cause, veiling and unveiling, and the emerging figure of the New Iranian Woman as morally depraved.Item Les Représentations littéraires de la guerre civile libanaise: pour une poétique du lien(2014) Matar, Marilyn; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze representations of the Lebanese civil war in literature, and focus mainly on the works of the Francophone writers, Wajdi Mouawad, Elie-Pierre Sabbag and Ramy Zein. I trace in these works recurring themes and motifs that allow me to bring out the singularity of the aesthetics of war writings from the Lebanese civil war context. My thesis also reflects on the ethical questions raised by these works, which undertake a basic and universal examination of evil, meditate on the horrors of war, revenge and reconciliation, and grapple with the limits of human dignity. In the introduction, I present the authors and their works in the socio-historical context of the Mashrek and, more specifically, of Lebanon and the wars it has experienced since 1975. My dissertation is comprised of five chapters: In the first chapter, I examine the literary representation of the human cost of war: the aftermath of trauma, exile, and death. I also show how war and identity become inextricable in this literature. In the second chapter, I focus on the rewriting of myths and Greek tragedies such as Oedipus and Antigone as a way to gesture towards the unspeakable tragedy of war. In the third and fourth chapter, I demonstrate the importance of narrative by analyzing the links between intimate storytelling and the public space of theater, and by reexamining the notion of catharsis. The final chapter is a detailed study of the metaphors of reconstruction and reconciliation in Lebanese Francophone literature. In this section, I show how these works are characterized by a will to transcend conflicts; they thus constitute a powerful call for a society based on humanist ethical values.