UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Exilios y redes en el hispanismo de Estados Unidos (1962-2011): Ficciones y migraciones(2022) Devesa Gómez, Nélida Isabel; Naharro-Calderon, Jose Maria; Merediz, Eyda; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Franco dictatorship (1936-1975), Spaniards fled and went into exile in large flocks. Unfortunately, the United States only admitted a small group of Spanish intellectuals, deemed politically neutral, who joined institutions of higher education and developed multicultural, academic, and social networks. These intellectuals had a lasting influence that led to a significant revival of Hispanism in the USA. This dissertation, Exiles and Networks in US Hispanism (1962-2011): Fictions and Migrations, interrogates autobiographical novels and memoirs that focus on the experience of three of those exiles: Prof. Carmen de Zulueta (CUNY/Lehman College, 1966-1984), Prof. Ildefonso-Manuel Gil (Rutgers University, 1962-1983), and Prof. Víctor Fuentes (U. California-Santa Barbara, 1965-2003).Despite differences in genres and viewpoints (memoirs, autobiographies, autofiction, etc.), these authors share specific chronotopes of exiles. These chronotopes are based on three dimensions through their experience of displacement: spaces, times and intellectual networks, through which they recreate their exilic itineraries. Each author accentuates a specific dimension of these chronotopes: Zulueta (Chapter 1) puts distance between herself and her account and focuses on the portrayal of the intellectuals that assisted her along the way; Gil (Chapter 2) relishes the recreation of time as a game that is played out on the page; and Fuentes (Chapter 3) adopts characters of traditional Spanish literary works (picaresque, Don Juan, revolutionary) to create chronotopes in which the three dimensions are equally relevant. The analysis of these authors’ chronotopes of exile reveals not only their identities as exiles, but also their relationship with Spain as their homeland, and the United States as their host. They develop a special relation with both countries since they become transatlantic and transoceanic figures that greatly enjoy the new opportunities found in the US, but long for the past lives of their homeland. Their accounts also divulge the ways in which the previous Spanish intellectuals that had arrived in the US assisted each other and helped them to emigrates. They also portray the spaces of their new home and the “non-places” of Spanish culture that they constructed once they were settled.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 The Multistable Material of Modernism: Perception, Objects, and Identity(2021) Harr, Kayla; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that modernist writers channeled the transformative potential of multistability, a popular concept among twentieth-century theorists of perception, into politically charged literary practices whose goals continue to reverberate in recent antiracist and decolonial theory. In the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists used the concept of multistability to explain human perception and captured this concept in paradoxical images that appear first as one thing and then another, through a shift in what the viewer perceives as figure and ground. Writers as different as H.D., Virginia Woolf, Amos Tutuola, and Wilson Harris adapted multistability into literary practices that sought to dismantle the bounds of patriarchal, imperialist, and anthropocentric hierarchies. These writers infused their representations of perception, objects, and power dynamics with a multistability that ceaselessly troubles the divide between subject and object and its related structures of social exploitation. Moreover, placing these writers’ efforts to expand what counts as a subject or agent alongside recent theories of extrahuman ontologies that seek empowering alternatives to the exclusions of Western subjectivity offers a compelling link between modernist literary experiment and contemporary antiracist and decolonial theory concerning objects, identity, and ecology.Item An Editor in Israel: The Periodicals of Ahad Ha'am in the Development of Modern Hebrew Literature(2021) Fabricant, Noah L; Zakim, Eric; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for a reevaluation of the significance of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) in the development of modern Hebrew literature on the basis of his work as an editor of periodicals. Critics commonly portray Ahad Ha’am as rigid and didactic, enforcing his own literary norms while excluding aesthetic and humanistic literature in favor of literature with explicit Jewish themes. Reading the periodicals edited by Ahad Ha’am shows that this reputation is exaggerated; his work is in fact characterized by significant heterogeneity and flexibility.This dissertation introduces the critical perspective and methodology of periodical studies to Hebrew literature. The first chapter shows how Ahad Ha’am as an editor brings diverse ideologies and Hebrew styles together in an organic whole, the “Odessa nusach,” in the literary collection Kaveret (1890). The second chapter argues that Yehoshua Ḥana Ravnitsky, editor of Pardes (1892-1896), lacks the editorial skill and vision of Ahad Ha’am, and as a result Pardes is divisive and lacks the unity of Ahad Ha’am’s periodicals. The final two chapters are devoted to Ha-Shiloah, the most prestigious outlet for Hebrew literature of its era, founded and edited by Ahad Ha’am from 1896 to 1903. Chapter Three traces the history of the critical reception of Ahad Ha’am’s controversy with Micha Yosef Berdichevsky over the boundaries of Hebrew literature, showing the development of a polarized standard account of the dispute that discredits Ahad Ha’am. Reading the original essays of the dispute in context shows that Ahad Ha’am’s resistance to belles lettres and humanistic literature is far from absolute, and in a sense Ahad Ha’am authors the entire controversy by collaborating with and publishing Berdichevsky and his supporters. Finally, the dissertation uses the belletristic literature published by Ahad Ha’am in Ha-Shiloah to show that his selections as an editor were not as narrow as critics claim or even as Ahad Ha’am himself prescribes in his essays. As a periodical editor, Ahad Ha’am fostered diversity and dialogue, and this should be accounted for in evaluating his influence on the development of Hebrew literature.Item Harbor(2011) Young, Martha A.; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The speaker confronts both her ambiguous relationship with her father and becoming a parent herself, moving from fear and anger to a tentative reconciliation. Specific topics also include motherhood, the author's younger sister and brother, her son and daughter, as well as miscarriage, strokes, and death.Item Coureurs de Bois, Backwoodsmen As Ecocritical Motif in Four Works of French Canadian Literature(2015) Rehill, Anne Collier; Orlando, Valérie K.; Frisch, Andrea M.; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 17th-19th century French Canadian fur traders and interpreters called coureurs de bois and later voyageurs were known for their independence of spirit and connection to the wilds. They can also be seen as an ecocritical motif because, in addition to participating in the environmentally abusive fur trade, they also show the way forward through intercultural connections and business relationships with Amerindians. The four novels analyzed here--Taché's Forestiers et voyageurs: Moeurs et légendes canadiennes (1863); Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine (1916); Desrosiers' Les Engagés du Grand Portage (1938); and Maillet's Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979)--portray woodsmen operating in a collaborative mode within the realistic context of the need to make money. They participated in both ruthless capitalist exploitation and greater intercultural acceptance, as exemplified in Desrosiers' two opposing main characters. They entered folklore through the 19th century literary efforts of Taché and others to construct a distinct French Canadian national identity, then in an unstable and continually disrupted process of formation. Because coureurs linked the natural and human worlds as well as radically different human cultures, their entry into literature involved their Amerindian business partners, thus making intercultural connections an aspect of the national identity that Taché strove to construct and mirror. From a modern perspective, such cultural intersections pertain to the ecocritical acknowledgment of the need to respect global populations' widely varying modes of survival. Serres' Contrat naturel offers a broader proposal: that the human population, from the position of its diverse needs and power over the environment, should reach a silent contract with the rest of the planet that also acknowledges and respects its needs. The coureurs de bois and voyageurs portrayed in the works studied here embody both the problem and the way forward. They and their Amerindian partners occupy the perhaps unique position of contributing to environmental damage as well as greater understanding of the cultural other, which holds the promise of collaboration and the joint search for realistic solutions. Thus, in ways both positive and negative, coureurs de bois and voyageurs, far from perfect models, continue to serve as guides, even in today's tremendously diverse field of ecocriticism.Item As Thread(2013) Dyche, Jessica Kathryn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As Thread is a collection of poems which keeps account of the categories and modes of loss, using the death of my father as the catalyst, and how memory, as replacement, unravels, tangles, and mends--as thread does.Item Candidates for the Redemption Machine(2013) Gannon, Shaun Patrick; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection takes the concept of the "stunted individual" from grotesque fiction and applies it to surrealist prose poetry, where only traces of standard logic can be found; through this, the contrast between impossible events and innately human behavior becomes exaggerated. The melding of these forms forces the struggling individuals in these poems to represent humanity, where it is found wanting, despite artificial hope.Item British Modernist Narrative Middles(2013) Rosenberg, Michael Eli; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Middles play a key role in shaping narrative form. However, while Edward Said has shown how beginnings shape the novel and a wide range of intellectual endeavors in Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Frank Kermode has explored the pull of the ending on Western narrative in The Sense of an Ending, there has been no comparable study of the middle. Defining the narrative middle as a central piece of text that has a transitional or transformational function, British Modernist Narrative Middles draws attention to the ways narrative middles have been used to construct distinctly modernist narratives through transformations of narrative form and technique. The various techniques employed in modernist narrative middles are demonstrated through close readings of three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as well as three British neo-modernist texts: Rayner Heppenstall's Saturnine, B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, and Brigid Brophy's In Transit. While not all modernist texts employ prominent narrative middles, when they do, these middles can be crucial to our understanding both of these novels' narrative form and how they grapple with the major thematic and poetic concerns of modernism.Item Rewriting the French Colonial Topos of the Island in the Works of Marie Ferranti, Jean-François Samlong, and Chantal Spitz(2012) Baage, Silvia; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The island trope is a recurring theme in colonial travel literature but how do contemporary authors of the French-speaking world conceptualize the island in the 20th and 21st century? My project examines the complexity of the notion of islandedness in the works of three contemporary authors of Francophone islands outside the French Caribbean: Corsican author Marie Ferranti, Réunionese author Jean-François Samlong, and Tahitian author Chantal Spitz. Drawing on different discourses of postmodernity including intertextuality, supermodernity, the hyperreal, the time-image, and violence, I argue that the island becomes an important site from which ethnography, the crisis of time and meaning, and techniques of resistance are negotiated and constructed. In my analysis, I build on various foundational theories of cultural contact from the French Caribbean and Francophone Africa to account for the diversity and difference of the non-French Caribbean island text. Particular attention will be given to the literary text as a tool to reflect upon a colonial past and neo-colonial present in three different contexts of the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific.