English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
Browse
18 results
Search Results
Item AFRO-MEXICAN FOLKTALES AND POETRY IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES(2024) Tenorio Carrillo, Nancy Berenice; Collins, Merle; Long, Ryan; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The aim of my dissertation is to challenge what I call mestizo normativity. In creating and coining the term mestizo normativity, I borrow from Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work on queer theory. In their work “Sex in Public” (1998), Warner and Berlant note that heterosexuality only appears to be normal because of public structures that regulate the sex binary. In their work they note that everything in public life is done with the aim of normalizing the male/female binary. This binary affects all aspects of daily life and can be seen, for example, in the male/female designations in public bathrooms and male/female categories in sports. I use the term mestizo normativity to interrogate how Afro-Mexican works of poetry, folklore, ballads, and stories disrupt accepted definitions of Blackness and Latinidad in the Americas. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note, in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (2010), “we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.” In essence, those who do not fall neatly along the Black/Latino binary are asked to choose between their identities. They can be either Latino or Black but not both. In a similar fashion, queers and bisexuals are made to choose between the heterosexual/homosexual binary; they can be heterosexuals or homosexuals but not both. With these definitions in mind, I read Afro-Mexican literature as queer literature. Afro-Mexicans do not fit neatly along the Afro/Latino binary; they are both, and in that two-ness lies their queerness. My dissertation adds to the field of Afro-Mexican studies by positing that Afro-Mexican literature shares similarities with African traditions, history, and culture. As Nicole von Germeten has pointed out in her work “Juan Roque’s Donation” in Afro-Latino Voices (2009), the African diaspora in Mexico is as much a part of Mexican history as Spanish history. Throughout the colonial period, Spaniards always constituted a small minority in New Spain and were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Africans throughout the colonial period. African culture, like Spanish culture, is also part of Mexico. In order to prove my thesis of mestizo normativity, I have organized my dissertation into four chapters. In chapter one I argue that Afro-Mexican folktales share similarities with West and Central African storytelling practices. In my analysis, I note that Afro-Mexican tales share similarities with trickster rabbit tales from the Bantu people in Central Africa and Hausa people in West Africa. And moreover, I note that these tales fall into the tatsuniya genre of storytelling found among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa. This genre of tales is known as a subversive category of tales, for it includes tales of small animals taking down larger animals. I argue that these tales are how Afro-Mexicans remember their African heritage. As is discussed in my first chapter, the first scholars to analyze Afro-Mexican folktales moved away from comparing them to West and Central African folklore because they understood all Mexican literature to stem from Mexico’s Amerindian and Spanish roots. That is, their readings upheld mestizo normativity. In my second chapter, I argue that the ballad tradition in the Costa Chica shares similarities with West African storytelling traditions. Moreover, I argue that through ballads, versos, and maroon poetry, Afro-Mexicans disrupt the notion of a mestizo Mexico. That is, they question the single story that has been told about Mexico and create a multifaceted and culturally complex site that they recognize as home. To drive this point home, I compare Afro-Mexican corridos to calypsos and argue for readings that include Afrodiasporic strategies of resistance when dealing with Afrodesendant peoples. In chapter three, I read Afro-Mexican works written by writers in the U.S. diaspora. I examine how these writers’ perceptions of race are formed in the U.S. Lastly, I examine how contemporary writers such as Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, Abel Emigdio Baños Delgado, and Filemón Silva Sandoval use social media to promote their written works and challenge readings that depict Mexico as a Black free space.Item The Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item UNDOCUMENTARY POETICS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN POETRY BY WOMEN AND NON-BINARY POETS(2021) Knowles, Andrea; Long, Ryan; Ontiveros, Randy J; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Undocumentary Poetics elucidates how poets from across the Americas use poetry’s form to interrogate the bounded nature of form itself, including the forms of the poem, the canon, the nation, and of recounting and knowing history. This project challenges the writing of a hemispheric canon of American poetry that, by largely overlooking women and non-binary poets, especially and including those of color, continues to leave dominant, white hetero-patriarchal forms intact—despite the hemispheric framework’s inherent potential to uncover minor literary networks across borders and destabilize those deep-rooted systems of control. The contemporary poetry I examine confronts those systemic erasures by tackling the constraints of genre and form. The project’s focus on form and historical power brings it into conversation with recent discussions of historical and documentary poetry. The term “documentary” has been applied to a range of poems, from lyrics documenting personal experience to mixed-media experimental writing that pushes on the genre-categories of documentary and poetry. I ask how poetry itself can be “documentary.” How do poems become “documents” that substantiate official or State versions of culture and history? Do poetry’s canons, histories, and formal and generic expectations also play this documentary role? I propose that undocumentary poetry engages in and undermines poetic documentation in multiple senses. On the one hand, the poems I analyze make visible events, lived realities, or histories that are hidden within ‘official’ versions of history and culture, and they also make visible the forms that have enabled and perpetuated such erasures. On the other, the poems undermine the boundaries of that documentation, ultimately making even themselves provisional. I highlight the ways that poetry’s condensation of forms and language, and its resulting paradoxes and ambiguities, specifically enables such undocumentation. Rather than creating a new category or form of poetry with Undocumentary Poetics, I observe undocumentary poetics as a current within contemporary poetics, one that is invested in imagining a world with more nuanced and fluid, and less rigid, forms. It is a poetry that “inhabits contradiction” as M. NourbeSe Philip put it, “unraveling old systems of control and domination,” without creating new ones.Item AT HOME IN THE WORLD: TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE WORKS OF EUROPEAN WOMEN WRITERS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY(2021) Ehrlich, Manon; Eades, Caroline; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Europe during the long nineteenth century, despite being relegated to the private sphere and excluded from the realms of national and international politics, women were increasingly exposed to the effects of global movements. Novels written by women, while generally dismissed because of their narrative emphasis on domestic matters, constitute important literary tools to reevaluate the historical processes of globalization through a female lens. In connecting the texts of English novelist Jane Austen, French author George Sand, and French-speaking writer Isabelle Eberhardt to contemporary global dynamics, this dissertation registers expressions of transnational mobility in their writings and argues for the formation of a cosmopolitan consciousness in nineteenth-century women’s literature. By adopting a transnational and comparatist approach that fosters interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, this project proposes an out-scaled reading strategy to understand past female experiences in a new light. In thus challenging the boundaries of knowledge for works produced during the long nineteenth-century that have been previously read mostly as national products, this study charts the gradual re-orientation of these novels’ focus from the home to the world. Given the (geo)political and archival value of those texts as relates to the development of a global culture in the nineteenth century, this dissertation proposes a method of interpreting that helps to recover international history in the context of women’s writing. In order to capture the shifting relationship between the authors’ viewing of the world, but also their being-in-the-world, this study is divided along two sections: the formation of a transnational textual space (1) and the authors’ engagement with political matters and their subversive contribution to international history-making (2). In learning to feel at home in the world, but also to navigate the tension between the social pull of the domestic sphere and the centrifugal desire to transcend the limits to their gendered experience, these writers show us that nineteenth-century literature is more relevant than ever. Indeed, in offering us keys to negotiate in-between spaces and conflicting orientations, women writers in the long nineteenth century can help us cope with the complexities and challenges of living between the national and the global in the twenty-first century.Item Alternative Worlds of Female Desire: Women Reimagining the Nation in Caribbean Fiction(2021) Allan, Keisha Simone; Collins, Merle MC; Avilez, GerShun GA; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how the nation is reimagined through the lens of women who critique social and political inequities in their societies. I explore how literary artists provide feminist interventions in discourses on the nation by scripting women characters and women’s bodies as the medium for constructing the nation. I illustrate how these authors open up a dialogue about how to envision revolutionary womanhood anew-historically and linguistically-using the female body as a central axis of power.The creation of alternative worlds in the works of Caribbean women writers of the twentieth century is of particular thematic importance. In Julia Álvarez’s In the Name of Salomé, Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Amour, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber and Zoé Valdés’ La nada cotidiana, the homeland is depicted as shaped by male desire-national and individual. These authors create alternative worlds in their fictions to provide their female characters with avenues to escape, protest against and interrogate social and patriarchal repression. For these selected Caribbean female authors, language is crucial to the interrogation of the nature of the nation. In In the Name of Salomé, Julia Álvarez subverts masculinist connotations of the nation by reimagining a matria (motherland), using the language of motherhood to reconceptualize the nation. In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson creates a hybrid language, placing Standard English and Caribbean Creoles in dialogue with each other to create an alternative socio-normative reality where Creole languages and Standard English are equally valued. These authors illustrate how the divergent colonial, linguistic and cultural configurations of the Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean impact the reimagining of the nation. This study seeks to explore how the reimagining of the nation by the female characters in Amour, In the Name of Salomé, La nada cotidiana and Midnight Robber redefines notions of revolutionary womanhood. I will examine the symbiotic relationship between literature and revolutionary imagination in the works of Caribbean female authors. This project aims to illustrate how the feminist reimagining of the nation allows Caribbean female authors to utilize their fictional narrative spaces to inscribe transgressive narratives in an attempt to define real-life sites of resistance for social and political transformation.Item Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011(2021) Wei, Tung-An; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011,” I focus on a radical, underexamined type of difficulty which presents irreducible interpretive dilemmas at fundamental narrative levels—for example, a reader may be required to fill in gaps to complete the narrative but is unable to. Unlike what James Phelan calls “the difficult,” recalcitrance does not yield to our interpretation. Existing scholarship has mostly focused on the canonical works of “the difficult” in modernist and postmodern literature. I intervene in the scholarship by investigating the wide appeal to recalcitrance across the century, including previously overlooked late modernist and contemporary literature. Moreover, I analyze various forms of recalcitrance in different types of fiction, not just canonical or highbrow. This large scope allows me to trace how later authors repurpose modernist techniques, including recalcitrance, for new ends. I argue that recalcitrance is an effective strategy to lay bare the workings of a text. For example, in Molloy, Samuel Beckett taps into the recalcitrant lists and catechism in James Joyce’s Ulysses to fashion his lists and in turn critique traditional emplotment. Moreover, in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses unreliable narration to keep readers interested in tracing the narrator’s reevaluation of his past. Recalcitrance is equally powerful in foregrounding social issues that are so complex that they can never be fully solved. For instance, Joseph Conrad’s underappreciated wartime story “The Tale” uses recalcitrance to register the public’s antithetical attitudes toward wartime rumors of submarine attacks. In the afterword, I analyze how Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Yong-Ping Li’s The End of the River critiques colonial exploitation of Indigenous women by reworking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Through my afterword, I gesture toward future work on 1) additional sites of recalcitrance beyond British or Anglophone literature and 2) the transformations of modernist narrative techniques, including those bearing on recalcitrance, in global novels. My dissertation contributes to the New Modernist Studies by accounting for transnational exchange (such as Li’s rewriting of Conrad) and drawing attention to authors who are largely unfamiliar to American academia, namely Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Li.Item HASIDIC HAGIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION – A HISTORICAL AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVE.(2020) Mandel-Edrei, Chen; Zakim, Eric; Jelen, Sheila E; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Hasidic Hagiography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” sheds light on a neglected genre in the scholarship of modern Hebrew literature – Hasidic hagiography. Nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment activists, influenced by Romanticism with its perspective on “primitive,” “national” literatures, read Hasidic hagiographies as folklore; until today this genre is excluded from the canon of Modern Hebrew literature and from critical literary discourse. My work challenges this myopia and offers a critical perspective on the complex relationships among religion, mysticism, and modernity within the Hasidic stories; it shows how Hasidic hagiography represented an alternative path for Jewish modernization that rejected the binary lens of the Enlightenment’s secular rationalism. The dissertation’s title references Walter Benjamin, who revolutionized an understanding of literature as a reaction to changes in society wrought by industrialization and market capitalization. My dissertation applies a similar perspicacity to the study of Hasidic hagiography. The 1848 revolutions, the growing political and cultural awareness, and the influences of print-capitalism in Galicia, prompted two Hasidim–Menachem Mendel Bodek (1825-1874) and Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845-1904) to print oral Hasidic hagiographical stories in the popular format of folktale collections, thereby constituting Hasidic hagiography as a new genre in Hebrew literature. These projects marked a sharp transition from oral and intimate gatherings with the tsadik to popular printed experience of the masses. The process through which mechanical reproduction replicates the first-hand meeting with the tsadik for the masses, reflects the Hasidic engagement with the project of Jewish modernity. Distributed through networks of popular media, Hasidic hagiography became the device through which Hasidism integrated into contemporary Jewish and secular discourses, responding to ideas such as nationalism and individualism. The goal of this project is twofold: first, to offer a new critical methodology for reading those texts and establish a framework for discussing similar cases of marginalized texts in world literature; and secondly, to offer a new understanding of the political role of Hasidic hagiography and its promise for modern Jewish experience and literature. Finally, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of the political and cultural functions of popular literature, and illuminates alternatives to historiographies of national literatures.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 PROTEAN GODS: A RETELLING OF HISPANIOLA’S STORY THROUGH THE MAROON(2018) Rivera, Ines Pastora; Ontiveros, Randy; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that an exploration of the maroon, or the runaway slave, in literature can be a means to acknowledging the too-often-repressed historical, political, and cultural connections between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and can also help us uncover more accurate and less restrictive versions of Hispaniola’s story. Hispaniola’s story is often told through the fatal-conflict narrative, reducing Haitian-Dominican relations to an unending cockfight. The fatal-conflict narrative paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations fated to regard one another as ultimate, foreign archenemies,destined to be in total conflict. It also paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations whose fight for Hispaniola and for the preservation of their respective cultures is fatal. The formation of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti has bolstered the fatal-conflict narrative, silencing a shared history of resistance and cross-pollination. My work extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of a united island and that complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. Rather than reaffirming a discourse of national difference through a focus on the border, I focus on the maroon as a protean figure who undoes the fatal-conflict narrative. I argue that these change agents, the maroons, anchor the island in what Cedric Robinson calls the Black Radical Tradition, the evolving resistance of African people to oppression. Maroon figures also reveal different angles to Hispaniola’s story through their forms of resistance and penchant for metamorphoses. I also examine twentieth and twenty-first century maroons found in Dominican and Dominican American literature. Like their counterparts from the past, modern-day maroons take flight, resist forms of enslavement and oppression, and undergo transformations that challenge conventional ways of thinking about Haitian-Dominican relations and the island of Hispaniola. Writers from the Dominican diaspora—among them Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—have played a pivotal role in interrogating history, and more specifically, memories of violence and the repercussions associated with migration. Not only does this interrogation rewrite history, but it offers a means of forging a new, fuller story that erodes the border and expands the island’s boundaries, all the while magnifying the role of the Black Freedom struggle in the making of a whole Hispaniola.Item Engagements with Tolstoy: Representations of Crisis in Hemingway, Wharton, Pasternak, and Grossman(2017) Pratsovyta, Nataliya; Richardson, Brian E.; Papazian, Elizabeth A.; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines the problem of historical representation in literary fiction, taking as its subject the twentieth-century novel. As a project in comparative literature, it brings together literary works of American and Russian authors of the twentieth century with works of critical theory and philosophy to analyze artistic representations of crisis, understood as moments of social and cultural transition and change, across cultures. Looking at literary works from the USA and the Soviet Union reveals the points of contact between two countries that both presented claims for cultural domination at the beginning of the twentieth century. The representation of crisis in works of literature that have become canonical from both countries allows us to trace the rich cross-cultural exchange between them. One way in which such cultural exchange was realized was through the cultural uses of Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century novel War and Peace (1869). This dissertation argues that Tolstoy’s novel served as a model for twentieth-century writing in both countries. Through the close examination of two American novels, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), and of two Russian novels, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959), this dissertation uncovers the specific Tolstoyan techniques that each of these authors appropriated and readapted for his or her own purposes. The philosophical concept of the I-other relationship as elaborated by Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and the theories of the dialogic representation of reality in the novel by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) are used as lenses for reading these literary texts. The dissertation argues that applying the Levinasian model of the I-other relationship to the above-mentioned works of fiction allows for a deconstruction of the totalizing vision of history, a feature which comes to define the historical writing in these major literary works in the twentieth century. The novelty of the present work consists in asking the question of what can be learned about literary representations of crisis by looking at intertextual literary contacts between Russian and American literature from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Russian and American authors considered in this dissertation all seek to respond to their own historical moment and work out models of historical representation in the context of social change.