College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item ANTÍGONAS EXILIADAS DE LA GUERRA CIVIL DE LAS ESPAÑAS (1936-1999): CONCHA MÉNDEZ Y ERNESTINA DE CHAMPOURCIN(2019) Bort Caballero, María de la Luz; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) left a marked influence on the culture and literature of contemporary Spain. After Franco violently toppled the Second Spanish Republic, those with progressive ideas were persecuted, executed, and more than a half a million were forced into a nearly forty-year diaspora. These displacements left diverse traces buried in private memories and certain literary and cultural practices. Despite active research in the last four decades, there are still untapped questions and silences. Particularly, works by exiled women writers and intellectuals that have been relegated to the margins. They offer unexplored spaces of memory and insights into the experiences of forced uprootings. Through poets Concha Méndez (1898-1986) and Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), this thesis delves into geographies of memory, and seeks to broaden the relevance of poetry written in exile, biased by the male canon and its scholarship. It posits the recognition of fresh and close readings of repression and resistance while looking through the violet lenses of equity. These poets refused to abandon their own voices or be silenced due to their marginalized condition as women and exiles. The figure of the classical archetype, Antigone, and the dialogic theories of María Zambrano, allow for a further exchange with these authors’ poetry, oral testimonies and remembrances. The entombment of Antigone, for Zambrano, represents both a challenge and a liberation where expulsion is redeemed by the affirmation of the feminine self. Even though these women were banished to the same location, Mexico, D.F., Concha Méndez offers insights into the study of the plight of her terminal exiles. Meanwhile, Ernestina de Champourcin represents the possibility of interrogating a reconstruction of exile as she attempts a definite return to Spain. However, both voices and experiences coexist within the trauma of loss, solitude, survival, a search for refuge, and the reinvention of oneself. They call for a review and rethinking of categories such as inner exile, and propose new multidisciplinary lenses in order to read alternative discourses of exodus in a feminine mode.Item Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers(2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.Item The Invented Indian: Race, Empire, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century US Literature(2018) Humud, Sarah Bonnie; Nunes, Zita; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines representations of ‘Indians’ to expose how these fictions underpin white male hegemony and US imperialism. As team mascots, Western sidekicks, or Thanksgiving staples, ‘Indians’ permeate US culture in the twentieth century, though scholars have largely focused on the nineteenth. In the era of US expansion, representations of savage and vanishing Indians justified Native genocide. Scholars have highlighted the role these nineteenth-century ‘Indians’ played in maintaining white male dominance, but this focus on early American literature has obscured the Indian’s ongoing role in maintaining white hegemony. Fictions of Indian incompetence have led to continued abuses and assaults on sovereignty, and despite the social justice gains of the last century, Native land, water, and human rights are still under attack. By analyzing a range of writers including authors of color, women, and white men, my project intervenes in earlier scholarship to reveal an enduring, though often unconscious, commitment to colonial ideologies in twentieth-century US literature. Americans of all races and genders participate in a culture steeped in Indian characters, costumes, and literary tropes. Race and racism are part of the fabric of US culture and language, and US authors reiterate race issues in literature, even if they do so unintentionally. In both canonical and activist literatures, the ‘Indian’ sustains white supremacy by propagating as neutral, if not invisible. In its normalcy, it resists critical inquiry. This dissertation makes three interventions in American literature and Native American studies. First, it highlights the continued colonial mindset in the twentieth century and its consequences for Native peoples. Second, it reveals how the invented Indian in US fiction helps maintain white hegemony. Finally, it underscores that even activist literatures rely on the figure of the ‘Indian,’ meaning they, too, often unconsciously support white male hegemony. As Americans use Indian caricatures to better understand themselves, these metaphors ultimately displace Native peoples and their realities, further obscuring and normalizing their colonization. By examining dominant and resistant literatures side-by-side, my analysis reveals that colonial ideologies remain mostly unquestioned and intact in US culture.Item Making English Low: A History of Laureate Poetics, 1399-1616(2018) Maffuccio, Christine; Coletti, Theresa; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation analyzes lowbrow literary forms, tropes, and modes in the writings of three would-be laureates, writers who otherwise sought to align themselves with cultural and political authorities and who themselves aspired to national prominence: Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1367-1426), John Skelton (c. 1460-1529), and Ben Jonson (1572-1637). In so doing, my project proposes a new approach to early English laureateship. Previous studies assume that aspiration English writers fashioned their new mantles exclusively from high learning, refined verse, and the moral virtues of elite poetry. In the writings and self-fashionings that I analyze, however, these would-be laureates employed literary low culture to insert themselves into a prestigious, international lineage; they did so even while creating personas that were uniquely English. Previous studies have also neglected the development of early laureateship and nationalist poetics across the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Examining the ways that cultural cachet—once the sole property of the elite—became accessible to popular audiences, my project accounts for and depends on a long view. My first two chapters analyze writers whose idiosyncrasies have afforded them a marginal position in literary histories. In Chapter 1, I argue that Hoccleve channels Chaucer’s Host, Harry Bailly, in the Male Regle and the Series. Like Harry, Hoccleve draws upon quotidian London experiences to create a uniquely English writerly voice worthy of laureate status. In Chapter 2, I argue that Skelton enshrine the poet’s own fleeting historical experience in the Garlande of Laurell and Phyllyp Sparowe by employing contrasting prosodies to juxtapose the rhythms of tradition with his own demotic meter. I approach Ben Jonson along the path paved by his medieval precursors. In Chapter 3, I argue that in Bartholomew Fair Jonson blends classical comic form with unwieldy city chatter, simultaneously investing the lowbrow with poetic authority and English laureateship with tavern noise. Like Hoccleve and Skelton, Jonson reappears as a product and producer not only of the local literary system to which he was immediately bound, but of a national culture, in no small measure lowbrow, at least two centuries in the makingItem An Operatic Contribution to a Literary Conversation: Locating Henry James' Ambiguity in Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper's "The Turn of the Screw"(2018) Athanasiou, Evangeline Katerina; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1954, Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s chamber opera, "The Turn of the Screw," premiered at the Venice Biennale. They adapted their story from the late eighteenth-century Henry James novella of the same title. Soon after its publication in 1898, James’ "The Turn of the Screw" sparked a literary debate focusing on the credibility of the main narrator, a young governess who claims to see ghosts while in charge of two children isolated in a country house. During the 1950s, when Britten’s musical career was steadily advancing, the literary debate moved in the direction of reconciling the argument over the governess’ credibility. This study primarily expands upon musicological scholarship from Philip Rupprecht as well as literary scholarship by Shlomith Rimmon, along with various other studies concerning music, literature, and adaptation. Through a textual and musical analysis of James’ ambiguity as realized in Britten and Piper’s "The Turn of the Screw," this study demonstrates that the opera should be considered among the contributions to the mid-century critical trend toward the synthesis of the two dominating interpretations of the novel from the twentieth century.Item Immigrant Self-representation: Chinese American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li in the International Context(2018) Liu, Shuang; Wang, Edlie; Chu, Patricia; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I talk about how first-generation Chinese immigrant writers contribute to Chinese American literature through their unique representations of immigrant life. Due to language barriers and other historical reasons, a majority of representations of immigrant life in Chinese American literature have been written by the descendants of immigrants, second-generation writers. Now, there are more Chinese immigrant writers who write immigrant stories in America. To some extent, immigrant writers’ representation of immigrant life is a “self-representation,” since they are writing their own stories. By comparing immigrant writers’ works to those from second-generation writers, I argue that Ha Jin and Yiyun Li are immigrant writers who have contributed to Chinese American literature in three aspects: genre, theme, and language.Item MARKET BEHAVIOR IN THE POST-TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVE OF RAFAEL CHIRBES AND BELÉN GOPEGUI(2018) Giller-Wilde, Anne; Naharro-Calderon, Jose Maria; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to identify pertinent literary strategies found in the Spanish capitalist contemporary narrative. Having traced patterns like the stock market’s pendular movements in the Spanish post-Franco Transitional narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui, this thesis considers similar thematic and stylistic repetitions deriving from the 19th Century Spanish Realist and Naturalist Novel and the Post-War period of the Civil War (1939-1975), characteristics which manifest themselves cumulatively in the novels of Chirbes and Goegui. Taking into account economic and market theories, and borrowing R.N. Elliott’s wave theory terminology for charting of market data and analysis of numerical data over time, the thesis considers qualitative literary fluctuations analogous to the temporal structures of stock market prices which occur through the history of trading. Due to differing experiences in the aforementioned periods, male and female authorship are considered separately in the two periods anterior to the post-Franco Transition. The dissertation also relies on theories of memory, history and group psychology, concepts close to formulations found in theories such as those of Prechter, Frost, Ortega y Gasset, Ricoeur, etc. It proposes that the novels of Chirbes and Gopegui, because of their discernible temporally ascending intertextual articulation, are analogous to the fifth wave of Elliott’s five-wave market cycle, which he termed social movement and whose momentum was stimulated by collective social emotion or Prechter’s social mood. In Chirbes and Gopegui, the underlying social mood is one of indignation and resentment whose manifestation can be traced from the late 19th-Century, to the Post-War period under the dictator Francisco Franco, culminating in the Post-Transitional novel, in which a generational rift rooted in socio-economic inequality is indicative of the unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. The novels from the three time periods are also of an economic nature, treating human engagement with money and its consequences. Chirbes’ and Gopegui’s protagonists are theoretically a return to the universal protagonist in the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, but who embody the socio-economic concerns of the 21st Century, completing a literary social movement.Item TOWARDS A FEMINIST RECONSTRUCTION OF PERSIAN SUFISM(2017) Nourbakhsh, Safoura; MOSES, CLAIRE; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contrary to many claims, Sufism is not a gender-neutral discourse and practice. Although women have been present since the inception of Sufism in the eighth century CE, like most androcentric knowledge, the foundational discourse of Sufism is defined by male interest and male privilege. Seeking to address the gender bias in Persian Sufism, this dissertation offers a feminist interdisciplinary examination of Persian Sufism through various forms of textual analysis—linguistic, psychoanalytic, formal—in different fields of study: religious studies, medieval historiography, literature, and ethnography. Through analysis and interpretation of some of the foundational texts of Persian Sufism written from the 10th to the 13th century CE—Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub, Ibn Munavvar’s Asrar al-tawhid, Attar’s Tazkirat al-awliya and Illahi-nama, and Rumi’s Masnavi—my work offers a map of the construction of gender and women’s participation in the early discourse of Persian Sufism that continues to shape the understanding and practice of Sufism in contemporary times. Following medieval textual analysis, I provide an ethnography of women’s diverse experiences as members of the Nimatullahi Sufi order from an insider perspective. The analysis of early influential texts will reverberate through the ethnographic chapter, since many of the texts that I discuss are still central in Sufi ethos and practice. My aim throughout this dissertation is to address male privilege in Persian Sufism by deconstructing the myth of the exceptional woman in Sufism, highlighting women’s involvements in early Sufi communities, reinterpreting Sufi narratives to engage the gender question meaningfully, turning negative interpretations of women into empowering and inspiring tales of women’s spirituality, and finally, to record and preserve the contributions of contemporary women in Sufism for future generations.Item POETIC MINERALOGY: NEW STONES FOR “THE LOOSENED HAND” BY MARTÍN ADÁN. RECONSTRUCTION AND INTERPRETATION(2017) Monsalve, Maria Monsalve; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetic Mineralogy: New Stones for “The Loosened Hand” by Martín Adán. Reconstruction and Literary Interpretation is an innovative research project in the field of literature and digital humanities that aims to collect, interpret, and make available the verses of the long and neglected poem “La mano desasida” [The Loosened Hand], by the Peruvian poet Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, better known by his pseudonym Martín Adán (1908-1985), a fundamental, yet understudied figure in Latin American literature. “La mano desasida” was written in fragments around 1950 on a variety of unusual surfaces, including napkins, cigarette papers, and notebook pages that Adán himself never put together. Collecting the verses of “La mano desasida” has been a challenge for decades and many scholars allude to the poem as a mystery or labyrinth. Portions of the extensive fragments were published in the 1960s, with a more but not entirely complete version comprising some 200 pages produced in 1980. Many verses remain as yet unpublished, and scholars continue to piece the text together, seeking to determine if there is a proper order. The structure of the poem relies on interruption, division, and incompleteness, which reveals a deep understanding of how fragments express totality, an idea that was crucial during the German Romanticism. The poem, set in the ruins of Machu Picchu, recreates the ancient conversation between Man and Stone, a key concept in the Andean culture.Item ENTRE EL DESEO Y EL PUDOR, EL AMOR HEREOS EN LA NOVELA SENTIMENTAL: GRISEL Y MIRABELLA DE JUAN DE FLORES(2017) Eldredge, Ginette Alomar; Benito-Vessels, Carmen; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the studies about Medieval Spain, only men were believed to be susceptible to amorous passion or lovesickness. I propose that a more nuanced and complete understanding of women’s roles and actual behavior can be reached by analyzing the same medical and philosophical treatises that deny them the possibility of suffering from lovesickness. In fact, my readings of texts such as Grisel y Mirabella (ca. 1475), Celestina (1499) and Tristán de Leonís (1501), demonstrate that women’s behavior in literary representations is guided by the same symptoms experienced by lovesick men, symptoms that women sometimes suffer even more intensely than men. The topic of women’s lovesickness and the rhetorical devices used to depict the power and influence of women in medieval Spanish literature has not been formally studied due to the misjudgment that this malady was an exclusively male condition. This study shows that women's roles in Juan de Flores' sentimental romance Grisel y Mirabella (1495) were influenced by lovesickness or amor hereos. I also discuss how linguistic and narrative theories, as well as historical rhetoric about sexuality from the time of this text, helps us to understand how lovesickness influenced the female discourse created by Juan de Flores in the late Middle Ages. In doing so, I argue that the female characters were an alterity of power to their real counterparts in society. In some narratives they are resistant within the text, in others they struggle to act upon their desire without fearing the moral and social consequences.