Browsing by Subject "Comparative Literature"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    The end of the Gold Standard: finance, crisis, and the cinema of the New Left, 1967-1974.
    (2011-05) Adamson, Morgan
    This dissertation is a comparative analysis of emergent visual cultures in the U.S.A., Europe, and South America within the context of the global political and economic crises of that moment. The period that frames the dissertation is the era economists have come to call "floating Bretton Woods," which saw the breakdown of the post-war economic order defined by the dollar-gold standard. By developing a theoretical framework to analyze a diverse and international set of media practices, I present an original historical account of a heterogeneous phenomenon in visual culture, which I call the "Cinema of the New Left." Addressing avant-garde film, video, and television experiments that took place both within and alongside New Left political movements, I develop a new language for analyzing these movements in a moment of crucial global transition. In its approach to film form, my research is concerned with the re-emergence of the "essay film" within international avant-garde film cultures, and the manner in which this form was translated into different geopolitical contexts and media. Theoretically, this dissertation combines the fields of Film and Media Studies with the emerging field of Critical Financial Studies, and works to understand what Randy Martin calls the "financialization of daily life" at the level of visual culture. In essence, this dissertation draws together interdisciplinary historical and theoretical approaches in order to examine a process we might describe as the "financialization of the image," and seeks to ground this analysis in a concrete set of historical situations that typify the transition between modernity and post-modernity, Fordism and post-Fordism, industrial and financial capitalism. While traditional analyses of the political economy of cinema focus on a critique of the commodity form, or on specific economic practices within film production (especially Hollywood cinema), this dissertation offers a new set of terms such as debt, inflation, and credit to the analysis of moving-image culture in order to better theorize the role of finance in shaping our contemporary visual environment.
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    Literary cartographies: Lu Xun and the production of world literature.
    (2011-03) Dooghan, Daniel M.
    This dissertation addresses three critical issues in the emergence of world literature as both a scholarly discipline and a pedagogical project. Using the prominent modern Chinese writer Lu Xun as a case study, the project challenges the unstated assumptions that have thus far undergirded world literature. First, it probes the tacit acceptance of translation as a necessity for the teaching of world literature. However, rather than predictably but pointlessly calling for the necessity of reading in the original, I instead argue that the history of a text's translation can be as instructive as the text itself. Looking at both Lu Xun's translations of Western works into Chinese, and translations of Lu Xun's works into Western languages reveals compelling stories about the influence of imperialism and the Cold War on the bidirectional reception of these texts. Second, the dissertation interrogates the aims of world literature as an area of study. Rather than casting it as an inclusive mode of representation, I envision world literature as a means of theorizing globalization on a cultural level, free of crassly economic paradigms. I analyze Lu Xun's exceptionally broad reading of both Chinese and Western texts to articulate an aesthetic epistemology that enables the development of high-resolution models to chart the movement of texts and ideas. Finally, I position Lu Xun neither as a Chinese writer, nor as an ill-defined "world" author, but as an active participant in both national and transnational literary discourses. As such, he serves as a counterexample to the tacit reliance on national categories found in many anthologies of world literature.
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    Marking the untellable:a theory of reading punctuation in the work of Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras, and Clarice Lispector
    (2011-06) Sweet, Stephanie Paige
    My dissertation, "Marking the Untellable: A Theory of Reading Punctuation in the Work of Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras, and Clarice Lispector," provides a systematic and comparative examination of experimental punctuation in literature and film. My central argument is that extending literary analysis to innovative uses of punctuation reveals historical and cultural connections that are not fully expressed in the language of a text. My research builds on existing studies of punctuation, which are provocative but scarce. Although eminent theorists such as Theodore Adorno and Giorgio Agamben have published essays on punctuation, both comprise fewer than ten pages. Similarly, Christian Metz's analysis of punctuation in film limits its discussion to editing techniques. While more sustained analyses of punctuation also exist, they tend to focus narrowly on one writer, text, or film. Using work by Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras, and Clarice Lispector, I explore how punctuation marks serve as historical-political residues that at once point to contemporaneous political-historical conditions and erase them. I argue that reading the shards of the (historical or experiential) untellable embedded in punctuation opens another dimension of literary and imaginative space wherein it is possible to consider ways of re-punctuating social and political life. The project is situated in relation to methodological debates about comparative modes of analysis, feminist analyses of the political in literature and film, and considerations of the political investments of experimental writing more generally. After exposing the regulatory work of conventional punctuation, I show how creative uses of punctuation point to historical and political situations that remain unspoken within the text. Also, by showing how gender marks the construction of these counter-memories, I contribute new insights to feminist scholarship on the unique politics of these writers; I also expand the scope of what counts as the political in literary and cinematic work. My objective is to demonstrate how punctuation marks a space between the historical, the textual, and the personal as a space of interaction and interference, and as a dynamic and generative space out of which a new grammar of the political can be forged.
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    Open secrets: violence, secrecy, community.
    (2010-03) Stockwell, Cory
    The dissertation is a consideration of the workings of secrecy in texts by five writers - Kant, Sade, Duras, Lispector and Bolaño. The first chapter, through a reading of Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and his Critique of Judgment, argues that the secret is that element of Kant's philosophy that allows us to conceive of a Kantian theory of community, one that is marked by an essential openness to the outside. The second chapter turns to Sade, and to a select group of his twentieth century readers, and posits the secret as an essentially political element in his work. If, as many observers have noted, the condition of violence in Sade is that it take place in secret, I argue that the very essence of this secret violence is to overflow the borders of its containment, but that this violence remains secret in its very openness, in its very becoming-public. My third chapter investigates what I refer to as the essential femininity of the secret, through a reading of Duras's The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein and Lispector's The Hour of the Star. Examining the workings of the veil in these novels, I argue that the veil opens onto a certain temporality, one that lies on the limit between present and future, a time of the "not yet." It is within this sliver of time, I contend, that a link between femininity and secrecy is established. The last chapter turns to the names of the dead (and specifically the names of dead women) in the work of Roberto Bolaño. I argue that proper names in Bolaño's work function essentially as divine names: rather than revealing any hidden meanings to us, they tell us absolutely nothing, and in so doing, open us up to what we are - open us, in other words, to our common being.
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    Postcolonial automobility: West Africa and the road to globalization.
    (2009-08) Green-Simms, Lindsey
    Through a close textual analysis of characteristic but diverse forms of West African cultural production, including plays, novels, videos, and films, this dissertation examines ways that the contradictions of globalization are embedded in both the commodity of the automobile and in what has been called automobility, the ideal of the fully mobilized self that is coupled with the automobile.
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    Warring opinions: an investigation into the sublime aesthetic narratives of contemporary warfare.
    (2010-08) Licht, Melissa Vera
    This project uses aesthetic concepts of the sublime as critical categories for exploring opinions and subjective responses to war as they are presented in selected soldiers' memoirs, literary theory, films, and public affairs-from World War I to the (ongoing) Gulf War. Representations of sublime force as well as sublime sacrifice and idealism permeate even "objective" journalistic accounts of warfare and inform the perspectives through which we engage with war in thought and feeling. The project argues that "opinion" is not merely a rationally measurable statistical phenomenon but an aesthetic problematic through which we experience ourselves in relation to the world. Soldiers' memoirs and public discourses narrate the trauma of war and express opinions that swing between and simultaneously uphold radically different positions: war as a sublime communal endeavor versus war as the destruction of social meaning. These opposing opinions reflect different aesthetic and narrative strategies: different ways of representing one's position in the world and of managing overpowering forces and emotions. Opinion itself is built and supported through our emotional narratives of sublime antagonism and/or sublime interest in the social world. The critical thought of Hannah Arendt, J. Glenn Gray, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Immanuel Kant are central to the analysis of sources throughout the project.
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    The witness who may not have been there:Eastern European authors looking westward.
    (2009-05) Hudecova, Eva R.
    Using the tool of witnessing, Eastern European authors look westward intending to facilitate the reemergence of what the West imagines to be its limit-space: Eastern Europe. It is my dissertation's goal to increase the West's literacy about the history and culture of a region different from the West, yet one which the West increasingly considers the same. Through an examination of German, Slovak, and Polish writers, my dissertation reframes testimonial literature as a basis for communication between the Eastern writer and Western reader, bringing Trauma Studies, Eastern European Area Studies and Comparative Literature Studies into dialogue. I call this reframing of testimonial literature removed witnessing, since it is a witnessing very different from the narrow legal definition of testimony. In removed witnessing, bodily presence of the witness at an event is possible but not absolutely required. It is in the medium of literature that this kind of witnessing can be established.