Browsing by Subject "World Literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The end, or life in the nuclear age: aesthetic form and modes of subjectivity.
    (2012-08) Gibson, Alicia
    "The End, or Life in the Nuclear Age: Modes of Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form" is a transnational study of the experiences of Americans, Japanese Americans, and Japanese in the nuclear age as expressed in post-World War II literature, television, and cinema. I use the figure of the bomb as a way of understanding the historical, political, and linguistic impacts of modernity - crystallized in the image of the nuclear bomb - on our contemporary moment. I argue that the world has become fully global, not because all peoples experience the same material conditions of life, but because the nuclear age is one in which the world is conditioned for the possibility of the end of life as such. This project responds to key cultural and literary theorists writing from the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe (in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault), by enlarging the scope of their critique of modernity to include the atomic bombing of Japan. Crucially, I argue that nuclear war is not merely a futural event as commonly understood by most Western theorists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demands that we account for how acts of terror committed by the West against the non-West have discursively given rise to an age in which nuclear technology functions as the symbol for both the ultimate technological triumph of Western science, and total planetary destruction. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to further development of the interdisciplinary field of nuclear criticism. "The End, or Life in the Nuclear Age: Modes of Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form" is a transnational study of the experiences of Americans, Japanese Americans, and Japanese in the nuclear age as expressed in post-World War II literature, television, and cinema. I use the figure of the bomb as a way of understanding the historical, political, and linguistic impacts of modernity - crystallized in the image of the nuclear bomb - on our contemporary moment. I argue that the world has become fully global, not because all peoples experience the same material conditions of life, but because the nuclear age is one in which the world is conditioned for the possibility of the end of life as such. This project responds to key cultural and literary theorists writing from the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe (in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault), by enlarging the scope of their critique of modernity to include the atomic bombing of Japan. Crucially, I argue that nuclear war is not a futural event as commonly understood by most Western theorists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demands that we account for how acts of terror committed by the West against the non-West have discursively given rise to an age in which nuclear technology functions as the symbol for both the technological triumph of Western science, and total planetary destruction. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to further development of the interdisciplinary field of nuclear criticism. Through a close reading of Japanese hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) essays, Japanese anime (animation) and cinema, American Cold War novels, and Japanese American Bildungsromane I trace the emergence of an aesthetics of the fissure that resists the structuring logic of a global nuclear modernity organizing populations according to target sites and kill zones. In order to understand this aesthetics of fissure I analyze the literary concepts of semiotic liminality, mimesis, melodrama, and Bildungsroman alongside political discourses of nuclear strategy, Hegel's philosophy of history, and feminist theory. Thus, this dissertation creates a comparativist approach that takes seriously the inextricable connection between world literature and world politics.
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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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    Postcolonial Appetites: Vietnamese American Literature and Refugee Aesthetics
    (2014-06) August, Timothy
    This dissertation examines the crossing of global literary tastes and Vietnamese American culinary writing. Specifically, I argue that Vietnamese American writing illustrates how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression across the colonial, anti-imperial, and neoliberal eras. As it is still a nascent genre, Vietnamese American writing has not yet been consolidated formally or critically, and therefore a new generation of writers and actors are actively experimenting with forms that will fuse the experience of refuge with the challenges faced in a racially charged United States. Through a close examination of various literary and cultural texts, I ask how, and, perhaps more importantly, why cuisine has become a popular organizing trope for these diasporic authors to work through the harsh legacies of the colonial project, the US intervention in Vietnam, and refugee life. Using a transnational and comparative approach, I demonstrate how Vietnamese American artists engage their own history of European and American domination by turning to gastronomic literature. I contend this literary movement seeks to reanimate the sensual loss experienced during wartime and the period of refuge in order to articulate a uniquely somatic brand of "Vietnameseness" that can travel across the globe. This literature responds to the commodification of western multiculturalism and the global desire for manageable ethnic difference by providing intimate cultural touchstones that make social positions intelligible without being completely translatable--resetting the terms of transnational cultural contact.
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    Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling
    (2017-06) Hwang, Hyeryung
    Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling explores how various forms of peripheral realism—an aesthetic that is hugely underappreciated not just in the Western academy but also in postcolonial studies—envision a new cultural analysis that allows us to understand and surpass the limits of modernism. First, I probe how modernist taste, with its ahistorical emphasis on aesthetic form and subjectivity, had far-reaching global influence at the expense of what it systematically jettisoned—that is, various realist attempts to reimagine the social value of literature. I analyze the demands of Western modernist aesthetics and its influence in the making of world literature and cinema to show how peripheral forms of art resist the modernist imperative. Second, I discuss recent instances in which realism re-appears as a problem—its status after the affective turn in literary cultural theory, its advent in the peripheral vision of the metropolitan writer J. M. Coetzee’s Australian Trilogy, and its emergence as a peculiar from of “neo-realism” in literary and cinematic works from South America and South Korea—to demonstrate how authors reclaim an entirely new type of realism. De-emphasizing modernist delight in the wiles of language and skepticism about representations’ correspondence to the real, neo-realists rediscover historical agents’ ability to express their subjectivity in literary form without neglecting their own place in history. Finally, in addition to its broad geographical and political remit, the dissertation is, importantly, a study of genre. By investigating how peripheral neo-realists defend truthfulness and achieve a sober realism that understands the ethical dimension of political life as essentially collective, I argue that realism’s “fidelity to truth” is not merely an epistemological claim but an ethical attitude toward the world.