This work is a setting of two poems by E.E. Cummings for chamber orchestra and mezzo-soprano soloist. The approximate durations of the first and second movements are respectively seven and one half, and six minutes. The music was inspired by the poetry and attempts to highlight the cyclic syntax which hallmarks Cummings' style. The first poem ("pity this busy monster, manunkind,") presents a sarcastic analysis of the progress of society. The compositional techniques used in the first movement involve elements of ostinato and fragmented motivic development to punctuate the penetrating message of the poem. The second movement ("these children singing in stone a") offers a marked contrast in texture and is a peaceful resolution to the agitated frustration of the first poem. Chromaticism is an essential element in defining the melodic and harmonic style. The vocal writing is largely declamatory and presents the vocalist with challenges of tessitura, intervallic complexity and extended technique.

El llamado discurso indigenista es una de las contribuciones clave en la formación de una modernidad periférica en América Latina, ya que le otorga un carácter de localización (geocultura) a lo latinoamericano. Esto supone una comprensión de “lo indígena” como una presencia recalcitrante en el discurso de nuestra modernidad regional, oculto, negado, excluido, recuperado. Lo indígena es lo que se presume que no puede hablar por sí mismo, que es por un lado una parte oculta de la nación y por el otro su “afuera”, su exterioridad.

Often overlooked in the nineteenth century Gothic novel are the complicated social issues existing within the text. In Emily Brontèe's Wuthering Heights and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, the authors each create villains who represent the preoccupation with appropriate sexuality and conventional gender roles existing in Victorian England. Brontèe's Heathcliff and Stevenson's James Durie embody all that is immoral and non-normative in society with their depraved behavior ; however, because of the authors' craftiness with language, the authors, through their villains, manage to magnetize the other characters and subsequently emasculate those men in the text who emulate the Victorian ideal of masculinity. By focusing their novels on the plight of the Other and his disruption to the homogeneous rules regarding sexuality and gender in the nineteenth century, both authors articulate a profound understanding of the societal fears regarding these issues existing in their time. / by Dana DeFalco. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study argues that the interfaith symbolism present in the works of American author Jean Toomer undermines dominant Christian justifications for racism in the United States. It also discusses the ways in which Toomer's interfaith symbolism promotes the establishment of a race Toomer called the "American" race, a group of interracial, interreligious people whom Toomer hoped would change the way race was viewed in the United States. The multireligious references in Toomer's works challenge constricted definitions of both religion and race by highlighting interchangeable religious ideals from several world religions. / by Laura Gayle Fallon. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation attempts a concomitant reexamination of two interrelated phenomena. Its primary undertaking is an analysis of mid-to-late nineteenth century gesaku commercial fiction production and its structural transformations during the first decades of the Meiji period, together with the imbrications of its narratological and rhetorical conventions with the language of reportage writing on the page of the Meiji newspaper. In conjunction with, and in order better to situate, the foregoing, its secondary task is to question the literary-historical emplotment of this period and its authors in the later 1920s, at the moment when Meiji literary history first emerges as an analytical object after the institutionalization of literature and journalism as discrete categories of discursive production. To such ends, this dissertation focuses on Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894), whose diverse career coincides what has come to be considered the transitional moment – and thereby recalcitrant to historiographical analysis not altogether fraught with ambivalence – intervening between the latter decades of the Tokugawa period and the ultimate establishment of Literature (bungaku) as an ideologically self-sufficient category of social value and discursive praxis by the first decades of the twentieth century. His survival in the annals of this later literary history proffers an occasion to reconsider the mechanisms involved in the arbitration of social, literary, and aesthetic value. Chapter I begins with a brief sketch of Robun’s early biography and career before the Restoration, through which we hope to delineate some sense of the social and literary-productive context undergirding his activity, specifically, and, more generally, the attitudes towards authorship, adaptation, and narration constituting the prevailing ethos of the time; here, we take a survey of several of Robun’s earlier works, written before his assumption of the “Kanagaki” penname and his first major success with Kokkei Fuji mōde (Ridiculous Pilgrimage to Mount Fuji, 1860-1), many of which are erotic parodies of well-known kabuki or Chinese vernacular narratives, and analyze the manner in which the author constructs his enunciative position therein, before momentarily considering how Robun, at this juncture in his career, was perceived by his peers. Then in conclusion, we anticipate both Robun’s later career, its ambivalent emplotment in literary history and the fraught evaluation of the early Meiji period in toto through a later retrospective on the part of literary critic Tsubouchi Shōyō as he looks back on the literary ecosystem of the early Meiji period and the ethical conflict, latent in his argument, between the ideological dominance of modern rubrics of literary value and incommensurate pleasures of reading as lived experience. Chapters II and III take as their focus Robun’s work in the comic hizakurige-mono genre pioneered by Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Along the Eastern Sea Road by Shank’s Mare, 1802-22), first with his success with Fuji mōde and subsequently, Seiyōdōchū hizakurige (Along the Western Sea Route by Shank’s Mare, 1872-4), a heavily intertextual updating of Ikku’s classic. Chapter II approaches Robun’s contributions to the genre through formal and narratological analysis, considering how the shift in topos, from domestic travel on foot, as in Ikku, to transpacific nautical travel via steamship, precipitates modulations in narrative structure, and weighs the ramifications of these intrageneric transformations. Chapter III shifts its focus to the intergeneric and intertextual, with attention to the modular configuration of its primary intertext in Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige and the paratextual apparatus of hanrei, or the prefatory guidelines explicating a given text’s contents, provenance of sources, and editorial policies followed, etc. inherited from non-fictional and academic writing, and how these operate in Ikku and Robun as a space for conceptualizing social knowledge and the figure of the author. Chapters IV and V address the latter portion of Robun’s career, after the Meiji government’s promulgation of the Three Articles on Education and its efforts to conscript gesaku authors like Robun to assist in the education of the new subjects of the Meiji state. Here, we examine the simultaneous devaluation of and dependence upon popular fiction in Robun’s Bunmei kaika-inflected writing, before his relocation to the emergent newspaper industry, at which point we consider the sort of narrative and rhetoric prevalent in reportage writing in the 1870s and its phenotypical affinity with gesaku stylistics. Chapter IV concerns itself with a discussion of the political and economic factors precipitating Robun’s move away from gesaku production and his subsequent literary activity informed by his new role as a government official employed by Kanagawa Prefecture, before his move to the Yokohama mainichi shinbun (Yokohama Daily News). Chapter V then turns to the space of newspaper narrative and the emergence of tsuzuki-mono or serialized narrative, and how their early status as neither consummately fiction nor non-fiction adumbrates aspects of the epistemological economy of readerly desire and social knowledge, aspects subsequently concealed by the later ascendance of bungaku and the shōsetsu as the dominant lens through which socially valued discursive production comes to be apprehended, and the concomitant institutionalization of Journalism as Literature’s reciprocal in the early twentieth century. In the epilogue, we attempt to locate more precisely the coeval emergence of these ostensibly distinct and antagonistic categories in public discourse in the early 1900s, and the concomitant adjudication of the sociocultural value of early Meiji gesaku production and its affiliated figures, anticipating in turn the more rigorous synthesis of a systematized Meiji literary history in the years immediately following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.

Le sujet confronté aux puissances objectives et destructrices d'un événement comme la Deuxième Guerre mondiale porte inévitablement la marque d'un changement survenu dans sa réalité sociale. Ce bouleversement fondamental au sein du sujet et de sa société constitue le point commun majeur entre deux romans publiés après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale : Pompes funèbres (1953) de Jean Genet et D'un château l'autre (1957) de Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Les retombées de la guerre s'inscrivent ainsi au cœur de ces œuvres qui, à travers la voix de leurs narrateurs, réorganisent les ruines d'un monde détruit pour le raconter. Le « sens commun », concept philosophique emprunté à Hannah Arendt, permet de réfléchir aux problèmes soulevés par l'expérience de la catastrophe et par ses conséquences dans la communauté, puisque, selon ses acceptions, il concerne trois dimensions fondamentales qui touchent la relation de l'humain avec sa société : la perception sensible (synthèse du sensible), la perception intellectuelle (bon sens et sens de la communauté) et la signification (rationalité commune). En tirant profit de l'analyse de ce concept, cette thèse se demande : comment ces romans peuvent-ils produire une communauté de sens capable de transmettre l'expérience moderne? Des écrivains comme Céline et Genet abordent de front la question de la relation du sujet à sa communauté. Ils ont tous les deux une posture particulière qui leur confère une situation inédite au sein de la société : Céline est coupable en raison de la publication de ses trois pamphlets antisémites et Genet est un criminel condamné pour vol qui fait des séjours de plusieurs mois en prison pendant l'Occupation. L'étude de ces romans offre ainsi l'occasion de proposer de nouvelles bases pour réfléchir à la notion de sens commun et à son statut dans les œuvres littéraires. D'un château l'autre et Pompes funèbres s'inscrivent dans une crise plus générale du sens qui survient dans l'après-guerre française et participent de ce fait à une réflexion sur le sens commun. À partir d'eux, cette thèse s'intéresse plus exactement à la fin de la guerre en France - le souvenir encore récent de l'Occupation et la période de la Libération - et démontre que le concept de sens commun est essentiel pour aborder des œuvres dont l'intrigue se déroule dans les ruines de la guerre. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Littérature, Sens commun, Hannah Arendt, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Genet, Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

Historians disagree on the reasons the Populist Movement and labor failed to achieve a political coalition. Some find the cause in a backward-looking Populist ideology that imagined solutions to the problems of rapid industrialization could be found in a yeoman republic. According to this view, rank-and-file Populists neither understood nor had sympathy with the problems facing workers in the mass industries of the late twentieth century. Others see Populism as a progressive movement that accepted industrialization but sought to bring it under government control so that its material advantages would benefit all citizens, especially the producer classes of farmers, laborers, and small businessmen. These historians blame the failure of a coalition to develop on the immaturity of the labor movement; it was not intellectually or organizationally advanced enough to appreciate Populists’ shared interests with workers or to accept their offer of a coalition. Richard Hofstadter and Oscar Handlin are key scholars in the first school; Lawrence Goodwyn and C. Vann Woodward are acknowledged spokespersons for the second. This study attempts to address the coalition issue by examining the responses of Populist and Republican newspapers to the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. These strikes were selected because both were notorious for their violence and bloodshed and both elicited armed government intervention on behalf of business. Newspapers were examined around the time of the strikes to gain a sense of local Populist sympathy with labor and of its commitment to a political coalition of farmers and workers. Populist response was compared to opinions expressed in Republican newspapers to determine if significant ideological differences existed between the Parties. Reviewing newspapers throughout the state and for events that occurred two years apart served as a check on regional and chronological variations. In all, over 400 newspaper editions were reviewed. The study’s findings solidly support to the perspective that depicts Populism as actively seeking a coalition based on a realistic understanding of labor’s position in an industrial economy. Universal editorial stances in favor of labor also advance the position that this was an authentic grass-roots expression and not simply a reflection of national leadership ideology. All Populist newspapers called for a political coalition of farmers and laborers. Populist response was markedly different than Republican. With a few exceptions, Republican newspapers took the side of capital. Further, this investigation revealed no evidence of desire to return to an imaginary yeomen republic in Populist newspapers. The study also examined the newspapers for instances of anti-Semitism and nativism associated with Homestead and Pullman. There was little evidence of either. While this might not be surprising with regard to anti-Semitism since the strikes did not revolve around issues of banking or credit, it is significant with regard to nativism. Anti-foreigner sentiment was often associated with strikes and with the importation of cheap, European labor. If nativism infected the Populist Movement, as is claimed by many historians who see it as a reactionary movement that practiced status politics, it should have been reflected in the pages of these newspapers. Its absence raises questions about negative conceptualizations of the Movement. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept, of History.

Sadness in literature has often been thematically interpreted as an indication of literary originality. Notions of solitude, silence, and alienation contribute to the idea that melancholy benefits the introspective work of the artist. But it is also possible to explore sadness as a more complex literary phenomenon, one that expands the dimensions of affect and influences possibilities of aesthetic and ethical renovation that gesture beyond the usual themes of melancholy and solitude. Sadness thus does not come to be conceived as merely an aspect of mourning, but as a structure of loss that is intrinsic to our concept of the world's composition and insufficiencies. The energies that surround the experience of sadness measure the degree to winch many writers have been able to develop their sense of unhappiness into a way of charting the difficulties and transformative power of their own labours. As well, sadness in literature can be seen as illuminating a loss that writers generate in order to achieve through their art the possibility of aesthetic and even social reparation.

This study deals with Gertrud Kolmar's literary texts, those that center upon the topic of the French Revolution. It endeavors to examine her poetic discourse dealing with the possibility of an alternative political leadership in a time of crisis. The texts comprise the essay "Bildnis Robespierres," the Robespierre cycle of poems, and the play Cecile Renault. These texts, in which Robespierre takes center stage, stand out from within the complete works of Kolmar. They were written between the fall of 1933 and March 1935 and may be read as texts of resistance against the Nazi dictatorship. / Since these texts have to be seen as a direct reaction to the historical developments of the period, they are being closely examined herein, hoping to unearth their political and ideological intent. Drawing upon the theories and conclusions of New Historicism, which assumes that the writer and her subject cannot exist outside their socio-historical environment, important historical influences have been taken into consideration, in an effort to establish possible aspects that have entered into Kolmar's literary message. / A close reading of these texts demonstrates that, by first using the genre of the essay, Kolmar searched for a positive alternative paradigm of power to counter the fascist totalitarian regime. She finds this ideal in the figure of Robespierre because of his virtue and strong sense of justice. Because Kolmar interprets the Revolution as incomplete--since the Jacobin adhered to his principles up to his death--these texts may be considered as a revolutionary call to take up the fight for human rights once again. In her poems, Kolmar poetically creates a model of ideal leadership in the figure of Robespierre. She propagates his strict and harsh rule, as he presented himself to his fellow citizens and accepts violence as necessary in order to establish justice. Thus, Kolmar's model is problematic, since it mirrors, and therefore, confirms the given dictatorial power structures of the National Socialists. In an attempt to justify the use of violence and force, Kolmar immerses her protagonist in the messianic-idea. In her play, she adheres to her model of Robespierre as a messianic figure. But in the light of the altruistic attributes and the fate of the young Cecile Renault, whom Robespierre sacrifices, he appears questioned in his role as the only possible redeemer figure. Therefore, this last Robespierre-text reveals an expanded awareness and an altered attitude of the author towards her historical environment.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk.