One of the most recurrent and significant themes in Spanish American women's literature since its inception is food. In this dissertation I explored how food in Spanish American women's literature (since the second half of the sixteenth century to the twentieth century) is not only a theme, but also a metaphor and therefore an artistic type of language capable of transcending its basic biological and literal function. In this thesis project I intend to show the interconnections between food and writing in Hispanic American women's literature and how food imagery, eating rituals, and the kitchen as creative space have evolved in form and purpose from their beginning to the present regarding its discourses of power and self-affirmation. For this purpose I studied four key historical moments according to the point of view of Hispanic American women who used food imagery and discourse in their writings as a tool for self-affirmation. For the sixteenth century I examined the letter written by Isabel de Guevara to Princess Juana. The Hispanic American Baroque period during the seventeenth century is covered by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Madre María de San José. For the Hispanic American period of independence during the nineteenth century I studied works by Juana Manuela Gorriti, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Teresa González de Fanning and Soledad Acosta de Samper. Finally for the twentieth century I covered works by Teresa de la Parra, Rosario Castellanos, Laura Esquivel, and Isabel Allende.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how and why Toni Morrison employs biblical allusion, biblical names and entire books of the Bible both directly and ironically in order to emphasize the importance of ancestry and community in the lives of African-Americans. Morrison begins in Sula emphasizing the idea that communities that are not cohesive cannot survive. She challenges her readers to question how The Bottom community could have thrived if the people thought of it as more than just a place, but as a group of neighbors who help each other to live and grow. She continues in Song of Solomon with the emphasis not only on community but also on ancestry as identity. When Jake agrees to give up his name, he prevents his descendants from knowing or understanding from where they came. In not knowing their past, they are empty. She culminates her argument in Beloved where she fully emphasizes both community and ancestry with the incarnation of Beloved as the community of all slaves that have gone before. All three novels are heavily laden with biblical allusion that culminate in Morrison’s challenge for all not to forget and to let their history lead to a reclamation of ancestry and community.

This dissertation examines slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, and histories of slavery. Using critical race theory, narrative theory, and philosophical critiques of objectivity, I trace how academic histories, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, developed a grammar of white supremacy that excluded African-Americans from equal citizenship. These texts claimed to present a “transparent” view of the past by highlighting the perceived (through physical, documentable evidence) and eliding the role of perceiver and of language in the creation of narrative history. In order to write themselves into history, I argue, both fugitive slaves and contemporary novelists have drawn on the oral conjure and trickster tales that enslaved African-Americans told as a means of subverting the masters' authority. Both conjure and trickster narratives deny that narrative can present a transparent description of the past, and yet they work in contradictory, sometimes antagonistic ways. To counter the grammar of white supremacy and its Cartesian claim to a “universal,” disembodied perspective, conjure narratives emphasize the embodied perceiver, while trickster narratives emphasize language, as the mediums through which we know both history and identity. Conjure narratives such as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt's conjure tales, Bontemps's Black Thunder, and Morrison's Beloved depict the dominant discourse as a “magic” rhetoric that transforms reality while claiming to simply describe it. Invoking magic and ancestral spirits, conjure discourse disrupts mechanistic assumptions about reality, reunites body, mind, and spirit, and creates a communal, participatory history. In contrast, trickster narratives such as Bibb's Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Chesnutt's “The Dumb Witness,” Reed's Flight to Canada , and Johnson's Oxherding Tale present the master narrative as a set of generic conventions that we have been duped into accepting as reality. Through anachronism, parody, mixed genres, and linguistic “sleight of hand,” trickster narratives disrupt teleological history, erase distinctions between slave and free, black and white, past and present, and remind readers that narrative constructs both history and identity. Finally, I examine Johnson's Middle Passage, which integrates trickster and conjure narrative to explore the tension between self and community.

This dissertation explores the communal uneasiness and hermeneutic impasse created by suicide in twentieth-century US American literature by women. By considering how history is negotiated through suicidal acts and how literary texts are structured by self-inflicted death, I suggest that this intentional turn is most fundamentally readable through public spaces—the Middle Passage, Hiroshima, Harlem, San Francisco's Chinatown. My first chapter focuses on Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West: An Anthropological-Clinical Study (1944), an existential analysis of a Jewish woman who killed herself in Switzerland when she was thirty-three. Along with Anne Sexton's poetry, West's writing acts as a prelude to my subsequent chapters because it makes the body inextricable from the imagination, and both inextricable from history, community, and politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the conflation of white femininity and suicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature before turning to modern novels in which women ambiguously fall to their deaths: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993). These texts disperse intention over a field of inquiry, connecting the private act of suicide to culture less through consciousness than through public space—the fictional space of falling in public and the imagined space of a reading public. In Chapter Three, I examine revolutionary suicide in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), integrating theories from Emmanuel Levinas and Huey Newton. Self-destruction operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story, as a political form of resistance and within the narrative structure, as a discursive strategy, an axis around which meanings revolve. Finally, in Chapter Four, I sketch the political terrain covered by female suicide in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Velina Hasu Houston's Tea (1983), and Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990). Each play extends the logic that I have traced in previous chapters, deploying the act of suicide to register the effects of colonialism, war, and white supremacy on contemporary American women's lives.

This study is focused on the works of Cormac McCarthy and their interpretations; it also is concerned with the hermeneutical practice itself. I explore three types of interpretation performed on McCarthy's texts—scholarly essays, translations, and journalistic articles—with an eye to how critics, translators and reviewers have understood this author's work in the United States as well as in Germany and France. After presenting a panoply of interpretations by American critics interspersed with my own observations on the five McCarthy texts to be investigated ( Outer Dark, Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing), I offer an overview of translation theory and the translator's role within that discipline. I then perform a comparative reading of the works in English, German and French, but where I expected divergent interpretations, I instead found striking similarities: the translations were remarkably close to my own understanding of McCarthy's texts; only on rare occasions did the German or French renderings suggest meanings different from those I and American scholars had found. This result led me to investigate how German and French reviewers interpreted the translated texts and here too I found overwhelming similarities between how European critics and their American counterparts seemed to understand McCarthy's works. Given the indeterminacy of language(s) and of textual meaning—tenets to which I had always adhered—this was not an outcome I anticipated. How could the Atlantic not be large enough to engender varied readings? The logical if somewhat maligned answer seemed to me to lie in authorial intention. To reassert the author's importance in the creation of a literary text is then one of the goals of this study, but while this project concludes with an argument for an intentionalist interpretation of McCarthy's singular prose, it does not erase the winding path it took to arrive at that conclusion. In the end, this paper is as much a testament to the ways in which I was forced to question and reevaluate my thinking about literary interpretation as it is a discussion of the wordsmith McCarthy.

No description available.

No description available.

Discusses the alternate women's reality developed by Robinson in her novel.

This thesis explores John Steinbeck's Cannery Row as a taoist text. It furthers this investigation by examining Cannery Row's recently discovered precursor, The God in the Pipes; examining the question of whether or not both novels were inspired by the ancient eastern philosophy of Taoism. The thesis uses clues from The God in the Pipes to determine which version of the Tao Teh Ching Steinbeck used to compose these novels.

My thesis is an experimental project that explores the connection between aesthetics and meaning-formation. The inspiration for the project emerged out of my research into the work of a group of poets known as infrarrealistas, whose most famous member, Roberto Bolaño, has become one of the widely read writers of our times. In the recently published anthology titled Perros habitados por las voces del desierto (2014) Rubén Medina, a founding member of the group, explains the infrarrealistas' artistic motivation as an attempt to capture the multiple forces that shape the subject's identity (16); forces that operate beneath the complex symbolic systems of communication. These forces are responsible for shaping the subject's immediate experience, or being-alive-ness. Influenced by the group's motivations and recent conceptualizations within the field of affect theory, the following project is an exercise in using poetry as a way to re-conceptualize the experience of being alive. Discursive formulations are avoided in an attempt to create a text whose meaning derives from its affective connection with the reader, and not from the intricate economies of meaning that limit the affective scope of academic and scholarly language. As a result, the following thesis upon first glance looks like the work of a mad man. Poems, citations, excerpts from books, pages from my personal diary are bundled together in a way that challenges what is commonly understood as an academic thesis. However, its validity rests in the fact that it tries to engage with current work in the field of affect theory, experimenting with aesthetics and meaning-formation, and leaving aside the discursive formulations to engage with its reader at an affective, or visceral level. / In Spanish with title page, preliminaries, and abstract in English. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2015. / April 22, 2015. / Affect, Infrarrealistas, Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Enrique Álvarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Juan Carlos Galeano, Committee Member; José Gomariz, Committee Member.