Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / For more than a century, the chain gang has been glamorized, criticized, abhorred, and often explained away as an economic necessity or natural byproduct of historical circumstances. After Emancipation, this centuries-old approach to punishing criminals offered an immediate palliative for southern plantation owners in need of field hands, northern coal and steel interests and railroad tycoons in search of blasters and miners, and eventually government officials who identified the South's antiquated infrastructure as its greatest barrier to integration into a regional and national economy. Heavily influenced by Hollywood, the blues, oral histories and folkways, archived photographs, and literary representations, many people now view the chain gang as a relic of a bygone era of southern prejudice and brutality. After all, history does not cast the men and women who served on chain gangs as heroic workers and, if they are acknowledged at all, they are only occasionally figured as victims of the political, social, and economic forces that led to their convictions and servitude. And yet, paradoxically, labor historians and others have argued convincingly that the chain gang, even with all its warts and abuses, actually made southern economic progress possible. Entering this still-vibrant, contested territory, "Restricted Movement" and Coordinates of Freedom focuses on depictions of chain gangs in selected literary works and films from 1901 to 2000, including Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren and the films I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Defiant Ones (1958), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This dissertation attempts to make sense of a multitude of historical and social conditions that bear specifically on chain gangs and convict labor, including black criminality, white supremacy, the Good Roads Movement, race-based electoral politics, and industrialization. In addition to exploring these vexed arguments about servitude and progress, this dissertation also explores how the chain gang, real and imagined, serves as its own special form of segregation. Beginning with the work of Edward L. Ayers, Alex Lichtenstein, Matthew Mancini, and others in the 1980s and 1990s, a handful of southern and labor historians broadened the study of postbellum race, crime, and punishment to consider whether convict-leasing programs and chain gangs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really did result in a form of "neo-slavery." In other words, these historians asked, did these practices actually "re-enslave" African Americans in the American South between 1865 and 1940? And if so, what were the social, political and cultural implications of this re-enslavement? How did these practices shape the experience and consciousness of both blacks and southern whites? Moreover, in a culture that speaks so often of slavery's terrible legacies, how might a deeper understanding of convict leasing and chain gangs offer its own particular lessons about race, history, and justice in the United States since the Civil War? My hope is that the methods and approaches laid out in this dissertation will invite other scholars to grapple with the ways in which chain gang history and cultural history inform one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Orientador: Maria de Fátima Alves de Oliveira Marcari / Banca: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Banca: Maria Dolores Aybar Ramirez / Resumo: Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o romance Apariciones (1996), da escritora mexicana Margo Glantz, com a finalidade de compreender, em primeiro lugar, os procedimentos de escrita empregados pela romancista, com destaque para a metaficção e a intertextualidade. Para tanto, contaremos com o apoio teórico da poética sobre o prazer do texto elaborada por Roland Barthes (1973), assim como dos estudos de Tiphaine Samoyault (2008) sobre a intertextualidade, dentre outros autores, procurando demonstrar como Margo Glantz elabora uma (re) escritura a partir do diálogo e da integração de textos, alusões à pinturas e músicas. Outrossim, analisaremos o tema do erotismo presente no romance, investigando como o erotismo sagrado se aproxima do profano, por meio da análise da recriação paródica dos exercícios espirituais de duas monjas e, por outro lado, como o erotismo profano que caracteriza os encontros amorosos de um casal se aproxima do erotismo sagrado. Para tanto, nossa análise será fundamentada de acordo com as teorizações de Georges Bataille (1957) e Octavio Paz (1994) sobre o erotismo, e de Linda Hutcheon (1988) sobre o pós-modernismo e a paródia / Abstract: This work has as objective to analyze the novel Apariciones (1996), of the mexican writer Margo Glantz, with the purpose of understand, at first, the writing procedures used by the writer, highlighting the metafiction and the intertextuality. Therefore, we will have the teoric support of the poetics of pleasure from the text prepared by Roland Barthes (1973), as well as from the studies by Tiphaine Samoyault (2001) about the intertextuality, among other authors, trying to demonstrate how Margo Glantz elaborates a (re)writing from the dialogue and the integration of texts, allusions to paintings and musics. Likewise, we will analyze the theme of erotism presente in the novel, investigating how the sacred erotismo approaches the profane, through the analysis of the parody recreation of the spiritual exercises of two nuns and, on the other hand, how the profane erotismo that caracterizes the love meetings of a couple approaches the sacred erotismo. Therefore, our analysis will be substantiated according to the theorizations of Georges Bataille (1957) and Octavio Paz (1994) about the erotism, and of Linda Hutcheon (1988) about the postmodernism and the parody / Mestre

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Spectacles of justice preoccupy contemporary American culture. Legal culture---including the Watergate trials, the Lewinsky scandal, and OJ Simpson's trial for alleged murder---assumes a central place in the American imaginary. Configurations of the law are not limited to media reportage and televised docudramas. Nor are arbitrations confined to law faculties and the spaces of formal courts. Working through depictions of due process in different ways and in different zones, contemporary American writers point up the prevalence of legality in everyday life. Whether on college campuses, in TV studios and suburban homes, or at theatres and racetracks, justice mediates interpersonal relations. Personal narratives proliferate as modes of self-justification. Everyone has a right to represent her side of a story. As interpretations of reality, however, none of these stories can claim absolute justness. No one has a monopoly on the law or victimhood. / This dissertation inspects how Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Jane Smiley present the inconsistencies of the law. These American novelists emplot global escapes into their work as a means to inform notions of liberty and jurisprudence. For these writers, freedom requires the recognition of contradictory---and unanticipated---narratives. "Justice Theory" emerges where media, gambling, performance, and suburban studies intersect with ethics, globalism, and narratology. In Franzen's novel The Corrections and essay collection How to Be Alone, self-validation requires the appreciation of the stories of others. In DeLillo's later works, particularly the plays The Day Room and Valparaiso, justice materializes in terms of isolation and the will to alter personal stories. For Smiley, as construed in her long novels The Greenlanders and Horse Heaven, dynamic responsive actions attend risky, unpredictable encounters in competitive milieus like the racetrack. These authors reveal that executions of justice and the perpetration of injustice involve varied consequences. The law is not only about punishment and recompense. Rather, legality directs the consequences of its applications toward the ideal of justice, which evolves alongside the subjects that it serves and the stories that they relate.

My dissertation investigates how Chinese American writers invent transnational Chinese American identities in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I focus on Amy Tan's The JoyLuck Club (1989), Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), and Shawn Hsu Wong's American Knees(1995). 1 argue that Tan, Lim, and Wong challenge the conventional ideas of a singular, pure, and fixed identity but instead create Chinese American identities in the post-1965 era as multiple, hybrid, and constantly changing to accommodate to an open, diverse, and multicultural America. Specifically, in Tan's work, by describing both the conflicts and connections between the Chinese mothers and their American horn daughters, she represents a group of Chinese American women who transcend their cultural, generational, and linguistic differences to achieve an identity that connects the West with the East. In Lim's work, by portraying the domestic and international movements of herself as an immigrant, she reveals the long and painful process of negotiating multiple cultures and identities that enables her to change from a Chinese Malaysian to a new Asian American woman. In Wong's work, by focusing on how the fourth- and fifthgeneration of Chinese and/or Asian American men and women negotiate racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, Wong meditates on what the term Asian American means in the new age. Together the three works reflect the range, diversity, and invention of contemporary Chinese American identities by Chinese American writers in the new era. / Department of English

My dissertation concentrates on Americans writing at home and abroad in the inter-war period and contextualizes their expatriation with reference to debates between modernist critics over the nature and substance of the American literary tradition. I clarify the definitions of terms like "exile," "emigrant," and "expatriate" central to my analysis but muddied by years of misuse. I do so with reference to coercion, a concept which I develop in accordance with recent work in the philosophy of action. At the same time I make the case for a realist, causalist hermeneutics. Next I explore the aesthetic corollary to my argument with reference to the fiction, autobiography, and literary criticism of Gertrude Stein. I argue that Stein's decision to leave America must be viewed as uncoerced, and as therefore indicative of her emigration to France. Viewed as an emigrant, and not as an exile or expatriate, Stein can be shown to manifest tendencies in her work (towards subjectivity, abstraction, and retrospection) which reflect her dissociation from, rather than ongoing connection to, America. Lastly, I look closely at the work of Van Wyck Brooks and Harold Stearns, two modernist literary and culture critics whose writings on expatriation demonstrably influenced generations of subsequent biographers and intellectual historians. Steams and Brooks can be counted among the most articulate and vociferous proponents of literary change in America, and can be situated at the poles of a vigorous debate within the literary community of their day over whether American letters were better served from within or without the United States. I contrast Brooks' civic humanism with Steams' rugged individualism and identify in the debate over expatriation a powerful analogue to ongoing debates in literary and cultural critical circles referred to as "the culture wars."

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This study examines the political theory of modernity as it appears in the work of contemporary Latin American writers and thinkers (pensadores). It is designed to help bridge the gap that separates the North American and European dialogue on modernity from the parallel dialogue on modernity currently flourishing in Latin America. The dialogues are brought together in two ways. First, the theory of modernity, which is still often thought to apply only or primarily to the developed world, is subjected to the challenge of the Latin American political and cultural context. Many features of the theory are found to apply equally well to both cultures, and these features provide the basis for the second "bridging" of the two dialogues, in which some of the most interesting Latin American responses to the problems of modernity are brought to the attention of North American and European political scholars. After reviewing the problem of modernity in some depth, the work of Jose Ortega y Gasset is presented both as a link to German philosophical thought and as a pattern for subsequent discussion of modernity in the Spanish-speaking world. Ortega's uniquely Latin way of understanding modernity is then compared to other philosophical approaches, and placed within the context of political literature in Latin America. Literature is shown to be a uniquely suitable forum for conveying Ortega's approach to modernity because it expresses in itself the central role of arts and culture in his political thought. The balance of the study focuses on the works of three contemporary Latin American authors: Octavio Paz of Mexico, Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. Each author's major works are placed within the context of the model Latin American response to modernity inspired by Ortega and analyzed for significant contributions to the discussion of modernity. Their most important insights center around the need to assimilate the value of tradition in a new approach to modernity by means of some form of democratic dialogue combined with critical appreciation for the cultural uniqueness of nations.