Global ETD Search

1	The Picturesque Domestication of Iran for an American Counter-Modern Retreat Benjamin W Laga (7346138) 16 October 2019 (has links) <p>This thesis examines one of the most fraught and distorted relationships—the association between the United States and Iran. Contemporarily, most scholars and professionals associated with this connection evaluate the relationship in terms of politics, religion, power, and national security. Far fewer, however, evaluate it from its roots—the cultures, relationships, and dependencies that ultimately produced the prickly relationship of these two countries today. This thesis utilizes American authored travel narratives from 1921- 1941, written primarily by recreational travelers, to contradict American contemporary and paternalistic views of the relationship with Iran. This thesis posits that a nascent and unsure America depended on a pre-modern Iran to ease her into an impending modern existence.</p> Comparative Literature Studies Iran Picturesque Travel American
2	TRACING SHISHI IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE HISTORICAL NOVELS Jiacheng Fan (12343894) 20 April 2022 (has links) <p>This dissertation aims to address the lack of transcultural and historical perspective in the study of the Chinese term <em>shishi</em> and its role in the contemporary literature among the current scholarship. To begin with, the study traces the origin and genealogical development of <em>shishi</em> as a literary concept. It concludes that although it was initially invented as a translation for the Western term “epic,” the connotation of <em>shishi </em>was then greatly expanded and modified by Chinese intellectuals and should be understood as a unique aesthetic paradigm for evaluating literary works and inspiring writers, especially in terms of the criticism and the creation of historical fiction.</p> <p>Guided by the craving for building a unified identity for the newborn nation with literary works inspired by communist ideology, the revolutionary historical novel from the “Seventeen-Year Era” (1949-1966) becomes the embodiment of the classic ideas of <em>shishi</em>: heroism and optimistic belief in social progress. With the revolutionary era coming to an end, the orthodox historical narrative was challenged by writers and critics who began to implement new and alternative methods of representing and reconstructing past events and memories, which leads to the renovation and diversification of <em>shishi</em>. With a combination of textual analysis and historical interpretation, this study shall examine the works of six writers with varied and distinctive features from the 1980s to the present and demonstrate their contribution to the continued relevance and vitality of <em>shishi</em> in Chinese literature. The final lesson is, instead of sustaining a static and definitive view of <em>shishi</em>, we should recognize and embrace its dynamic and plural natures, and its ability to adapt and innovate.</p> Comparative Literature Studies shishi epic historical novels Contemporary Chinese Literature
3	Aspirations and Ambivalences of the New Woman: French and Chinese Women's Press and Fiction,1900-1930 Lang Wang (11170524) 23 July 2021 (has links) <p>My dissertation “Aspirations and Ambivalences of New Woman: French and Chinese Women’s Press and Fiction, 1900-1930” seeks to foster a global understanding of the dilemmas faced by “New Woman” in France and China in the early twentieth century. The thesis operates on two levels: press and fiction, and focuses on three central aspects of women’s lives: heterosexual love, professionalization, and singlehood. It is the first book-length project on the topic in which the East and West converge. </p><p>Studying feminist periodicals, I investigate two opposing discourses in the first chapter: the nationalist and anti-nationalist feminisms. I argue that both French republican feminism and Chinese nationalist feminism appropriated motherhood to defend women’s rights to education and women’s status at home. Along the anti-nationalist axis, I identify the anarcho-feminism in France and China, which remains understudied in current scholarship. I observe that Chinese anarcho-feminism is deeply influenced by French individualist anarchism through the bridge of Chinese anarchists in Paris. Together, they contributed to the plurality and complexity of first-wave feminism and challenged the nationalist feminist discourse.</p><p>Chapter two shifts from studying periodicals to the textual analysis of fiction centered on heterosexual relations. Informed by psychoanalysis, this chapter frames free love discourse as synonymous with the free expression of individuality. Departing from previous scholarship, I highlight the violent and exclusionary nature of free love, which leads to heroines’ death and rejection of other forms of love. Meanwhile, I propose that French protagonists embrace a new philosophical model of love based on preserving one’s individuality instead of the age-old love model of “merging," which obscures women's identity.</p><p>Chapter three employs sociological theories of professionalization to analyze women’s unique challenges and solutions to negotiating family and career. I argue that the female Bildungsroman in the early twentieth century exhibits narrative features different from its nineteenth-century predecessors: the trajectory of girls' development is expanded to include schools and workplaces; love ceases to be the only theme dominating women’s narratives; supportive female communities populate women’s fiction.</p><p>The fourth chapter highlights the singlehood that Chinese and French heroines both embrace as a valid life alternative. I investigate the motivations behind singlehood as well as its social stigmatization. Whereas heroines consider singlehood a valid option, their choice imposes a tremendous emotional and social price. I argue that the ideological tension between single women and the larger society lies mainly in contrasting views about female singlehood: it is conceived by female protagonists as a sign of independence and a means of self-preservation, but as a radical renunciation of femininity by society. </p> Comparative Literature Studies French and Chinese feminisms women's writing Bildungsroman free love women's education
4	Female authors and their male detectives: the ideological contest in female-authored crime fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand Redmond, Robert Stanley January 2008 (has links) In the nineteen-eighties a host of female detectives appeared in crime fiction authored by women. Ostensibly these detectives challenged hegemonic norms, but the consensus of opinion was that their appropriation of male values and adherence to conventional generic closures colluded with a gender system of male privilege. Academic interest in the work of female authors featuring male detectives was limited. Yet it can be argued that these texts could have the potential to disrupt the hegemonic order through the introduction, whether deliberately, or inadvertently, of a female counterpoint to the hegemony. The hypothesis I am advancing claims that the reconfiguration of male detectives in works authored by women avoids the visible contradictions of gender and genre that are characteristic of works featuring female detectives. However, through their use of disruptive performatives, these works allow scope for challenging normal gender practices—without damage to the genre. This hypothesis is tested by applying the performative theories of Judith Butler to a close reading of selected crime novels. Influenced by the theories of Austin, Lacan and Althusser, Butler’s concept of performativity claims that hegemonic notions of gender are a fiction. This discussion also uses Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author as a means of distinguishing the performative agency of the text from that of the characters. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, and Donna Leon, each with their male detective heroes, come from different generations. A Butlerian reading illustrates their potential for disrupting gender norms. Of the three, however, only Donna Leon avoids the return to hegemonic control that is a feature of the genre. Christie’s women who have agency are inevitably eliminated, while conformist women are rewarded. James’s lead female character is never fully at ease in her professional role. When thrust into a leadership she proves herself to be competent, but not ready or desirous of the senior position. Instead her role is to mediate the transition of her junior, a male, to that position. Donna Leon is different. The moral and emotional content of her narratives suggests an implied author committed to ideological change. Her characters simultaneously renounce and collude with illusions of patriarchal authority, and could lay claim to be models for Butler’s notion of performative resistance. gender in fiction crime novels gender norms
5	Emile Zola v Čechách / The Czech Reception to Emile Zola Štefanová, Helena January 2012 (has links) No description available.
6	Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albigensian Crusade Adrian James McClure (9017870) 25 June 2020 (has links) <p>This study presents a new reading of the <i>Perlesvaus</i>, an anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Grail romance bizarrely structured around an Arthurian restaging of the battle between the Old and the New Law. I construe this hyper-violent, phantasmagorical text as a profoundly significant work of “trauma fiction” encoding a hitherto-unrecognized crisis of religious ethics and identity in Western Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century. Combining literary and historical analysis and drawing on current trends in trauma studies, I tie what I term the “deranged discourse” of the <i>Perlesvaus</i> to the brutal onset of internal crusading in southern France (the papal-sponsored Albigensian Crusade, 1209-29), making the case that the collective trauma staged in its narrative perturbations was a contributing factor in the well-documented worsening of Western European antisemitism during this period. One key analytical construct I develop is the “doppelganger Jew”—personified in the <i>Perlesvaus</i> by its schizoid authority figure, Josephus, a conflation of first Christian priest and first-century Romano-Jewish historian—who functions as an uncanny embodiment of powerful, unacknowledged fears that Christians were losing their spiritual moorings and reverting into reviled, scapegoated Jews. Traces of this collective trauma are explored in other contemporary texts, and one chapter examines how the fourteenth-century <i>Book of John Mandeville</i> revives similar fears of collapsing Judeo-Christian identity and unfolds under the sign of the doppelganger Jew.</p> Literature Comparative Literature Studies Jewish Studies Medieval literature Perlesvaus Albigensian Crusade Medieval antisemitism Grail romances Medieval religious identity supersessionism Medieval exegesis
7	“IN PLACE OUT OF PLACE”: THE CONSTRUCTION AND NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITY AND PLACE IN MUSLIM WOMEN’S FICTIONAL NARRATIVE Riham A Ismail (9190382) 31 July 2020 (has links) <p>This dissertation examines the negotiations between narrative, identity, and place in the fictional works of three major contemporary Muslim women descendants of Arab immigrants: Leila Houari, Faiza Guène, and Mohja Kahf. The study focuses on four novels: <i>Zeida de nulle part, Kiffe kiffe demain</i>, <i>Du rêve pour les oufs</i>, and <i>The Girl with The Tangerine Scarf</i>. </p><p><br></p> <p>Two key questions structure my examination of the four novels: 1) How do Muslim women living in a non-Muslim society construct and negotiate their individual and collective identities?; 2) To what extent does their experience of space (domestic, public, national) shape their perceptions of self? These questions form a foundation for better understanding the experience of Muslim women living in predominantly non-Muslim societies. I must emphasize, however, that this is in no way a representation of all Muslim women living in majoritarian non-Muslim societies and in no way can summarize each and every experience. If anything, the dissertation provides an account of diverse sets of experiences of what some may encounter, rather than a collective static representation. </p><p><br></p> <p>By doing so, this study aims to decrease the dissonance between the different viewpoints of the women characters in these novels by highlighting their experiences and subjecting certain misconceptions to critical scrutiny. The dissertation relies on an interdisciplinary approach, as it integrates different theories and concepts ranging from cognitive science, postcolonial studies, literary studies, psychology, and religious studies.</p> <br> <p> </p> Literature Literature in French Middle Eastern Literature Comparative Literature Studies Identity Space Place Narrative gender roles immigration arab american Arab French Arab Belgian
8	CRIME FICTION AS A LENS FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE IN THE MODERN ARAB WORLD: ELIAS KHOURY’S <i>WHITE MASKS</i> AND YASMINA KHADRA’S <i>MORITURI</i> Rachel Hannah Hackett (10682463) 07 May 2021 (has links) <p>This thesis argues that <i>Morituri</i> by Yasmina Khadra and <i>White Masks</i> by Elias Khoury use the genre of the detective novel as a pretext for social and political critique of Algeria and Lebanon respectively. This thesis links the generic (crime fiction) and the conceptual (Political and Social Critique in Modern Arab World). While the detective novel is traditionally thought of as a non-academic, entertaining part of popular culture, the use of the genre to critique the failure of nation building after colonization elevates the genre and transforms it from mere entertainment to a more serious genre. Both novels are emblematic of a shift in the use of the detective and crime novel to address the political disarray in their respective states and the Arab world as a whole. As modern examples of detective novels in the modern Arab world, <i>Morituri</i> and <i>White Masks</i> transform the genre through their complex interweaving of aspects of the popular genre of detective fiction with the more serious political novel. The historical and political context of both countries at the time of the novels’ settings are an intrinsic part of understanding the crimes and the obfuscation of the perpetrator. In both of these novels, the technical and generic aspects are connected to the thematic, and the detective novel structure is not just there for suspense and entertainment. Instead, this structure points to the neocolonial system, benefitting the most powerful and the most affluent at the expense of the weak, poor, and disadvantaged.</p> French Language Literature in French Middle Eastern Literature Comparative Literature Studies Morituri Algeria Lebanon Yasmina Khadra detective fiction crime fiction nation building White Masks Elias Khoury Middle East social critique political critique Modern Arab World genre fiction North Africa
9	CHILDREN OF GLOBALIZATION: DIASPORIC COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS IN GERMANY, ENGLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES Ricardo Quintana Vallejo (8722203) 17 April 2020 (has links) <p><i>Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States </i>is an exploration of contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels written in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. Framed in the long tradition of <i>Bildungsroman </i>studies, this study illuminates the structural transformations that the coming-of-age genre has undergone in contemporary diasporic communities. <i>Children of Globalization</i> analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for the tercentennial genre. While the most traditional iteration of the <i>Bildungsroman </i>genre follows male middle-class heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection to become citizens and workers, contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard, narratives of nationhood. Recent changes in the global genre are the direct consequence of the intricacies of the formative processes of culturally-hybrid protagonists who must negotiate their access into adulthood and citizenship, and puzzle over sexuality and gender identity, in host societies that at times regard them with contempt and distrust. The study spans three centuries as it traces both perennial and volatile elements of the genre through its contemporary state. In doing so, it identifies thematic and structural seeds which, planted through the centuries in varied locations, have bloomed into nuanced explorations of the self in an interconnected world where regional and national definitions of identity are increasingly contested and in flux.</p><p>In order to contextualize the genre and provide evidence of its enduring malleability, the study begins in Germany, tracing what I term Proto-<i>Bildungsromane, </i>long medieval narrative poems that follow the formative processes of knights and heroes in grandiose style. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century poem <i>Parzival </i>and the coeval Gottfried von Straßburg’s <i>Die Geschichte der Liebe von Tristan und Isolde </i>ponder the development of the self but too heavily rely on destiny to be considered <i>Bildungsromane. </i>Still in Germany, I illustrate the fundamental characteristics of the genre in Wolfgang von Goethe’s <i>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. </i>In order to showcase the flexibility of the genre, I analyze its early transformations in England in prominent works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and E. M. Forster. The last four chapters focus on the exciting development of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in England, the United States, and Germany. Despite the stark differences between these societies and the particular cultural wealth of diasporic groups that have migrated there, the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel has enabled sophisticated explorations of identity and belonging in all three countries. As the chapter summaries show, contemporary writers have used the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel to untangle complicated formative processes, understand the expectations of their social environments, and achieve different levels of belonging and maturity.</p><p>With <i>Children of Globalization, </i>I seek to deepen our understanding of the exciting influence that contemporary diasporic movements have on the coming-of-age genre in particular and literary studies in general. Additionally, it is my hope that the exploration of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels contributes to a capacious understanding of the important role of literature in the study of migration.</p> Literature Social and Cultural Geography British and Irish Literature North American Literature Literature in German Literature in Spanish and Portuguese Comparative Literature Studies Migrant Cultural Studies Postcolonial Studies Diaspora and migration literatures Global South Comparative literature Bildungsroman German Literature of the 20th Century German Literature of the 18th Century English literatures american literature Immigration issues Globalization
10	“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Ghaleb Alomaish (8850251) 18 May 2020 (has links) <p>This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.</p> Art Literature History Disability Studies Gender studies Language North American Literature Other Literatures in English Middle Eastern Literature Comparative Literature Studies Literary Theory Aesthetics Epistemology Feminist Theory Hermeneutic and Critical Theory Comparative Religious Studies Islamic Studies Gender, Sexuality and Education British History Saudi culture American Saudi-American Orientalism Orientalism in art neo-Orientalsim Desert oil Cultural studies Arabian Gulf migration Diaspora Studies blackness slavery literature Mormonism Mormon biblical studies disability studies geopolitics 9/11 post-9/11 post-9/11 America Post-9/11, fiction terrorism extremism radicalism visual studies orientalist painting postcolonial Postcolonial Discourse Otherness Alterity munif cities of salt urbanism Modernity tradition Islamic feminism Islam whiteness studies

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