After tracing the theo-philosophical roots of the eighteenth-century sentimental sensibility as Laurence Sterne used them in Tristram Shandy, this work examines the antecedents of twentieth-century sentimentalism as they appear in William Butler Yeats's memoir Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, in the first two chapters of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in the "Overture" and "Combray" sections of Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way. This study concentrates on how the focal characters' innate artistic sensibility emerges during their childhoods. Following sentimental patterns, the idealistic central figures are vulnerable to threatening realities that disillusion them. Melancholy accompanies their distress, and they react by wishing to withdraw physically and psychologically from an alienating world to which they feel superior because of their aesthetic sensibilities. These modern works conform to three specific sentimental characteristics that appear in Yeats, Stephen and Marcel. First, they respond spontaneously to sensory stimuli, which lead to associated ideas, often manifest as memories or synaesthesia that the characters elaborate both imaginatively and intellectually. The second sentimental trait is that the action of deeply-detailed scenes is often suspended to reveal characters. And the last sentimental element, which reinforces the Kunstlerroman and Bidungsroman aspects of these works, is that the protagonists turn to language to define both their realities and artistic identities, showing the evolution of sentimental sensibility in these potential writers.

The life and career of the remarkable Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) offers a paradigm for the modern woman writer. Despite the great number of women associated with Western Modernism, the Modernist canon is striking for the paucity of its women representatives. This thesis hopes to redress that situation, starting with a new reading of Tsvetaeva's epic poem of the Russian Civil War, Perekop (1928-1929). Perekop is the culmination of Tsvetaeva's verse experimentation with her culture's received constructs of gender and genre and it is the work in which she realizes the voice of an anonymous female bard. The failure of this poem to attract critical recognition parallels the experience of comparably innovative work among Tsvetaeva's female contemporaries. Tsvetaeva's work, in verse and prose, is a de facto manifesto of a female poetics. Deciphering the terms of this female modernist poetics provides a critical discourse in which to appreciate the comparably innovative and de-valued work of other modernist women writers. My thesis first outlines the cultural obstacles to Tsvetaeva's epic ambition, then explicates the strategies by which she accomplishes it. Through her re-writing of the gender-linked metaphors of Western poetics, Tsvetaeva creates the modern female bard. The trajectory of my analysis is determined by the unifying system of lyric tropes I extract from both prose and verse. This series of tropes is then located in Tsvetaeva's appropriation of western ideas, ranging from the practice of Homer, Herodotus, Hesiod and Heraclitus through the theories of the German Romantics and Nietzsche to the practice of the Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. My analysis culminates in the exploration of the medieval Russian text Slovo o polku Igoreve as the unifying sub-text of Tsvetaeva's Perekop.

As we gaze into the mirror of literary texts, we often forget that the images projected back at us are verbal constructs that may bear little resemblance to the reality they purport to represent. This is the case with a group of fifteenth-century Spanish texts that denigrate or defend women. We do not witness these women as they really were; instead, we see fictionally embodied projections of the fears and fantasies of both their authors and of the societies in which they were formed. We see how man's relation to woman plays itself out in a constant oscillation between overwhelming attraction and fear of the loss of control over both himself and woman; or, we see women who are so perfect and so willingly subjected to man's control that they will never achieve status as an individual. This dissertation examines three modes of discourse used by these texts to represent women. The misogynist discourse of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Luis de Lucena achieves near hallucinatory visions of chaos with its depictions of Woman as Wild Man: the incarnation of every excess and sin that men might dream of but know they cannot indulge in. These creatures destroy the “natural” order of society by defying its control. Attempts to tame them may fail, for only the annointed few are equal to the task. In contrast, the profeminist discourse of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Mosón Diego de Valera, Álvaro de Luna, and Fray Martín de Córdoba raises women up to a potential paradise of harmony and respect between the sexes, but below the surface of these portrayals of exemplary wives, widows, and virgins, we see the continuing discourse of male control. Indeed, this control is now tightened, so that even perfect women are tested, to see which will fall. Finally, we come to Teresa de Cartagena, this group's only female voice. Teresa borrows from both male-determined discourses and then subverts them so that she can at last free herself with the very words meant to imprison her and, by extension, all women. men.

The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.

This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

In an interdisciplinary fashion, this dissertation on Brazilian women writers in English focuses on translation and gender issues and employs an historical and statistical approach. Following an investigation of the proportion of men to women writers in the corpora of Brazilian literature and its English translations, I offer an analysis of the English translation of three contemporary Brazilian women writers. Then, drawing on models developed by Javier Franco Aixelá and Carla Melibeu Bentes, I evaluate the "foreignizing" or "domesticating" character of the translations by examining Culture-Specific Terms (CSTs) and provide a new model to analyze translation strategies for Gender-Marked Terms (GMTs). The first part of the dissertation (chapters two and three) consists of a quantitative macro analysis of women writers' representation in Brazilian literature, based on a recent reference work, the Enciclopédia de literatura brasileira (2001), and on my own diachronic survey of translated authors. The surprising results, graphically represented in tables and charts, point to the visibility of Brazilian women writers in translation and raise questions regarding the process of cross-cultural transmission. In the second part (chapters four through six), I undertake a qualitative contrastive micro analysis examining the strategies used to translate CSTs and GMTs - presented in tables and charts–in seven books by three Brazilian women writers. Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the most widely translated and best known in Brazil and abroad, has published highly introspective works. Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), briefly famous after the publication of her exposé of favela life, found unexpected success in English translation, which motivated her book's re-publication in Brazil. Ana Maria Machado (1940-), famous for her children's books, is one of the few Brazilian authors of this genre published in English. English translators tended to keep most CSTs (50%) in Portuguese; 68% of GMTs were equivalently translated; however, domesticating (CSTs) and neutralizing (GMTs) strategies had a significant impact on the translations. Such macro and micro analyses introduce an evidence-based dimension that complements contemporary translation studies, at times contradicting the presuppositions of theorists, and offers new avenues of research for understanding the processes by which Brazilian works enter the English-language market.

In "Specters of War: Reclamation, Recovery, and Return in Southeast Asian-American Literature and History," I examine life stories, autobiographies, poems, and a film by and about refugees and their children from Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos. Engaging with the works of Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Cathy Caruth, and Kathleen Brogan, I argue that the historical experience of war and immigration for Southeast Asian-Americans produces three specific narrative moments: reclamation, recovery, and return. I begin the dissertation by exploring Bakhtinian poetics in the writings of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston A. Baker, Jr., and King-kok Cheung in Chapter 1. Specifically, I use Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of double-voiced discourse to discuss what I call "ethnic intertextuality" in the cultural productions of US ethnic writers. Chapter 2 examines how double-voiced discourse as a textual property allows Cambodian-American writers Loung Ung and Chanrithy Him to re-present the voice of the Cambodian Genocide victims in their testimonial works. A discussion of how and why Le Ly Hayslip and Loung Ung turn to storytelling and activism as vehicles for agency, empowerment, and healing takes place in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 addresses how memories of the traumatic past return to haunt Southeast Asian refugees in Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge and le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Using the life stories found in Sucheng Chan's Hmong Means Free and Usha Welaratna's Beyond the Killing Fields, I examine the socio-political forces that produce desire for home in Southeast Asian refugees in Chapter 5. I conclude this final chapter with a discussion of the return trips made by Southeast Asian-Americans in Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Spencer Nakasako's documentary Refugee.

As a political, social, and cultural ideology, Pan-Africanism has been a complex movement attempting to ameliorate the dehumanizing effects of “the global Eurocentric colonial/modern capitalist model of power,” which Anibal Quijano (2000) refers to as “the coloniality of power.” The destructive forces of the coloniality of power—beginning with the transatlantic slave trade—that led to the dispersal and displacement of millions of Africans subsequently facilitated the creation of Pan-African political and cultural consciousness. Thus, this dissertation examines diverse articulations of Pan-African politics of cultural struggle as a response to racist and sexist oppression and economic exploitation of Afro-descendants. I am specifically interested in the formation of international politico-cultural movements, such as the Black Arts movement, Négritude, and the Pan-African Cultural Revolution and their ideological alignments to political liberation struggles for the emancipation of people of African descent. With varying degrees of revolutionary commitment, intellectuals in each of these movements utilized literary and cultural production to raise the political consciousness of Africans and Afro-descendants to combat forces that oppressed their communities. To demonstrate this, my dissertation historicizes and analyzes the numerous Pan-African festivals, congresses, and conferences, which occurred between 1965 and 1977, while interrogating the specific manifestations of “translocal” contacts and linkages between movement intellectuals. I chose to focus on these years because they roughly correspond with the historical time period known as the Black Arts movement in North America (1965-1975), which had a vibrant, yet understudied Pan-African worldview. Moreover, while Pan-Africanism gained considerable traction after World War II, it was particularly between 1966 and 1977 that intellectuals aligned with Négritude and Pan-African Marxism competed for ideological hegemony of the movement on the African continent and in the African Diaspora.

Border Crossings and Multicultural Whiteness analyzes the interplay of cinema and nation in audience responses to vampire films. Since audiences accept nationality, race, and ethnicity as “natural” terms for social differentiation, I examine them in tandem with an exaggerated term for social differentiation that calls attention to its ideological constructivity: vampire. Vampire-film narratives involve border crossings, posing; questions about immigration, cultural assimilation, and foreign intervention that produce notions of nation, race, and ethnicity. I question why audiences devalue vampire films, particularly ones challenging the “transparency” of eurocentrism, multiculturalism, and whiteness, to suggest that inequalities within film narratives reflect industrial inequalities with global film circulation. Vampire-hunters assassinate in foreign rulers, yet vampires are forbidden to immigrate; Hollywood dominates foreign markets, yet foreign films are often denied entry into US markets. I propose the concept of multicultural whiteness, linking problematic discourses of inclusion and exclusion, to suggest an internalization of Hollywood narrative conventions, cinematic styles, and production values as an expression of US nationalism. Audiences evaluate vampire films according to criteria of performing whiteness while constructing “America” as an a historical “nation of immigrants.” Chapters 1 and 2 investigate ethnocentrism and nationalism imbedded in vampirism against alternative primordialist and constructivist theories of nation, relating them to the evaluative criteria within vampire-film canons. Chapter 3 analyzes ambiguous representations of nationality for international audiences in Hammer Films (UK) productions since the late 1950s. Chapter 4 suggests that dubbing, reediting, and peripheral exhibition venues reduce parodies of eurocentrism in Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, and South Asian films to depoliticized touristic spectacle during 1960s–1970s. Chapter 5 examines “vampires of color” in post-1975 Hollywood as sites for debates and negotiation over miscegenation and assimilation. Chapter 6 explores multiculturalism's deflation of tensions between Chinese transnationalism (one China) and Hong Kong's hybrid identity (Chinese-British) in 1980s Hong Kong films. Chapters 7 and 8 question the purported de-centering of multinational financing in art and blockbuster films and interrogate the unequal benefits of globalization I conclude by discussing fan fiction, video distribution and reception via the Internet, contending that copyright law is selectively enforced according to national hierarchies within the global marketplace.

This dissertation examines homo/sexual representation in French and American literature and film from 1977-2001. I use the slash to distinguish between two areas of representation whose relationship forms the object of my comparative analysis. Focusing on narratives featuring sexual encounters between men, I analyze sexual representation as it ranges from reticence to frankness. I consider these same narratives in relation to what I call "homo representation," the interpretation of sexuality in minoritizing terms of identities, communities and politics. I argue that French texts demonstrate a greater frankness in relation to sexual representation; the dominance of a universalist tradition in France, however, inhibits the categorization of these texts and the sexuality they depict as "homosexual" or "gay"---or at least limits the political significance of that categorization. In contrast, I argue that the American texts I consider participate in a minoritized gay literature and subculture that has evolved in response to the greater reticence around sexual representation in the American mainstream. That mainstream, however, proves to be more open to "homo representation" on the levels of both culture and politics. I analyze texts by Renaud Camus, John Rechy, Dominique Fernandez, Edmund White, Cyril Collard, Gregg Araki, Guillaume Dustan, Dennis Cooper, Paul Smaïl, and Samuel R. Delany, situating them in the context of various genres. Applying minoritizing vs. universalizing strategies and normalizing vs. transgressive ones in different ways, these genres include coming out narratives (for which I propose an alternative gay Bildungsroman model), AIDS narratives, "ghetto" narratives, "assimilative" narratives and "queer" narratives. Within my American examples, minoritizing ghetto narratives predominate, establishing alternative community norms that are themselves challenged by more transgressive queer narratives. In my French examples, however, universalizing assimilative narratives are more usual, even as they reserve a surprisingly privileged place for transgressive sexuality in comparison with their more normalizing assimilative counterparts in the United States. I argue that these differences must ultimately be understood in relation to contrasting ways of situating sexuality, literature, and politics within the public and private spheres, even as those configurations continue to evolve in both countries through the 1990s and beyond.