Contemporary women's cinema in France has developed within a specific context. The persistence of auteur theory, combined with the absence of Anglo-American film theory, has led to a lack of critical engagement with feminism and feminist film theory by directors and critics alike. Yet, over the past decade, more than one hundred French women directors have released over two hundred films: an unprecedented 14% of all French films distributed in France. This dissertation investigates, against a backdrop of French and Anglo-American theory, the emergence of films directed by women in France between 1990 and 2000. This cross-cultural approach allows me to assess the specificity of these films and to examine how they attempt to reflect cultural change and to transform social and aesthetic awareness. In order to assert their own belonging to society, French women filmmakers present what I suggest is a double dynamic of integration and difference. Whether close to the mainstream or reflecting more personal visions, their films do not appear as a homogeneous group, but rather as individual works with distinctive cinematic voices. Yet they address similar thematic concerns, related to questions of marginality and social difference, and thus introduce the viewer to underrepresented voices such as those of ethnic and sexual minorities, lower class or suburban and provincial groups. Because this marginality is complicated by a desire to belong, these films suggest that their acceptance by the dominant majority imply a change in the mainstream. They thus demand that the “center” represented by traditional cinema shift towards the new type of representation proposed by these directors. As a consequence, the cinematic landscape of French film is gradually shifting towards an aesthetic of film that has, in some sense, become the province of women filmmakers. Detailed analyses of films by Denis, Breillat, Masson, Corsini and others, as well as the study of theoretical questions of cultural specificity hold this work together and help understand how the very lack of critical engagement towards feminist film politics has in fact helped these directors to create a diverse cinema which, in turn, facilitated their extraordinary integration within the mainstream.

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less important. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. This type of literary text, or what I label “con-script,” is not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematizes its own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of “false documents,” the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and to misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English, Spanish, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. “The Art of Con-Fessing” juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their “own” personal writing. “Mediations of Media” features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in “Con-Centering the Archive” via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

This project is a narratological study of the border between fiction and reality, and the traversing thereof. I postulate that the permeability of this border is the consequence of textual acts: Cataloged Fabulations, Second-tier Fictionals, and Rhizomatic Fabrications. These are akin to speech acts in that fictional entities gain nonfictional status by means of an implicit contract at the heart of the textual act. Having laid out the narratological foundation of the textual acts' power, I argue that the narratological bears on the ontological through performative speech acts, as portrayed in J. L. Austin's tripartite model. I use two lenses in my analysis: the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries. The Borgesian trifecta is encyclopedia, mirror, and labyrinth, referents that are synonymous with the three textual acts noted above. In terms of the biblical lens, my analysis focuses on a metaphor family in Jewish mysticism. This family includes the World as Book, The Torah as Blueprint, God as Author, and Letters as Building Blocks. The resulting conceptual system is narratological in nature. Consequently it is useful to draw on this system so as to elucidate the field of narratology. The binoculars offer a parallax view, which provides a unique perspective on narratology: the combination of modernist/postmodernist fantasy and the urtext of the Western literary canon. My aim is to further the conception of narratology into the crosshatched territory of literary theory and cultural studies.

This dissertation explores where historical memories concerning colonization, genocide, and racism intersect, merge, and overlap in multidirectional ways. The text opens by exploring the possibilities of using a multidirectional model of world history and then moves to a discussion of certain aspects of world political history that interrogates why some nations have dominated others. The focus then shifts to England's attitude toward perceived "others" in the crucial late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by examining contemporary theater drama. From there, the text moves on to current voices that have spoken out against the racism and genocide that have emerged as byproducts of empire building. Finally, possibilities for where we, as citizens of the world, can go from here in thinking through framing justice and equality for all its occupants is given the final voice in this text. My approach may be thought of as somewhat philosophical.

My project examines the transformations of the Monkey King figure in both Chinese and Asian American literatures and cultures. A protagonist in the sixteenth century classics Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), the Monkey King is still a highly popular cultural figure in China today, thanks to the continuous retellings and rewritings of his story. As the adaptations both in China and the United States make the image of the Monkey King a multifaceted subject, I adopt different research approaches for the varied examples chosen for each chapter. My methodologies range from close readings of literary, visual and graphical works in relation to their broader socio-historical contexts, to a theoretical analysis of the ambivalent nature of the Monkey King figure, the process of translation and representation, as well as identity formation from the approach of performativity and national/cultural myth-making. This project crosses boundaries between premodern and modern Chinese literature, Asian studies and Asian American Studies, and translation studies and media studies. The first chapter focuses on the literary use of the Monkey King in Asian American self-representation. Taking Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese as an example, drawing on Homi Bhabha's discussion of the "fixity" and the "splitting" nature of stereotype, I examine the intricate relationship between monkey, human and god embodied in the Monkey King image. The second chapter borrows the lens of western trickster theories to examine the Chinese mythical character in Journey to the West. I also bring in W.J.T. Mitchell's picture theory in considering the multivalent nature of the Monkey King image and the reasons that this image is most suitable in representing the ethnic American. The third chapter provides a (hi)story of the transformations of the Monkey King image, from a serious friar to a clown, and then from a trickster to a hero. I juxtapose two major changes in the growth of the image: how it is stabilized as a trickster in the Ming prints, and how the trickster is transformed into a hero under Communist politics. The fourth chapter analyzes the representation of the Monkey King image in American media. Focusing on cinematic works such as The Lost Empireand The Forbidden Kingdom, I examine texts from the approach of cross media adaptation and from the viewpoint of chronotope.

This dissertation explores the construction and transmission of the concept of authorship in the Italian novella in late-medieval and early modern Italy and England. The notion of authorship during this period undergoes an important shift from medieval conceptions of auctoritas to modern ideas about the role of the author. Tracing the figure of the author through a single genre allows an investigation of the translational mechanisms that affect cross-cultural ideas such as authorship as they move between cultures. This research contributes to knowledge about the formation and translation of cross-cultural concepts as well as to understandings of the role of the author in early modern literature. The literature used to pursue this investigation consists of some of the major and minor works in the genre of the Italian novella in Italy and England. The first chapter establishes the generic and theoretical foundations of both the genre of the Italian novella and medieval ideas about authorship. The first text addressed is the late thirteenth-century anonymous Italian Novellino, which is included in the first chapter as an example of an early novella collection that has some but not all of the characteristics of the developing genre. The subject of the second chapter is the authorial construction of Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron, which forms the basis for subsequent research. The third chapter explores how later Italian writers including Francesco Petrarca, Masuccio Salernitano, Matteo Bandello, and Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio modify and expand the Boccaccian models of authorship in their own contributions to the genre. In chapter four, translation comes to the forefront in an examination of how English writers and translators worked with the Italian genre, adapting it for their own purposes. This exploration moves from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer through the major novella collections of the late sixteenth-century and ultimately to the beginnings of "original" English novella production with George Gascoigne and the continuation of the translation tradition with the first complete English translation of Boccaccio's Decameron in 1620. Finally, the fifth chapter unifies a discussion of narrative structure that has proved key in the preceding chapters, exploring how the repetition and recursivity of the texts at hand influences authorial and interpretive constructions.

This dissertation traces the development of the relationship between the American West and the western frontier over the past century, and examines four key areas of the interaction between the West and the frontier: the trajectory of Western American History, which began the twentieth century with Frederick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis” as its dominant paradigm, and ended the same century with the so-called New Western history; the migration of aspects of the frontier thesis to film and television westerns, and the revisionist and postfrontier responses within the genre that emerged late in the twentieth century; the increasing urbanization of the American West, the postwar suburbanization of much of the United States, and the tendency, evident in many Eastern cities by the 1980s, to attempt to reinscribe urban spaces as wilderness or new frontiers; finally, the description of networked computers, the Internet, and cyberspace in general as an electronic frontier. Both the American West and the western frontier are introduced and analyzed in the context of the production of space, and recognized as the products of spatial discourse and social practice, informed by a plethora of media and disciplines. While the frontier is clearly “imaginary” space, composed from fantasies, projections, stories, and visual representations, its relationship to the American West is neither artificial nor arbitrary. Ultimately, the distinction between the West and the frontier is not similar to the one between history and myth, or between reality and fiction.

Revivals of the eighteenth century novel and revivals of material culture are closely related. Whether one is mourning the lost bagel of the past or the lost novel, a complex form of nostalgia is at work. Historians of the novel Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Lennard Davis, and many others are participants in the continuous re-invention of an invented tradition. Similarly, a number of novelists, reviving a great deal of eighteenth century discourse on genre, historiography, and aesthetics, partake of a nostalgia for novelty, a lost time when the European novel might truly have been novel. While these invented histories both need and oppose each other, neither are historical. The twin ideologies are revivals of a complex set of ambivalent metaphors and narratives that were parables of loss, regret, and repetition in their original form. The nostalgic fatalism of the past is recycled into the fatalism of the present, transforming that fatalism into a form of optimism. I trace the journey of this metaphor through Pierre Marivaux's Pharsamon , Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Denis Diderot's Salon de 1765 and Jacques le fataliste. Simultaneously, I discuss its revival in Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist , Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Milan Kundera's Les testaments trahis. I employ both folklore studies—Neil Rosenberg's Transforming Tradition and Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin's “Tradition: Genuine or Spurious”—and the genre theory of Gerard Genette, Philippe Lacoue-Labarth, and Jacques Derrida to extend discussions of nostalgia in Susan Stewart's Crimes of Writing and Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia. Finally, I suggest that many traditional debates and distinctions—novel and romance, realism and self-consciousness—are spurious rather than genuine.

"Mobility" and "home" are often assumed to be antithetical concepts. Visions of "mobility" and "home" are especially mediated through ideological mappings of gender, in which women are relegated to the local and the domestic as extensions of ideas of home, and men are assigned to the public terrain, the "outer" world. The dissertation not only seeks to problematize gendered ideologies of "mobility" and "home" but also investigates the ways in which "home" is redefined or reconfigured through different tropes of mobility. Through analysis of three novels, Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, Mulberry and Peach by Hualing Nieh and The Moon of Vancouver by Xiulan Du, I examine many implications of "home" that are fixated in binaries of domestic and public, male and female, East and West, and Asia and America. My study explores particularly the ways in which different tropes of mobility as conducted or imagined by the novelistic characters not only challenge the dichotomized understandings of "home" embedded in hegemonic structures of patriarchy, Orientalism, nationalism, imperialism and capitalism, but also redefine "home" in its relation with "mobility." Chapter One discusses gendered ideologies of "home" and "mobility" in both Chinese and Western cultures and outlines the major theoretical strands of my study. It also introduces the thematic connections of the three novels. Chapter Two explores the ways in which Ngs characters use different modes of mobility to re-map and re-imagine different "homes" and re-articulate their positions in them. Chapter Three analyzes how the constant mobility of Nieh's female protagonist reveals "home" as the locus of two conflicting desires and re-defines "feeling at home" as a perpetual state of reformation and negotiation. Chapter Four examines how capitalism on both a global and local scale affects transnational migration and the plans of settlement of Du’s characters.

This study examines adoption in a range of twentieth-century American cultural texts: novels, plays and films. Adoption narratives, I argue, hold in relief the process through which individuals are recognized within the public discourse of family and community. Both highly regulated and elusive, adoption enables individuals to assume "normal" (legitimate) roles within their adoptive families while obscuring their "spurious" (illegitimate) origins. How adoptive subjects are recognized in society depends ultimately on their ability or willingness to perform the rhetoric of legitimacy. Not only do citational practices enact adoptive identities, but the rhetoric of legitimacy naturalizes this process by referring obliquely to biology as the model for relatedness. This linguistic component serves to complicate identity issues faced by displaced subjects who must forge so-called unnatural social relations, adoptive bonds that mimic the biological. In this way, adoption reminds us that even biological kinship is wrought through language and configured as primal. While I focus mainly on literal adoptees, characters newly placed or caught between families, I recognize an important link between these characters and more symbolic adoptees, individuals who are culturally displaced or politically dispossessed. Adoption in literature works to expose rents in the social fabric, places where issues of belonging are in dispute. I begin my analysis by examining the force of records to determine characters in works by William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich. In both cases, culture mediates the efficacy of record-keeping and the dissemination of identity. From here, I explore more directly the fluidity of cultural claims made by adoptees in works by Bharati Mukherjee and Leslie Marmon Silko. I examine the performative function of adoption in plays by Edward Albee and John Guare. And finally, I focus on "the face of adoption," by examining how adoption materializes in recent Hollywood films. This study initiates connections between adoption and issues of difference and diversity by exploring the way culture and language converge in the expression of the adoptive subject.