A dramatic shift in tone in the final letter of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer reveals Farmer James' conflicting attitudes about an independent America. When the letters are juxtaposed with a Western myth of origin such as Virgil's Aeneid, it becomes clear that Crèvecoeur is forcing his narrating persona to repeat a pattern of civilization – destruction, renewal – on which all of Western civilization is based. The sudden pessimism that erupts in the penultimate "Distresses of a Frontier Man" is symptomatic of James' anxiety about the American Revolution and the resulting disruption in his bucolic way of life.

The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular. My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s. Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature). In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented. In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another. In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create. In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.

O arrivismo social, tema largamente abordado na literatura do século XIX, tem uma de suas grandes representações em na personagem Julien Sorel do romance Le rouge et le noir (1830) de Stendhal. Sorel é uma personagem verdadeiramente engendrada pelos acontecimentos históricos e sociais da época em que o romance foi escrito. Beneficiando-se de seu conhecimento dolatim e da Bíblia, vai aos poucos conquistando posições vantajosas nas casas em que é acolhido como preceptor e secretário. Escrito quase meio século depois de Le rouge et le noir, A mão e a luva (1874), do brasileiro Machado de Assis se passa no Rio de Janeiro do Segundo Reinado. Diferentemente de Stendhal, Machado de Assis não constrói a trama da heroína Guiomar a partir de fatos históricos específicos. Entretanto, a obra brasileira propicia ao leitor uma aguçada percepção dos costumes vigentes no Segundo Reinado, em mais de uma esfera social. Do nascimento humilde à vida adulta confortável, a trajetória de Guiomar traz à tona nuanças de uma sociedade em transformação. Esse estudo tem por objetivo observar a construção e o desenvolvimento dos protagonistas Julien Sorel e Guiomar em seus respectivos contextos literários, a fim de estabelecer, entre as narrativas, possíveis conexões. Não obstante, ao longo do trabalho, para além das semelhanças, tais como capacidade de adaptação e ambição, pôde-se perceber diferenças substanciais entre Julien e Guiomar: enquanto aquele destaca-se por não se adequar à norma social estabelecida, esta encaixa-se perfeitamente na sociedade em que vive, dominando amplamente suas regras. É o que tentaremos demonstrar e o que faz o objeto dessa dissertação. / The theme of social ambition, widely explored in 19th century literature, finds in the character Julien Sorel of Stendhals 1830 novel The Red and the Black one of its greatest representations. Sorel is truly engendered by the historical and social events of the novels period. By taking advantage of his knowledge of Latin and the Bible, he gradually gains a privileged position in those houses where he comes to work as a tutor and secretary. Written almost half a century after The Red and the Black, The Hand and the Glove (1874), by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, takes place in Rio de Janeiro during the 1850s. Unlike Stendhal, Machado does not build his heroine Guiomars plot from specific historical events. Yet the novel offers the reader a heightened perception of life during the Second Reign, in more than one social class. From her humble origins to her comfortable adult life, Guiomars trajectory brings out the nuances of a changing society. The present study observes the construction and development of both protagonists Sorel and Guiomar in their respective literary contexts, in order to establish possible connections between the two narratives. Their similarities notwithstanding, such as their adaptability and ambition, this research has also identified substantial differences between Sorel and Guiomar. While he stands out for not conforming to the established social norms, she becomes perfectly adapted to the social environment where she lives, in complete control of its rules. This is the main object and argument of this dissertation.

This thesis takes into consideration the presence of computers and electronic equipment in French literary and multimedia discussions, beginning in the first chapter with the foundation of the Oulipo group in 1960 and taking as a starting point the group's conceptions of the computer in relation to literature. It proceeds in the second chapter to explore the materialities and physical factors that have informed the evolution of ideas related to the composition and reading of digital texts, so as to illuminate some of the differences that may be purported to exist between e-literatures and traditional print works. Drawing on Roland Barthes' 'Between Work and Text,' the chapters gradually progress into an exploration of spatiality in digital and interactive literatures, taking into account the role of exhibitions in accommodating and diffusing these forms in France, notably the 1985 exhibition 'Les Immatériaux,' to whose writing installations the third chapter is dedicated. The first three chapters thus focus on computer assisted reading and writing prior to 1985. The chapters that form the second half of the thesis deal with more recent years, exploring online and mobile application works, reading these as engendering their own distinct physical spaces that extend beyond the 'site' of the work - both the website or display and the tactile materials on which the work is operated - creating in relation to the reading what Roberto Simanowski terms a 'semiotic body'. The fourth chapter takes into consideration the role of the reader's body in Annie Abrahams' 'Séparation' and Xavier Malbreil's 'Livre des Morts'. The fifth chapter explores gesture as a mode of reading and reinscription in the online, interactive works of Serge Bouchardon. Finally, the sixth chapter looks at mobile application narratives, spampoetry and email art, offering ways of reading the new spatialities these forms generate. The work as a whole aims to offer some perspectives for considering digital literatures as capable of creating complex spatial experiences between work and text.

This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy's famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent "deviation[s] from European forms." It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt's study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel's distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord--and by understanding the English texts as a "control group" for an examination of the Russian deviation--it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov, which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery--as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport--are possible in the real world and in realist narrative.

The Italianate Wordsworth is a study of William Wordsworth's enduring interest in Italian literature and culture -- an important aspect of his intellectual life and creativity to which no previous book has been devoted. Of all the first-generation Romantics, Wordsworth was the most influenced by Italian poetry and aesthetics. The roots of his passion for the Italian language stretch back to the earliest stages of his imaginative development and extend throughout his life. His voluminous reading of and recurrent engagement with Italian texts -- as translator and imitator -- began in the late 1780s, when he was under the tutelage of Agostino Isola at Cambridge University. Wordsworth translated works by Petrarch, the paradigmatic Italian sonneteer, in 1789-90; by Ludovico Ariosto, the master of epic romance, between 1789 and 1795, in 1802, and in 1815; by Pietro Metastasio, author of popular songs and melodramas, in 1802-1803; by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the artist, poet, and polymath, in 1804 and again in 1839-1840; and by Gabriello Chiabrera, the epitaphist, in 1809-10 and 1837. Wordsworth's immersion in Italian culture became complete in 1837 when, at the age of sixty-seven, he made an extended visit to Italy. During the four months of this sojourn he was able, after years of dedicated reading and translation of major Italian texts from the foundational Trecento to the pre-Romantic Enlightenment, to realize fully his connection with Italy. In the period that followed, he composed poems that addressed various aspects of Italian history, politics, and culture; and in the last collection of poetry he published in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), he included a series of twenty-eight poetic reflections entitled "Memorials of a Tour in Italy." This dissertation sheds light not only on Wordsworth's debt to Italian culture but also on our inherited ideas about the English Romantic relationship to Italy. Given the emphasis traditionally placed on the Italianate leanings of the second-generation Romantics, the impact of Italian literature on the mind and writings of a first-generation poet like Wordsworth has been largely forgotten. Thus the "Italianate Wordsworth" comes as something of a surprise. Time and again, he expresses his veneration for the style and sensibility of Italian poets from Dante to Tasso, often going so far as to emulate their techniques and adopt their cadences in his original English verse. As a poet, scholar, translator, and traveler, he is receptive to all that Italian civilization provides.

My aim in this project is to demonstrate how the reconfiguration of custom in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon opened up a new discourse of collective identity that found its most developed expression in the writings of the French and English people who first colonized North America. Among the authors whose work I examine are Marc Lescarbot, Thomas Morton, Anne Bradstreet, Marie de l'Incarnation, Pierre Esprit-Radisson, and Mary Rowlandson. Their texts, I argue, radically reconceptualize identity, making it something that one performs rather than something one simply is. In charting custom's development I reveal how its radical potential was neutralized by the emerging opposition between nature and culture, illuminating the central role that the nascent concept of the nuclear family played in this transition. My dissertation thus closes with the work of the "American" authors Cotton Mather and Joseph-François Lafitau, who refined the meaning of custom to the brink of irrelevance at the turn of the eighteenth century, transforming it from the source of one's sense of communal belonging to a mere index of how far a given community had fallen from the state of grace. An epilogue on the Letters of an American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur demonstrates the aftermath of this transformation and gesture towards the afterlife of custom as a critical term.

This dissertation examines two major parallel but intersecting trajectories: that of kangaku (Chinese studies), specifically the Kidendô (history and literature) curriculum that flourished at the State Academy in the Heian period (794-1185), and kagaku (waka studies), which emerged in the twelfth century. I trace the concept of "way" (michi) as it evolved from the Chinese studies curriculum to an aesthetic "way of life," characterized by a spontaneous and rigorous pursuit of literature and art. The emergence of the study of waka was significant not only because it functioned as a catalyst for the preservation and renewal of the ancient practice of waka, but also because numerous commentaries on the subject formed a canon that defined Japanese cultural identity in subsequent centuries. As in the European Middle Ages, the long twelfth century (1086-1221) in Japan saw the revival of ancient customs and texts. In the West, the Greco-Roman Classics, particularly Aristotelian philosophy, were rediscovered, partly through Arabic translations. In Japan's case, the "twelfth century renaissance" of court culture was not ushered in through contact with new intellectual trends from overseas. Rather, after a century of regency rule by the non-imperial Fujiwara clan, the imperial rulers of the twelfth century were eager to legitimatize their regimes by applying the standards of newly reinterpreted precedents from the past. Called the "era of retired emperors" (insei-ki), Japanese society in the twelfth century was retrospective in character, and witnessed an effusion of cultural production, including the compilation of numerous literary anthologies, sequels to existing religious and historical texts, and treatises and commentaries on poems from the past. For courtiers, participation in imperial cultural enterprises was their sole means of assuring their families' survival, as warriors established their own government by the early 1190s. Part One examines kanshi and waka traditions before the twelfth century through textual analyses of "prefaces" (jo), the majority of which appear in the literary anthology Honchô monzui (Literary Masterpieces of Japan, ca. 1058-65). This is followed by an examination of the role of the composition of Sino-Japanese poems in the lives of scholar-officials. I show how scholar-officials professionalized this practice as part of their household studies in the ninth through eleventh centuries. As part of my investigation of the literary genre of poetry prefaces, I also analyze the Chinese and Japanese prefaces to the Kokin wakashû (Collection of Japanese Poems from Ancient Times to the Present, 905), and the poet Nôin's preface to his private collection of waka. Part Two turns to the life and works of Ôe no Masafusa (1041-1111), the foremost scholar of his time. I show how Masafusa responded to the changing realities of Kidendô scholars, while idealizing his learned ancestors, their fellow academicians, and their imperial patrons' "passions" (suki) for the composition of Sino-Japanese poems. By closely reading some of the writings attributed to Masafusa, such as the Zoku hochô ôjoden (Biographies of Those Reborn in Paradise in Japan II, ca. 1099-1104) and the Gôdanshô (Notes on Dialogues with Ôe no Masafusa, ca. 1107-11), I argue that Masafusa's nostalgic recollections of literati culture from the tenth and eleventh centuries ushered in the setsuwa (anecdotal tales) mode of narrative that epitomizes literary production in the twelfth century. Part Three investigates the evolution of waka studies in the twelfth century. I first turn to Minamoto no Toshiyori's (1055?-1129?) waka treatise, Toshiyori zuinô (Toshiyori's Principles of Waka, ca. 1111-15) and discuss the peculiarly anecdotal ways in which Toshiyori glosses ancient poetic diction for a female reader. I then examine how the Rokujô school of waka incorporated some of the formal trappings of kangaku scholarship in its revival of waka, while the Mikohidari school of waka further consolidated hereditary studies of poetry by emphasizing the difficulty of mastering waka composition. In sum, by analyzing Chinese and Japanese writings from Japan's long twelfth century, I propose a new intellectual history of Japan in a crucial period of transition from the ancient to the medieval age.

Turkish humanist, literary historian, novelist, essayist and poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's work (23 June 1901 - 24 January 1962) provides us with a unique opportunity to reframe the major questions of contemporary literary historiography, particularly those relating to the politics of literature and the history of religion. This dissertation surveys Tanpinar's writings in a variety of genres (fiction, poetry, literary history and theory) with a particular attention on his masterpiece, namely the novel /The Time Regulation Institute/. It demonstrates how Tanpinar's humanistic sensitivities, together with his dedication to social scientific scrutiny, results in a quest for an original, cross-disciplinary position for the critic, or at least an alternative "mood" in writing and representing. Alternatively, his is a quest for a new "method" for literature, literary criticism and cultural study. Among his company in this quest are nineteenth century Ottoman-Turkish revolutionaries, poets and novelists - such as the nationalist Namik Kemal, pious Ziya Pasha, populist Ahmet Midhat Efendi and suicidal Besir Fuad, to name some of the figures I discuss in this dissertation - alongside French symbolists, Paul Valéry in particular, but also philosophers such as Henri Bergson and even Martin Heidegger, alongside eminent sociologists August Comte and Emile Durkheim. Yet one would only do injustice to Tanpinar's thinking and writing unless one takes into consideration his reception of modernist writing at large, against the background of Melville's, T. S. Eliot's or Kafka's works; or his literary- historical and political position in contrast to Erich Auerbach's or Maurice Blanchot's. Tanpinar's account of the late Ottoman intellectual legacy and modern Turkish and European letters is most instructive today in understanding the social and political relevance of modern literary activity and its position vis-à-vis religion, particularly in the non-West. Accordingly he must also be read against the background of sociology of religion and art. Tanpinar's original "mode" of writing or "method" redraws the contours of the global expansion (or "globalization") of a particular "regime" of sensibility -- a particular way of seeing and saying, making and sharing, writing and reading -- i.e. an "aesthetic" regime, as Jacques Rancière has it. Tanpinar's elaborations on the social, cultural, theological and philosophical implications of this expansion -- particularly in the Ottoman world and later the Turkish republic, but also in what he calls the "Muslim Orient" at large -- leads to the discovery of certain zones of indistinction or ambivalence ("duplicitous" spaces, as Tanpinar has it) not only between religion and literature, but also between literature and social sciences. This enables him to "critique" social scientific writing literarily, i.e. through specifically literary writing in the novel The Time Regulation Institute. But he also critiques literary and philosophical writing with social scientific scrutiny not only in The Time Regulation Institute but also in his theoretical writings and his history, in his essays and his Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature. He thereby postulates a concept for the political history of literature on a global scale that in turn scrutinizes the relationship between writing beyond genres and religion. Tanpinar the literary historian was hired in the late 1930s to establish Turkish philology at Istanbul University, together with Auerbach who was hired to establish Romance philology at the same institution. Auerbach, whose literary historiography displays a similar attention to the history and politics of representation in the Judeo-Christian tradition, wrote his most influential works during his Istanbul exile. Given Tanpinar's alternative focus on the question of verbal arts and representation in the "Muslim Orient," reading Tanpinar and Auerbach together produces a more complete picture of the stakes of a world literature in this dissertation. Finally, to address the relevance of Tanpinar's writings to contemporary scholarship with clarity, this dissertation recontextualizes Tanpinar's thinking and his unvoiced disagreements with Auerbach, among others, against the background of the productive tension between Jacques Rancière -- "the humanist" of the dissertation who often traces back his literary thinking to Auerbach -- and Pierre Bourdieu -- "the social scientist" here whose thought is very much imbedded in the sociological tradition extending from Comte to Durkheim.

This dissertation examines the modern Chinese script crisis in twentieth-century China. It situates the Chinese script crisis within the modern phenomenon of phonocentrism - the systematic privileging of speech over writing. It depicts the Chinese experience as an integral part of a worldwide crisis of non-alphabetic scripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It places the crisis of Chinese characters at the center of the making of modern Chinese language, literature, and culture. It investigates how the script crisis and the ensuing script revolution intersect with significant historical processes such as the Chinese engagement in the two World Wars, national and international education movements, the Communist revolution, and national salvation. Since the late nineteenth century, the Chinese writing system began to be targeted as the roadblock to literacy, science and democracy. Chinese and foreign scholars took the abolition of Chinese script to be the condition of modernity. A script revolution was launched as the Chinese response to the script crisis. This dissertation traces the beginning of the crisis to 1916, when Chao Yuen Ren published his English article "The Problem of the Chinese Language," sweeping away all theoretical oppositions to alphabetizing the Chinese script. This was followed by two major movements dedicated to the task of eradicating Chinese characters: First, the Chinese Romanization Movement spearheaded by a group of Chinese and international scholars which was quickly endorsed by the Guomingdang (GMD) Nationalist government in the 1920s; Second, the dissident Chinese Latinization Movement initiated in the Soviet Union and championed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1930s. This crisis was brought to an abrupt end in 1958, when Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, relegated the Romanization system pinyin to an official auxiliary status, secondary to Chinese characters, thus concluding the half-century struggle between the Chinese script and the alphabet. The final containment of the script crisis was partly a political decision of the new socialist state, and partly the result of the use of "baihua." The multivalent term baihua--plain speech, vernacular, and a colloquialized written language--enabled an unlikely reconciliation between the phonocentric dreams of a Chinese alphabet and a character-based Chinese national language and literature. This alternative solution to the script crisis, which grew from within the Chinese script, was rehearsed in the first modern Chinese anti-illiteracy program in France during the Great War. The solution was consolidated as a colloquialized written Chinese became the staple of modern Chinese literary writing. The negotiated baihua--imprinted profoundly by the phonocentric-biased discourse- on the one hand registers the historical reality of the modern Chinese writing as a written language; on the other, it keeps alive the phonocentric dreams of modern China.