Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830 examines the interplay between remembering and forgetting in literary and cultural engagements with the trauma of transatlantic slavery. The dissertation considers how intergenerational, trans-temporal trauma becomes re-narrativized and re-envisioned over time in four symbolic sites of slavery (five countries)—Africa (Ghana and Mozambique), the Caribbean (Cuba), Brazil, and the United States—with the goal of exposing differences and emphasizing ruptures. Each chapter functions like a slave schooner arriving at an outpost of the African Diaspora, touring an eclectic transatlantic archive of slavery including art, public space, newspaper clippings, telenovelas, monuments (both imagined and built), song, and advertising copy, then dropping an anchor to explore a more traditional cross section of literature from each national context, juxtaposing canonical and non-canonical works. Taken together, the chapters probe the ways nineteenth and twentieth century Inter-American and African “texts,” broadly defined, register the trauma of slavery in the Black Atlantic. Chapter 1 discusses Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães’ short novel, A Escrava Isaura (1875) and its wildly popular telenovela adaption in 1976 as an example of one of slavery’s twentieth century kitsch manifestations. The theme of Exodus in African American literature is considered in chapter 2 with a reading of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1869 poem, “Moses,” followed by an extended exploration of the early twentieth century Mammy cult including the 1922 statue proposal. Chapter 3 explores scenes of racial violence and offers a reading of the horrific American ritual of lynching in Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis” and “Portrait in Georgia” in Cane (1923) followed by textual analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1962, 1966). Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian collective memory of the old historic district of Pelourinho in Salvador, Bahia as the former site of punishment at the pillory (whipping post) for enslaved Africans. Close readings in this chapter include Castro Alves’s classic epic poem, “O navio negreiro” from Os Escravos (1883) and Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary of favela life, O Quarto de Despejo (1960) in addition to shorter readings of the poetry of Alzira Rufino, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Francisco Alvim, and a short novel by Dudda Seixas. Chapter 5 engages with the charged metaphor of sugar and compares the only extant nineteenth century Cuban slave narrative, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (1839) with a twentieth century account of maroon Esteban Montejo’s slave narrative as related to anthropologist/writer Miguel Barnet in Cimarrón: Historia de un esclavo (1966). The final chapter addresses the so-called literary African amnesia around slavery and examines vestiges of the memory of slavery in three African texts: Noémia de Sousa’s “Negra” (1949), Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973).

This dissertation argues that the modern concept of literary character was an unintended consequence of Renaissance moral poetics. The evolution of "character" as a term of literary analysis, from the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century Italy to the establishment of modern English usage in the late seventeenth century, is the focus of the first half of my work. Aristotle invented a theory of mimetic realism whereby the representation of types of character renders transparent the moral ideology operative in a culture. By placing types into a plot revealing how they do or do not conduce to human flourishing, the Aristotelian poet engages in ideological critique. As I claim, Renaissance humanists revived the form of the Aristotelian character type yet looked to the ethics of Christian Neo-Platonism or Neo-Stoicism to ground any ideological critique. The result was an array of eclectic accounts of poetic character's relation to the political subject. Through close examinations of three authors in the second half of my work, I elucidate the internal tensions and creative opportunities posed by such accounts. Michel de Montaigne's statements concerning the representation of moral character in the Essais test various criticisms and partial recuperations of Stoic-Aristotelian epideixis. I argue that Montaigne eventually attaches to the humanist image of the inspired poet, because poetic inspiration provides a model of heuristic utterance that avoids the aggression of political factions in France. In a chapter devoted to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, I argue that the Neo-Platonic metaphysics taken for granted by Spenser in the "Letter to Raleigh" implies a more comprehensive hermeneutics of allegorical character than either the "Letter" or existing scholarship acknowledges. Interpreting Spenser's representations of the "morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised" through the lens of this hermeneutics brings us closer to the experience of Spenser's contemporaries reading his poem. In my final chapter, I study William Shakespeare's thoughtful deployment of a Ciceronian model of exemplarity. I argue that in the character of Henry V, Shakespeare unmasks the ideology of patriotism and historical triumphalism shared by Cicero and the Tudor regime.

The project is a transnational study of how filmic representations of urban criminals and marginal figures transformed as Brazil, France, and the Maghreb shifted from military governments to liberal democracies. Beyond ideological productions that simply produce positive or negative portrayals, I examine how films made under military regimes invite audiences to identify with anti-heroes while films made under liberal democracies invite admiration of institutional figures, turning standards of good and evil on their head. The anti-authoritarian potential of violence in earlier periods is construed as a failed redemption in later ones. The theoretical background of the project rests on the oppositional and constitutive relationship between the outlaw and the state, the relationship between urban space and criminal personification, and the historical specificity of the transgressive figure's embodiment of socially un/desirable traits. I establish a geographic and conceptual continuity through a comparative postulation of urban citizenship--who belongs to the city and who does not, who is marked in their transgression and who is not, who is laudable bandit and who is condemned. In delving into a face-to-face relationship between the outlaw and the state following an aesthetic and historical tracing of a highly iconic figure at the margins of the law, the project brings statecraft into focus through the use of visual and representational forms.

Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1990) is one of the most important figures in modern Persian literature. However, his poetry is little known in the West. Even in Iran, though held in high regard, his work is considered hermetic. There is no unambiguous message, no identifiable political or aesthetic doctrine. Still, his poems exert a strange, haunting power. What do they tell us, now, two decades after the poet's death? What do they mean outside their homeland? What is their voice in world literature? These are the questions my dissertation seeks to answer. Chapters on rhythm, metaphor, time and - lyrical and epic - voice aim to place Akhavan in the comparative context of the 20th century literary movements. Following the philosophical hermeneutics of, above all, Paul Ricoeur, I attempt to tease out layers of meaning and bring Akhavan's poems to life for a contemporary reader. Aspects of time and presence throughout serve to structure my argument. In parallel, time and presence are traced as motifs that weave through Akhavan's writing. Through close readings of a wide range of poems I seek to understand Akhavan's texts as crystallisations of a historical moment. However, I also argue that his poems can no longer be explained within the linear evolution of Persian literary history: in their language and imagery, they point to an elsewhere that has not yet been mapped. Akhavan avoids ideological statements and political imperatives. All the same, an ethical stance is manifest in his poetry. Form itself takes on significance. Chapter 1 examines how Ahkavan makes the human time of rhythm converge with the time of the poem. Chapter 2 explores how definitions of metaphor affect the belief in literature's potential to describe and refigure reality. Chapter 3 elucidates the processes by which time is imagined as an unattainable space. Hope and desire belong elsewhere, as does salvation. Chapter 4 treats the genres of lyric and epic as distinct configurations of time. Akhavan's love poetry is a poetry of absence, reaching out to an elusive Other, while his narrative poems adumbrate the possibility of a different, gladder history in the interstices of language.

your words your words / The Classics

The dissertation recounts the variegated journey of the sea in the Hebrew Bible through the lens of myth, metaphor, and muthos. The journey begins outside the Bible in ancient Near Eastern sea myths exemplified by the Ugaritic Baal Cycle and the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, which tell the story of a sea deity whose defeat in cosmic battle against a protagonist god precedes three goodly consequences: creation, kingship, and temple. The story continues with the analysis of the biblical presentation of creation, kingship, and temple with emphasis on the constellation of themes and characters of the sea myth. The dissertation next analyzes the use of the sea myth as a metaphor for three events on the plane of history: the exodus (Exodus 14-15), the Babylonian exile (Isaiah 40-55), and the eschaton (Isaiah 24-27 and Daniel 7). Finally, the discussion moves from the analysis of the ways in which the sea muthos functions as a metaphor for the biblical presentation of individual events to the examination of the role of the sea muthos as a metaphor for a biblical view of historical reality in toto. In sum, the dissertation extends the study of sea imagery in the Hebrew Bible from mythology to metaphorology and narratology to argue for the deep, enduring, and transformative place of the sea myth within biblical tradition. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

According to postcolonial theory, postcolonial literature tends to depict non-Westerners – the native Other – as a homogenous mass, portrayed as carrying all the dark human traits. The Other is often represented as, for instance, being exotic, violent, hostile and mysterious, and either stands in opposition to, or is portrayed as being completely different from the Westerner. With postcolonial theory as a background, this study is a close-reading analysis and comparison of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), which takes place in a colonial Algeria, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), which is set in postcolonial South Africa. The novels have been analysed in terms of representation of the Other, as well as the power relations and hierarchy between Westerners and natives, in order to see if these aspects are portrayed differently due to the fact that one novel is written pre-independence and the other post-independence. The results show that the representation of the Other is in accordance with postcolonial theory, in both novels. The natives are exoticised, portrayed as violent and mysterious in a hostile manner, and the plot is viewed from the perspective of the Western, white male protagonist. However, the power relations differ; in The Stranger, the Westerners are definitely superior, whereas in Disgrace, some of the characters still consider themselves to be superior, but their power has declined – the natives strike back, leaving the white population with a choice: to comply to the new order, or to find themselves in a state of disgrace.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

<p> <i>Reading Home from Exile: Narratives of Belonging in Western Literature </i> analyzes the way in which narratives of belonging arise from Western literary works that have been largely read as works of exile. This dissertation insists on the importance of the concept of home even in the light of much of the theoretical criticism produced in the last fifty years which turns to concepts that emphasize movement, rootlessness, homelessness, and difference. Through readings of Western literature spanning from canonical ancient Greek texts to Mexican novels of the revolution and to Chicano/a literature, this study shows that literature continues to dwell on the question of home and that much of the literature of exile is an attempt to narrate home. Beginning with a close reading of <i>Oedipus the King</i> and <i>Oedipus at Colonus,</i> the first chapter discusses Oedipus's various moments of exile and the different spheres of belonging (biological/familial, social, political) that emerge through a close reading of these moments of exile. Chapter 2 examines these same categories of belonging in Mauricio Magdaleno's <i> El resplandor,</i> an <i>indigenista</i> novel set in post-revolutionary Mexico about the trials and tribulations of the Otomi town of San Andres. Chapter 3 continues to consider literature that takes Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico as setting and analyzes the narratives of belonging that arise in Juan Rulfo's <i>Pedro P&aacute;ramo</i> and Elena Garro's <i>Recollections of Things to Come.</i> Finally, Chapter 4 analyzes the emergence of these categories of home in Chicano/a literature and thought, focusing on Gloria Anzaldua's<i> Borderlands/La Frontera</i> and its relation to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity and to postcolonial theory in general. </p>

<p> "Historicity and the Romantic Novel in Britain and Russia" explores the engagement of early nineteenth-century Russian writers with contemporary British novels. Most studies of Russian fiction emphasize Russia's reliance on French models. Due to the profound shift in the understanding of history that occurred in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the less studied and underappreciated British connection also played a formative role in the development of the Russian novel. During those years, the definition of history was broadened to include the previously excluded areas of social experience and private life. Imbued with a reflexive awareness of its task, British Romantic historicism purported not only to place the objects of study within their actual settings but also to invent situations in which historical events might have occurred. This general boost in historicist sensibility affected not only the development of the English-language novel, but also the emerging tradition of Russian fiction. The two parts of my dissertation each focus on two exemplary novels: in the first part, The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol; in the second, The Last Man by Mary Shelley and Russian Nights by Vladimir Odoevsky. In each case, I consider the mechanisms of self-renewal that allow the Romantic novel to depict historical pressures and adapt to them. Drawing on German idealist philosophy and Scottish Enlightenment historiographical models, I study the use of metaphor and allegory and the relation between such sub-genres as the gothic and grotesque, showing how they contributed to a reimagining of the role of history in Britain. In more extreme and fragmented forms, this new view of history then became the basis for a similarly radical recasting of history in Russia. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the prose of the Romantic novel in its rhetorical extravagance offered ways to enrich, redeem, and reimagine history.</p>