In this study I provide close textual analysis of the novels of three women writers whose work displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examine the ways in which their racial representations interplay with their depictions of gender and sexuality. Writing from a consciously gendered and racialized position, I combine personal narrative with theoretical discussion as I trace common racial themes, such as racial violence, cross-racial couples, and the denial or erasure of race. In an examination of other critics who have employed personal narrative as a form of literary analysis, I affirm the value of teaching and reading literary texts as a mode of activism. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists, exploring the ways in which such depictions require a transracial, cross-gender performance on the part of the woman writer. Recurring patterns of racial dynamics emerge in the larger body of each author's work. A West Indian female racial identity emerges in Rhys' work as, consciously and unconsciously, her white heroines identify with black slave women, and seek another form of "blackness" through alcoholic oblivion. Gordimer's white women seek to slough off the racial privilege they are only too aware of, but Gordimer creates narratives in which white female identity merges textually with black male identity and black female identity, linguistically and through shared political action. Morrison's black women, doubly othered by race and by gender, seek to transcend all boundaries through wildly transgressive behavior, enacted boldly or imagined through language. In my final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of female racial identity in American, South African and Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture which signal the possibility of fluid identity. I demonstrate how Morrison, Gordimer, and Rhys employ a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of consciousness and of society. Literature is an ideal vehicle for entering the in-between space imaginatively, and dwelling there longer and longer as we rid ourselves of preconceived notions of race and gender.

This is a comparative study between Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade which examines the trajectory of their poetry towards maturity. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's notions on literary interpretation and intertextuality, this is an analysis that does not include the anxiety of influence, but rather explores the dialogic relations between poet (subject, personality), text, and context. A historicity of texts divided in four acts observes a progressive relation between poet and world. Beginning with the poet, the first act examines a trait of personality common to both poets—their gaucherie —and the projection of this trait in their art. The second and third acts successively discuss the relation between the poet and his/her family, the poet and the world, or more precisely, how the “strange idea of family” travels through poetry while it opens up more and more to a larger world. The final act closes the poet's dialectic with the world with a reading of crepuscular poems, combining a ripening of memories in the “creative time/space distance” with the voice of the mature poet.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

This dissertation scrutinizes the writings of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the United States with the aim of revealing how representations of motherhood function in their journalism as the site for a reformulation of the configuration of female subjectivities astride the private/public divide. Alfonsina Storni's and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's discursive acts of questioning socially and culturally validated mothering practices interrogate the classic divide, thus threatening to unsettle the very foundations of patriarchal ideology, which at least partly explains the neglect displayed towards this production. Alfonsina Storni's fame as Argentina's most famous "poetess of love" drastically overshadowed during her life and afterwards her journalistic contributions, which have as a result been largely overlooked by most scholarship on her work. In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's renown as a leading feminist thinker and reformer have traditionally led critics and scholars to focus almost exclusively on her utopian fiction, to the detriment of her journalistic endeavors. This study sets up a dialogue between the journalism of both women writers through the recuperation and examination of Storni's contributions to the "feminine" column of the journal La Nota and of Gilman's pieces for The Forerunner—the monthly she published entirely by herself. It is via a transgressive use of their journalism that both writers manage to critique the "domestication" of female subjectivity endemic to most existing accounts of motherhood, which cancel and negate the empowering possibilities of mothering practices for new forms of female agency. A close analysis of the discursive and rhetorical strategies employed by Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman thus helps unearth a neglected literary corpus and contributes at the same time to enriching new and innovative feminist analyses of mothering.

As the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the European Union, present-day Brussels is a paradoxical city, defined by its multitude of governmental functions and characterized by its cultural and linguistic ambiguity. The city's history is marked by a unique linguistic metamorphosis that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed Brussels from a historically Dutch-speaking city into a predominantly Francophone urban setting with an official bilingual status. This study presents a comparative and historically situated analysis of the literary representations of Brussels produced in Flemish literature between 1830 and 1932. It concentrates on the changing position of Dutch in Brussels as a result of the frenchification of the city and the creation of a socio-linguistic urban hierarchy, in which French was the language of the ruling elite and Dutch became considered as an unsophisticated idiom, spoken by the lower classes. The investigative focus of this dissertation is on how Flemish authors have responded to these socio-linguistic developments and in what way these events have shaped their narrative construction of the city. The Flemish urban narratives are examined within the context of Brussels' linguistic, political and cultural history and within the framework of a linguistically polarizing Belgium. The chronological scope of this research begins in 1830 with Belgian independence and ends in 1932 when Brussels officially becomes a bilingual city. Its methodological approach is based on notion of the city as representation and on Michel Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia.' Considering these works of urban literature as heterotopian texts that hold up a critical mirror to the existing urban complexity enables one to recognize their ability to challenge and intervene in dominant urban discourses and to generate new and critical perspectives on the city. The literary representations of Brussels studied in this dissertation represent powerful narrative interventions in the socio-linguistic and political hierarchies that came to define the urban order in Brussels after 1830. The inextricable connection between language and class in Brussels makes these Flemish urban novels imaginative expressions of resistance to the linguistic inequality and social and political discrimination of the city's Dutch-speaking population.

This study focuses on Blackness and shows how changes in its meaning reflect arguments about the short story as a fictional form. I argue that Blackness, as a socially constructed identity marker and the corresponding discourse designed to reify Whiteness, led to the evolution of an aesthetic consciousness that found critical and creative expression during the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements of the 1960s and 70s. In a process I call the "Politics of Creation," where Blackness and the short story move towards self-definition, we discover that Blackness and the short story reshape the socially constructed groupings designed to "fix" categories of people and genres. In chapter one reviewing the relevant literature concerning the origins of racial prejudice proves instructive for understanding the role of narrative in constructing discursive categories: i.e. Blackness and Whiteness. Chapter two addresses the historical context and introduces this study's attitudinal "common ground." In chapter three, we see how the collective identity of a community, marginalized by the "majority" status society (in this respect, the "imagined community" of Blackness), coalesces in response to white domination and becomes part of the larger culture of resistance known as the African diaspora. Examining Black participation in the discourse shows how "essentialism" racialized the ideological discourse. Chapter four reviews the critical literature on the short story and shows how its diminishment as a "minor" form of fiction, is analogous to the process by which Blackness was "othered." In chapter five, the short story and Blackness meet in a discussion of the aesthetic issues that fostered the explosion of African and Black Short Story anthologies and the growth of a critical discourse to offset the prejudicial attitudes expressed under the guise of "universalism." Using representative short stories by Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Njabulo Ndebele, and Sindiwe Magona, chapter six addresses storytelling as "expressive" common ground, while revealing the "conflicts of unity" to Black solidarity. Chapter seven closes with a discussion of the commonalities I find in their writing styles. African American, African/a, Literary, Cultural, and Genre Studies will benefit from this study's insights into Black American and South African's reconsiderations of Blackness.

This dissertation centers on the theme of "the woman warrior," historically grounded in premodern Chinese culture and represented in contemporary Asian American literature as well as in visual art forms. I apply a historical perspective to this interdisciplinary project in order to examine the global evolvement of one particular woman warrior, Mulan's legend, starting from the Northern Dynasties (386-581 A.D.) until the beginning of the twentieth-first century. This work conceptualizes the transmission and transformation of Mulan's story as a palimpsest, thereby highlighting the enduring interplay of continuity and erasure in the construction of her tale in China and the United States. The thesis investigates what the development of her tale reveals to us not only about womanhood, heroism, filial piety, and loyalty in premodern China but also about the construction of female agency, ethnic identity, and cultural origin in contemporary Asian America. Contextualizing Mulan alongside other heroines in premodern China my discussion considers the woman warrior as a paradigm of women warriors at large, thereby addressing Mulan as a culturally and historically rooted image coming out of a fascinating typology rather than as a singular character. Through the phenomenal example of Mulan this dissertation explores representations of female identity in the complex and frequent negotiation between womanhood and warrior value in premodern Chinese society, thus contributing to the current discussion on transnational feminism. By way of scrutinizing the multiplicity and complexity characterizing the "origin" of this particular figure, my research complicates the debate on cultural authenticity in the context of Asian America and the Asian diaspora. By looking at Mulan as a character claimed by various regions in China as their local heroine, the discussion deconstructs the monolithic "China" in Chinese America, and by extension, that of the "Asia" in Asian America. Through examining Mulan as a cross-cultural palimpsest, I hope to broaden our understanding of the interrelations between cultural heritage, gender politics, and ethnicity as exemplified by the global journey of her story and to inspire further scholarly engagement with her warrior sisters in Chinese as well as other cultures.

Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

This dissertation discusses Anna Banti's Artemisia, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, Ingeborg Bachmann short story “Simultan,” Helma Sanders-Brahms' Deutschland, bleiche Mutter and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. The novels and films addressed all create a condition of epistemological crisis; they present the spectator or reader with a landscape of rubble, both literal and figurative, in which all existing structures have been erased. There are no stable epistemological certainties left, only provisional configurations that are always threatening to collapse once more into the debris, history is defined by slippage and displacement. Bachmann and Resnais, in particular, explore the trace and echo of “history,” and the rupture of temporal stability; for them, history shares the structure of language, ruled by metonymy and slippage, always exceeding any stable framework. These self-referentially split and fractured narratives present us with a universe in which everything is in flux. If “history” is “broken” by definition, so too are subjectivity, gender and desire: rupture and splitting are their constitutive elements. In Rossellini's films, especially, heterosexual masculinity has lost any claim to “authenticity” and has become purely performative, a phantasm of opera, theater, film, even puppet shows. The male subject is constituted both as spectacle and obsessive spectator, with voyeurism and scopophlia the only possible forms of desire. The lacuna of desire left by the collapse of the heterosexual male subject is partly filled by the scopophilic appetites of the cinematic spectator: we see ourselves, and our own deviant desire, constantly represented on screen.

The objective for this dissertation is twofold: I first examine how the Israeli poet Rahel Bluvshtain-Sela (1890-1931) reclaimed the Hebrew language of the Bible in order to create a Modern Hebrew vernacular. I then evaluate Rahel's creative strategies in light of her contribution to Hebrew poetry and Israeli culture that has evolved since her death more than seventy years ago. My study focuses on the biblical intertextuality in Rahel's poems. In particular, I examine Rahel's creative use of biblical allusions, and the complex ways in which she reflects on and connects with historic memory. This strategy allowed the poet to express her intensely personal experiences in the present as they reflected on a new collectivity. By reclaiming the Hebrew language, which until her time was primarily associated with the religious sphere, this pioneering intellectual integrated the practical aspects of everyday life into both her language and her poetry. My dissertation work integrates hermeneutic literary analysis, as well as analyses of intertextuality, literary history, and translation to explore the relationship between ancient and modern Hebrew in Rahel's poetry. My project is complicated by the fact that I translate a poet who wrote in a fresh new language, one that had not been spoken colloquially for hundreds of years—indeed, Rahel herself was translating from ancient Hebrew into a developing new language. The first chapter of this dissertation is an introduction of my project as well as an overview of Rahel's status as a poet. The second chapter provides an intellectual biography of Rahel, introducing her life in light of her intellectual background and context. This chapter thus goes beyond traditional biographical readings of Ra hel that focus on her personal life, particularly her romantic relationships, and her illnesses and depressions, while removing her from the social context and community in which she lived—a community that she played a key role in creating through her poetry. For the third chapter, I selected poems from Rahel's work that serve as examples for the way in which the poet positioned biblical texts within the new context of the emerging state of Israel. The poems are grouped by sub-topics: (1) Personalities as Destinies—The Bible as the Intimate Other, (2) Writing the Land as Desire, and (3) Between Ideology as Identity and Sense of Self. In order to show Rahel's use of intertextuality with the biblical idiom and content, I introduce each of her poems in the original Hebrew, in English transliteration, and also provide my own translations. The biblical sources are identified, traced and cited at the beginning of each poem analysis. I then provide an extensive prose analysis of each poem in which I analyze the biblical allusions as palimpsestic references that are used to retain the trace of biblical history within a new Hebrew language. The analyses offer a literal interpretation of the poem interwoven with an explanatory discussion, focusing on the biblical themes and language that appear in each poem. Such detailed examination of the selected poems will present Rahel's personal and unique approach to the biblical text, an approach that grasps the Bible not only in a metaphoric way, but also with the intention to highlight collective memories. The final chapter focuses on the popular reception of Rah el's poetry, and is a mosaic reflecting Rahel's influence on the Hebrew language and culture. The section's pieces come from different areas of Israeli life: contemporary poetry, literature and songs, as well as from literary reviews, folklore/cultural features and political editorials in newspapers. The purpose of this look at snapshots of contemporary Hebrew language and Israeli culture will reveal the effectiveness of Ra hel's palimsestic writing strategies for the complex negotiations of personal, spatial and national identities.