This dissertation examines representations of Muslim women in contemporary Germany and considers them in the context of the intensely gendered politics of cultural difference at work. It particularly addresses how immigrant women are understood as Muslim women. As a consequence, immigrant women are considered primarily as representatives of an essentialized and racialized culture. Such discursive reductions ignore immigrant women's participation in the realms of economy, politics, and knowledge production in Germany. The first part of my dissertation critiques representations of Muslim women by revealing the national and nationalist forces that overdetermine these representations. Utilizing transnational feminist cultural studies and feminist deconstruction as my theoretical and methodological underpinnings, I explore representations of Muslim and immigrant women in Der Spiegel from the time of reunification to the present. I then analyze discourses around Germany's headscarf debates in legal texts, newspapers, and court decisions. In the next section I work to theorize potential alternative discursive fields for representing immigrant women. Drawing in particular on Gayatri Spivak's notion of teleopoeisis, I discuss the need for representations and discourses that also imagine immigrant women as political actors, economic agents, and agents of knowledge. I then perform readings of interviews with Muslim and Turkish women as well as of Feridun Zaimoglu's literary rewritings of interviews with Turkish women to consider what a politics of teleopoeisis and careful listening might mean for literary and cultural studies. I suggest that even in texts that explicitly choose their subjects based on participation in a particular "culture," it is possible to read for subjectivities as agents of politics, economics, and knowledge production. The final chapter performs such an alternate reading through an analysis of the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. By reading textual figures for political, worker, and intellectual subjectivities one discovers that Özdamar herself has provided a transnational critique of histories of the political movements of the 1970s. In my concluding chapter I consider the difficulties of interdisciplinary work in relationship to my trainings in Comparative Literature, German Studies and Women's Studies.

My project explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá, on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. In chapter one I explore the codes, spaces, and functions of these translating, intermediary deities through cultural anthropology, religious studies, and art history. Chapter two explores patterns in the artistic employment of Eshu-Elegguá by analyzing these figures' appearance in visual arts and then in four texts: Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), and Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998). Chapter three explores how those patterns converge in Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000) by looking closely at the novel's narrators and translators, Eshu and Elegguá. I argue that Midnight Robber, when read through the literary theories and poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, is a novel "possessed" by the Orishas and that they take on authorial roles. Chapter four analyzes the translation of Midnight Robber into Spanish ( Ladrona de medianoche, Isabel Merino Bode, 2002); presents a way of translating the novel's multiple languages; and puts contemporary translation theories in dialogue with Eshu-Elegguá's translative and interpretive functions. Chapter five argues for a way of reading Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) through the figures of Eshu-Elegguá. ^ The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together. The dissertation extends the critical work on the selected literary texts; uses the arts to further understand the nature of these deities of communicability; and analyzes Afro-Atlantic texts through figures and interpretive systems from within the tradition. By surveying contemporary translation theories and based on my close reading of the translating capacities and metaphors that Eshu-Elegguá embody, I offer a new model for translation.^

The Erklaerung des Vaterunsers is a 337 page meditation and commentary on the Lord's Prayer composed by the fifteenth century German mystic, Magdalena Beutler of Freiburg. This study comprises biographical and critical essays concerning Magdalena and her works, together with a critical edition of the Erklaerung with textual apparatus. Its purpose is to reintroduce Magdalena and her hitherto inaccessible devotional works into late medieval religious and literary scholarship. Previous studies of Magdalena have dismissed her as a deluded, self-dramatizing hysteric and failed to mention either the Erklaerung or her most popular work, the Goldene Litanei, a meditation on the Passion that was widely anthologized from her own time through the early seventeenth century. This dissertation attempts to show that, despite the occasional criticism of contemporaries, Magdalena's actions lay well within a tradition of Franciscan mysticism which centered on the imitation of the life of Christ; that the special emphases of her devotion were characteristic of a strain of female piety that had begun to be voiced as early as the twelfth century; and that her peculiarly literal and physical approach to the imitatio Christi was at the same time orthodox and innovative; and that the Erklaerung represents Magdalena's efforts to share her practices and concerns with her community.

Focusing on transborder travel narratives by two German authors and one Polish author, “Cold War Crossings” investigates how their writing responds to the postwar demarcation of separate Eastern and Western spheres of influences. Central to each of their oeuvres is the topos of the border broadly conceived, from the material, ideological, and psychic boundaries of the Iron Curtain to the Saussurean bar of the linguistic sign. By presenting border-crossing as an act of both political and aesthetic transgression, these writers advance uniquely literary alternatives to the rigid geopolitical divisions of their age. This dissertation analyzes the way in which each author’s poetics of the border informs, among other things, their manipulation of narrative structure, their unique employment of figurative language, and their shared proclivity for intertextuality, all of which address and reorient different kinds of textual boundaries. In this way, it is a contribution to the ever-expanding field of border studies and other scholarly investigations of the discursive production of mental maps. At the same time, however, the dissertation argues by way of its three case studies for a closer examination of the formal elements of literary texts that often go overlooked in such analyses. Conceived as an interdisciplinary and comparative study, “Cold War Crossings” seeks to overstep barriers between national literatures as well as disciplines by combining cultural studies, literary criticism, and historical analysis. Furthermore, the dissertation’s joint study of German and Polish literatures also contributes to recent debates on Europe as it counteracts traditional Eurocentric approaches that disregard Eastern Europe.

The aim of this thesis is focused on demonstrating the strong influence that Galician immigrants exerted on the Argentinian society at the beginning of the 20th century. In this transatlantic literary study, the bonds between the old and the new continent will be established by analysing some of the authors who became affected by immigration and exile conditions: Xosé Neira Vilas, Luis Seoane and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao. The thesis will also examine the Argentinian literature related to immigration, and how some relevant authors accepted or rejected stereotyping. Both views, the one from exiles and the one from local authors, were blended in order to study the mutual influence that both cultures have had upon each other. There has not been much research regarding literary links between Galician and Argentinian authors, therefore the main purpose of this work is to search for connections among different writers from both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, the thesis analyses the importance of mainstream ideas such as nation, transnationalism and transculturation, and how these concepts have changed throughout history due to common experiences of migration and exile.

The Colombian armed conflict has affected Colombia’s civil population of all walks of life and has been a long-term problem. Within these, the most affected are people from the rural areas, minorities such as women, adolescents, children, and the indigenous communities. This work analyses the literary representation of trauma and the internal displacement in Colombia in Los ejércitos (2007) by Evelio Rosero. The introduction provides historical context and definitions of trauma. The analysis of the impact of trauma on the collective and the minorities follows. For theoretical and historical references, this thesis draws concepts mostly from psychoanalysis, Irene Visser’s modified Grid Theory of social thought, and official Colombian documents. The thesis examines how the structure of Los ejércitos and some of its characters provide the representation of trauma in relation to the armed conflict in Colombia and the internal displacement that ensued. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

French literature has undoubtedly exerted a marked influence over Haitian letters. Since the Middle Ages, notable elements of the fantastic, such as loups-garous and talking animals in lais and fables, all the way to the unheimlich narratives of the nineteenth century, are also present in Haitian works with strong overtones of the oral traditions of slave narratives. However, Haitian literature, given its syncretic nature, offers not just an array of talking animals and “magic realist” episodes, but a unique “fantastic being,” the zombie. In turn, these figures have made their way not just into the Haitian folkloric tradition, but infused with political undertones, have become pivotal metaphors for contemporary Haitian writers on the island, as well as for those who write in the diaspora, to explore the nation’s oppressive governments. This dissertation traces the origins of such figures and their creative reincarnations today. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This is a two-pronged study of how the Chinese and Tibetan literary traditions have become intertwined in the modern era. Setting out from the contention that the study of minority literatures in China must be fundamentally multilingual in its approach, this dissertation investigates how Tibetans were written into Chinese literature, and how Tibetans themselves adopted and adapted Chinese literary discourses to their own ends. It begins with Lu Xun and the formative literary conceptions of nation in the late Qing and Republican periods – a time when the Tibetan subject was fundamentally absent from modern Chinese literature – and then moves to the 1980s, when Tibet and Tibetans belatedly, and contentiously, became valid subject matter for Han Chinese writers. The second aspect of the project situates modern Tibetan-language literature, which arose from the 1980s onwards, within the literary and intellectual context of modern China. I read Döndrup Gyel, modern Tibetan literature’s “father figure,” as working within unmistakably Lu Xun-ian paradigms, I consider the contradictions that arose when Tsering Döndrup’s short story “Ralo” was interpreted as a Tibetan equivalent of “The True Story of Ah Q,” and I analyze the rise of a “Tibetan May Fourth Movement” in the 2000s, which I argue presented a selective reading of modern China’s intellectual history. Throughout, I focus on the intersections and divergences at play and examine the ways in which these texts navigate complex and conflicting discourses of nationalism, statism, and colonialism. The conclusions of this research point us toward significant theoretical reconceptualizations of literary practices in the People’s Republic of China, which now include not only a vast body of Chinese-language writing on minority peoples, but also numerous minority-language literatures and distinct “national” literary traditions.

This dissertation examines the rise of first-person fiction in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the modern concept of fiction can to be seen to have emerged during this period. As I show, the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, the Commedia of Dante, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales each offers a unique response to the question of how truth can be manifested in writing. I analyze key passages of these three poems, as well as earlier writings by Dante and Chaucer – in particular, Dante’s Vita Nuova and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, as well as Chaucer’s other dream-poems – in order to show how the classical, and more specifically Platonic, subordination of fiction to philosophy was challenged and ultimately overturned through French dream-allegory, Dante’s visionary epic, and the general framework to The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer can be seen to engage both French and Italian predecessors.

This dissertation reconsiders the creative and strategic crisscrossings among the African diaspora’s literary and cultural productions, paying special attention to the status and influence of Black America(ns), as a point of reference, on African and Afro-descendant writers working in French. Building upon the works of Paul Gilroy on the one hand, and Frida Ekotto on the other, I trace a major literary lineage in Afro-diasporic literature that revolves around the question of legibility. The texts studied in this dissertation are linked by their focus on a hermeneutic that is deployed along two main lines of thought. At the diegetic level, how are the characters being (mis)read by other members of the African diaspora, and reciprocally, how do the characters see these other members of the African diaspora and situate themselves in relation to them? At the meta-level, how does this reading system, or system of knowledge acquisition, invite or highlight a critique of genre (and gender) conventions and classifications? More specifically, I look at how writers such as Maryse Condé, Alain Mabanckou, and Léonora Miano establish affiliative ties with their Anglophone peers— Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Teju Cole, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—across the Black Atlantic and across generations, in order to challenge the French system of racial and literary classification. In so doing, I argue that they also participate in shaping the figure of the contemporary black intellectual on a global scale, from a non-American black perspective. The two main objectives of my research are to situate African, Caribbean, and Afro-descendant writers working in French within a transnational literary tradition that transcends the long-lasting polemical—and today outdated—category of “Francophone Literature,” and to account for their contributions to it. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z