This dissertation argues that the richness and distinctiveness of modern Yiddish travel literature—with its emphasis on arriving rather than departing—reflects the complexity of such East European Jewish notions as home, homelessness, and wandering. It examines the ways in which the experience of travel affected the search for identity, home, and belonging by Yiddish writers from the first secularized and westernized generation of East European Jews. Yiddish travelogues written in the first four decades of the twentieth century show a curious trend with respect to the search for identity and the destinations that are their subject. These destinations fall into two categories: those with specific Jewish connotations and those without. For writers addressing the latter destination category, even though motivated by the search for a Jewish identity, locales beyond the Jewish map engender the greatest sense of empowerment. Even when their ostensible motivations and emphases are diametrically opposed, they arrive at the same conclusion, that Jews belong simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Peretz Hirschbein and Melech Ravitch are exemplary illustrations of this tendency: the former laments the countless roads on which Jews have traveled and many borders that separate them; he longs for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature, and as such rejects the diversity of the Jewish experience; the latter, on the contrary, celebrates diversity. How can we explain this trend? It is born of the contradictory set of ideological and artistic aims and interests of a generation that rejected the traditional beliefs and lifestyle of their parents, and that aimed to create a body of modern literature in Yiddish that would equal major European literatures, and that internalized a number of European cultural (primarily literary) tropes. Moreover, this literature was the product of a generation of writers who yearned for an organic connection to Jewish past, present, and future and at the same time saw problems with every existing ideology. The Introduction situates the study within the context of Jewish cultural and literary history and addresses questions of scope and methodology. Chapter 1 analyzes Yiddish travel writers’ fascination with exotic destinations lacking specifically Jewish connotations and its role in these writers’ struggles to define their cultural identity. Chapter 2 analyzes the work of Peretz Hirschbein and argues that his longing for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature reflected both a reluctance to celebrate the diversity of the Jewish experience and an impulse to embrace its global proportions. Chapter 3 focuses on the life and work of Melech Ravitch and contrasts his passion for diversity with the opposite approach of Peretz Hirschbein. Chapter 4 explores Yiddish writers’ travel to Mandate Palestine and to Soviet Russia and focuses on the parallels between travelogues about these two politically charged destinations. Chapter 5 examines the development of Yiddish travel literature after World War II, focusing both on works that describe travel back to Eastern Europe and are dominated by the themes of mourning and preservation, and on later works, filled with the urge to affirm a worldwide Jewish presence. The Conclusion recapitulates the dissertation’s main points and stresses the uniqueness of the Yiddish travelogue and its importance in Jewish studies and beyond.

O estudo da poética de Mario Quintana terá por base as investigações da Literatura Comparada e da Teoria Literária, considerando o pensamento de Wellek, Ortega y Gasset, Bloon, Bakhtin, Paz, Pound, Antonio Cândido, entre outros. A primeira e a segunda partes da pesquisa se voltam às relações da literatura com a própria literatura e com outros campos do saber que têm nas relações sociais o pano de fundo para o desenvolvimento da produção artística e da visão de mundo expressa nas criações. Na parte seguinte, a dimensão simbólica do tempo é base dos estudos tanto na poesia como na pintura. Na quarta parte, é observado o processo das influências que estimulou a produção poética de Mario Quintana. Para tanto, a temática temporal, constante preocupação da lírica, foi o eixo centralizador das aproximações entre as suas poesias e as de Camões, com enfoque na problemática do carpe diem; nesta mesma parte, com relação ao tratamento da saudade, destacase a produção de Antônio Nobre, poeta português que, assim como Quintana, resgata em sua obra o passado vivido ou sonhado. Ampliando as inter-relações entre diferentes formas de expressão há, na quinta e na última parte, interesse nas analogias entre a poesia e a pintura com foco nas retomadas que Quintana faz da obra de vários pintores, privilegiando a de Van Gogh. / This paper aims at the study of Mario Quintana´s poetic, based mostly on the research and investigations carried out in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory fields, taking into consideration the thoughts and ideas of authors such as, Wellek, Ortega y Gasset, Bloon, Bakhtin, Paz, Pound, Antonio Cândido, among others. The first and second parts of the present research are concerned with the relationship the literature has to do with itself and with other knowledge areas which have the social interaction as the background for the art development and the worldview expressed in the masterpieces. In the next part, time symbolic dimension is the basis for the studies in both poetry and paintings. In the fourth part, the influential processes that would have stimulated Quintana´s poetic production are observed. For such purposes, the temporal thematic, a frequent concern of Quintana\'s poetry, was crucial to look for the similarities between Quintana\'s and Camões\' creations, focusing mostly on the carpe diem problems; in this same part, concerning with the treatment given to the feeling of missing, Antonio Nobre´s writings are highlighted, because this Portuguese poet, like Quintana, used to bring his past either experienced or dreamt to his verses. In the fifth and last part, making inter-relationships between different kinds of expression, there are interests in analogies between poetries and paintings, with focus on some painters recalling undertaken by Quintana, special and mostly on Van Gogh´s ones.

This dissertation expands the familiar concept of literary history in order to argue for the historiographic function of literary form in early modern poetry and drama. I propose that the “literary history” of early modern England is not merely the history of literature, but also these writers’ methods of evoking history by means of the literary. For Christopher Marlowe, George Herbert, and many of their contemporaries, the formal capacities of poetry offered methods for describing relationships between events in time, interpreting those events, and mobilizing those interpretations—in short, the formal capacities of poetry become ways of doing history. In the most familiar critical sense, literary history denotes canon-formations, literary influence, and the development of genres, trends, and fashions in poetic style. I demonstrate that early modern poets themselves recognized this sense of literary history, understanding their formal decisions in light of the history of poetic form. When Tudor and Stuart writers adopted a particular style or set of conventions, I argue, they did so with an awareness of how easily these styles could become—or had become—dated. While critics have demonstrated the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles, I also insist on the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such, arguing that poets’ formal decisions, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time—become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. By attending to the inherent temporality of poetry, I uncover the historical arguments poets and dramatists make, even in texts not overtly concerned with historical topics. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of poetry can become a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time.

This project follows a thread of citations of the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector found in the philosophical feminist texts of four European thinkers: Hélène Cixous, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, and Rosi Braidotti. I explore the intersection of material feminisms, Latin American decolonial feminism, and sexual difference theory differentially and multiply across contexts. I revisit histories of women and texts - French, Italian and Brazilian - that are multiply and differentially marginalized in the current Western feminist narrative framework - in order to create sources of alternative knowledge and create an opportunity for something new to emerge symbio-creatively from these points of contact. Chapter One covers the genesis of European feminist approaches to Lispector’s oeuvre in France, the impassioned reading by Hélène Cixous of Lispector’s work, and also provides vital counter-memory, decolonial feminist stories on Brazilian and Latin American feminisms which have been left out of the dominant Anglo-American/Western feminist historical narrative. Chapter Two will focus on the arrival in Italy of Lispector’s texts, Luisa Muraro and the Diotima women’s feminist philosophy group’s readings. Chapter Three then covers Adriana Cavarero, as well as her split from said Diotima group. Finally, Chapter Four brings us to Rosi Braidotti, from her early texts on Lispector to present theoretical horizons. My concluding discussion stems from the idea of connections as posited by Sonia Alvarez: “a translocal feminist politics of translation is crucial to the decolonial turn and a key strategy in building ‘connectant epistemologies’ in order to confront the equivocations or mistranslations that hinder feminist alliances, even among women who share the same language and culture.” I expand on my theory of points of contact and explore possibilities of symbiosis and non-deterministic evolution as a theoretical tool.

The dissertation investigates the medieval poetics of the amatory prelude beginning with the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah – or The Mantle Ode – by the poet Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Poets expanded the trope of the abandoned ruins to include urban space; incorporated sacred beloveds as poetic beloveds; and foregrounded the self-conscious authorial voice within the prelude. The first chapter locates the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah within the larger Arabic poetic legacy that extends to the ancient pre-Islamic period. The second chapter considers the discursive formation of sacred poetic beloveds, such as the Prophet Muhammad, incorporated among the repertoire of the amatory prelude’s classical and ancient poetic beloveds. The third chapter analyzes the authorial voice and role of the lyric “I” in the preludes of Shaʻbān al-Āthārī (d. 1425) and ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 1517) who pay homage to their literary predecessors including Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235), al-Būṣīrī, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 1349) by mirroring their metrical composition. The fourth chapter interrogates the intersection of poetics and literary criticism in the medieval Arabic-Islamic devotional invocation that is the hallmark of medieval prolegomena. The preludes within the genre of instructive poems on rhetoric known as the badīʿiyyāt encapsulated literary criticism’s definition of “ingenious beginnings.” Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) demonstrates this intersection in his prose introduction to al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmiyat al-ʿAjam. I conclude by returning to modern iterations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burdah in literary texts in order to further challenge and raise questions about the discontinuity of medieval Arabic poetics in modern culture.

This dissertation examines how contemporary Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone literature from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1984-present) reconfigures historical archives to negotiate the ethics of representing state violence in repressive societies. I identify new literary forms politically conscious writers are devising to capture and contest human rights violations. Using an interdisciplinary decolonial feminist framework, I closely read works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Michael Ondaatje, M. NourbeSe Philip, Edwidge Danticat, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Roberto Bolaño— a diverse set of postcolonial and post-dictatorship writers never before compared in comparative literature. I call these writers’ endeavors to reframe traumatic history “arts of the impossible,” which defy the alleged unrepresentability of collective trauma to secure justice and forestall impunity. I compare representations of wide-ranging atrocities including forced disappearance, slavery, genocide, and femicide— crimes exemplifying what I term “ontological erasure.” At stake in ontological erasure are not simply lost perspectives from multiply marginalized victims, like women and queer people of color, but the very possibility of citizenship and the will to dissent state recognition enables. To resist the threats posed by the authorization of these crimes to political freedom, these writers, I argue, reinvent evidentiary forms historically suppressed by authoritarian states, including court transcripts, testimonies, forensic reports, and national archives. These authors’ innovations push the boundaries of what counts as “evidence” in acts of state violence that are uniquely determined by erasure; they also imagine new methods for remembering past atrocities without compromising recognition for stigmatized minorities in the future.

This dissertation argues that Pacific literature is haunted by a form of ecological aggression known as nuclear colonialism. The Pacific is the region of the world where Western nations tested most of their nuclear and thermonuclear weapons – an extreme form of colonial occupation that will impact both the land and the people for hundreds of thousands of years. This study analyzes Pacific works published post World War II, from Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 collection of poetry to riMajel oral performer Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2017 videoart, focusing in particular on the francophone works of writers identifying as Kanak, Mā’ohi, and Ni-Vanuatu. Through a series of close-readings of this multilingual and transnational corpus, it argues that nuclear colonialism functions as a leitmotiv informing both the politics and the poetics of this anticolonial corpus, despite the fact that nuclear violence is often denounced in between the lines, through oblique and diffuse references mirroring the ubiquity of radioactivity itself.

My dissertation, titled Hanging-Together: Kant, Goethe, and the Theory of Aesthetic Modernism, observes that many of the composers, artists, and writers working in the early twentieth century developed theories of aesthetic coherence (Zusammenhang) that contradict the canonical interpretation of the period in terms of discontinuity and fragmentation. I show that the modernists drew on Goethe’s morphology in order to conceive of the inner coherence of the work of art as neither an aggregate (in which the parts precede the whole), nor as a system (in which an idea of the whole precedes its parts), but as a morphological nexus of formal variations. My thesis is that aesthetic modernism negates the ‘outer coherence’ of the work of art in order to reveal its ‘inner coherence,’ and that this morphological concept of inner coherence does not entail the totalizing ideal maintained by the poetic and aesthetic tradition from Aristotle to Kant. I develop this argument over the course of five chapters: the first examines Kant’s concept of systematic unity; the second focuses on Goethe’s critical response to Kant’s philosophy of nature; while the last three trace Goethe’s morphology through the theoretical reflections of a modernist composer, painter, and writer—Arnold Schönberg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alfred Döblin. What emerges is a theory of aesthetic modernism that takes into account the historical specificity of the period without reducing its significance to the ‘break’ it supposedly effects with tradition.

Este trabalho tem como ponto de partida as relações entre os protagonistas do Quixote, do escritor espanhol Miguel de Cervantes, e Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma do romancista carioca Lima Barreto observadas pela fortuna crítica barretiana. De acordo com esses estudos, Policarpo Quaresma seria um Dom Quixote brasileiro, por apresentar uma série de traços quixotescos. A partir dessa consideração, o objetivo desta dissertação é o de realizar um estudo comparativo entre o Cavaleiro da Triste Figura e o Major Quaresma, de modo a buscar, mais do que as semelhanças, as diferenças que delineiam suas singularidades. Para efetuar tal comparação, escolheu-se como parâmetro de análise a temática da loucura. Sendo assim, o exame das duas obras tem como preocupação central o modo como Cervantes e Lima Barreto se apropriam do referido tema na construção de suas respectivas personagens. / This work presents as its starting point the relations between the main characters of Don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quixote), by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, and of Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (Tragic Death of Policarpo Quaresma), by the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto, noted by the critics of Barreto´s book. According to them, Policarpo Quaresma is a kind of Brazilian Don Quixote, because the character presents a series of quixotic traits. Taking it into consideration, this dissertation aims to carry out a comparative study between the Knight of the Sad Countenance and Major Quaresma in order to search the differences in this case, more significant than the similitudes which delineate both characters´ singularities. The madness theme has been chosen as the analysis approach to carry out such comparison. Therefore, the examination of the two works has as its central theme the way both writers, Cervantes and Barreto, borrow from the madness theme in the creation of their characters.

Amelia Rosselli has often been considered an obscure and impenetrable author, whose language may be identified with the expression of the unconscious. In this study I argue, on the contrary, that a strong cognitive tension underlies the poet's multilingual production (in Italian, English, and French). I therefore explore its imaginative and philosophical depth, by reconstructing Rosselli's project to transpose into writing the complexity of human experience in a fickle, chaotic, and contradictory world. In the first chapter I focus on language, in particular on lexical fusions and distortions, mainly questioning Pasolini's interpretation based on of the notion of freudian slip. With the aid of hermeneutical tools borrowed from the philosophy of language, I claim that Rosselli's language aims on the one hand at mirroring reality, and on the other at making textual experience potentially infinite, thus engaging the reader in a never-ending interpretation. I also maintain that the category of the baroque allows us to appreciate Rosselli's aesthetics from an original point of view. In the second chapter I investigate Rosselli's elaboration of a new metrical form, stressing its relations to the poet's studies in musicology, ethnomusicology and acoustics. Through the meter Rosselli tries to restrain subjectivity, hence accessing a more objective and universal poetic dimension. The last chapter is devoted to Rosselli's mysticism. The mystic tradition offers a vivid imagery and a refined rhetoric to an author who wants to put the subject aside and depict the unstable (or vain?) nature of the world. However, Rosselli's attempt to find a metaphysical or divine remedy to violence and chaos does not succeed. Her longing for transcendency remains unfulfilled.