Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-01, Section: A, page: 0170. Chair: Rosemarie McGerr. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 11, 2006).

This study examines the way in which nationalism in the postcolonial world has emerged as a major ethical and political problem in postcolonial literary scholarship. Focusing mainly on the work of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, the study tracks the way in which various postcolonial critics have attempted to deal with questions and concerns raised by the nationalist response to colonialism, and the implications raised for art, culture, and critical theory. The study outlines how nationalism has emerged as the most persistent problem in Postcolonial Theory. It traces the ambivalent and complex theoretical and political engagement by Edward Said with nationalism in general and Palestinian nationalism in particular. It explicates Homi Bhabha's complex critique of national discourse. The study also examines the legacy of Frantz Fanon, and the way in which his work has been appropriated by both Said and Bhabha to further their own arguments. It concludes with an evaluation of the overall failure of Postcolonial Theory to find a coherent stance towards postcolonial nationalism and reviews several alternatives that have been proposed but not engaged in a sustained manner.

<p> This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11&mdash;Joseph O&rsquo;Neill&rsquo;s <i>Netherland</i>, Junot D&iacute;az&rsquo;s <i> The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao)</i>, Teju Cole&rsquo;s <i> Open City</i>, and Jennifer Egan&rsquo;s <i>A Visit From the Goon Squad (Goon Squad)</i>&mdash;I explore representations of the effects of and the attempts to cope with traumatic experiences including 9/11 itself.</p><p>

This study traces the representations of the Nizari Isma'ilis, or Assassins, in medieval European texts, a process revealing three different discourses about the sect. I argue that when the crusaders first encountered the Syrian branch of the sect, they sought to enter into an alliance with its members. Early texts discussing the Assassins reflect this desire for an alliance and treat the sect correspondingly. The events at the end of the twelfth century—especially the assassination of Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, newly elected King of Jerusalem—introduce a new way of approaching the sect in Latin Christian histories and chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. To the historians chronicling the death of Conrad, the sect functions as an instrument in the portrayal, positive or negative, of more significant historical figures such as Richard the Lion-Heart of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Conrad himself. Although the occasion of Conrad's murder did not immediately lead to the rejection of a discourse of alliance in treating the Assassins, this early approach to the sect was eventually replaced by one of exoticization in the thirteenth century. This third and final discourse rose to prominence as the historical Nizaris lost their independence and power, ultimately falling to the Mongols in 1256. As a result of the process of exoticization, the Assassins came to be seen as a “wonder of the East.” The three approaches to the Assassins outlined above did not succeed each other, but rather overlapped and sometimes existed simultaneously. Nonetheless each discourse achieves dominance at a different time. Thus, the discourse of alliance predominates in the early years of the medieval European representation of the sect, but the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat informs the perception and depiction of the Assassins from 1192 to the first third of the thirteenth century. Thereafter the discourse of exoticization becomes the dominant discourse about the Assassins in Latin Christendom, one that continues to influence our understanding of the sect to this day.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-215).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1945. / Published also without thesis note. Vita. Bibliography: p. [400]-438.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1945. / Published also without thesis note. Vita. Bibliography: p. [400]-438. Also issued online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1325. Adviser: Fedwa Malti-Douglas. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

This study of the "prosaics" of allegory in Perez Galdos's novels examines the relationship between allegory at its most formally elemental and prose realism at its most complex. The first chapter introduces the major lines of philosophical, rhetorical, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist thinking in modern approaches to allegory, from the Romantics to Paul de Man, and illustrates various ways in which allegory's formal structures serve as the figural and morphological underwriters of Galdos's narrative fictions. Chapter II uses a single tropological occasion in Galdos's Miau to develop a realist's revisionistic equation, in which the authoritative and morphologically deterministic structures of typology are compounded by modern intertextuality and the figural structures of metonymy and metaphor. Dante's Inferno supplies the allegorical subtext for the tropological occasion in question, and in that fashion is introduced the master allegorist whose authoritative traces will serve as allegorical tracking points in each of the study's subsequent chapters. Nicolai Gogol and Charles Dickens provide control texts by which to gauge the innovative subtlety with which Galdos articulates his stylistic equation. Chapter III explores the role of personification allegory in construing a metaphysics of fictional character. Galdos's dialogue novel Realidad, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and Dante's Inferno provide opportunities for speculation about about reductivity and complexity in realistic characterization. The fourth chapter takes Galdos's Torquemada tetralogy as the basis for comment upon realistic fictions as allegories of epochal thinking. Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme" opens the way for a discussion of the epochal disjunction in that novel series between Comtian positivism and Dantean allegory--a disjunction between system and synthesis. The fifth and final chapter draws upon allegory to propose a theory of the management of narrative time in realism. The theory suggests allegory as the underwriter of several narrative time codes that work against the impulse of chronology in prose narrative. Galdos's short novel Tristana is considered as an allegory of time--historical time, time detained, and time passing. Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, offers examples of Galdos's deployment of the time codes under consideration.

Thesis--Leipzig. / Cover title. Vita.