Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1919. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic university of America, 1932. / At head of title: The Catholic university of America. Bibliography: p. 102-104.

Issued also as the author's thesis, University of Chicago, 1903 (Dissertationes Americanae. English language and literature ; no. 1). / A free translation or adaptation of the Amphitruo of Plautus, increased nearly one-third by the addition of new matter, attributed to M. Slaughter. Includes bibliographical references and index. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / "Reprinted from University studies, vol. XIV., no. 4, 1914." Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis, “Re-visioning a Discipline: Martin Wickramasinghe’s Contribution to Comparative Literature,” explores the comparative approach of Martin Wickramasinghe, the pioneering twentieth-century Sri Lankan novelist, literary-cultural critic, and journalist. Wickramasinghe drew on Sinhala folk and classical, Pali, Sanskrit, and Western literary traditions, especially those of England, and Russia. His comparative approach had two main principles: First, literary concepts do not belong to any literary culture on the basis of their origin. Second, any concept that exists in a given literary culture can be “remoulded” and incorporated by another culture. The rejection of the notion of origin-based ownership of literary concepts and the reformulation of literary concepts as phenomena that may be circulated among literary cultures create a hierarchy-less base for comparison. In creating his comparative approach, Wickramasinghe problematized the binaries of local and metropolitan, village and city, and national and international. I examine his comparative approach by analyzing, first, his re-interpretations of the concepts of reader and grāmyatā (vulgarity). For example, Wickramasinghe challenged the elitism of Sanskrit literary theoretical conceptions of the reader and vulgarity. Second, I discuss how he “remoulded” different literary concepts in his theoretical writings and fiction. For example, he created a concept of realism that drew on classical Sinhala narratives as well as Western literature and theory. In this thesis, I place Wickramasinghe’s comparative approach in conversation with postcolonial scholarship such as that of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Simon Gikandi, Revathi Krishnaswamy, Gayathri Spivak, and S. Subramaniam. Wickramasinghe’s comparative approach provides us new insights on how to compare different literary cultures without ascribing hierarchical values to these cultures. He rejected the binaries of colonial and postcolonial Sri Lanka and, instead, situated himself in a liminal position. His writings illumine how Pali, Sanskrit, and European metropolitan literary traditions all impacted Sinhala literary culture in different historical periods. Wickramasinghe focused on how Sinhala literary culture appropriates literary concepts from other literary traditions rather than on the traditions themselves.

<p> &ldquo;Heartbreak and Precipitation&rdquo; confronts an affective position that in its articulation and representation defeats and defines the limits of its possibility. Performing a theoretical ethnographic position, voice, and imagination, the work/labour of the project is trying to navigate itself successfully (ethically) through the affective, class, and aesthetic registers it crosses in the cities its finds itself in as it makes sense of them as spaces and has them come to be as objects of knowledge. As cartographic method, it tries to find itself from the inside by marking out a range of texts &ndash; from Benjamin&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Arcades Project&rdquo;, Marx&rsquo;s &ldquo;Capital&rdquo;, to C. W. Mills &ldquo;On Intellectual Craftsmanship&rdquo; &ndash; these knotted up with fields of artifacts such as Red Wing boots, Dial liquid hand soap, non-dairy coffee creamer, and a roomful of palm trees; together a speculative mapping of affective territories with well contained limits of potential and possibility.</p>

<p> Narratological Techniques in the Modern Gulf Novel: A case study of the narrative works of Fawziyya Shuwaish al-S&amacr;lim Narratology began to take shape as a discipline in 1966 when the French journal <i> Communications</i> printed a special issue titled "The structural analysis of narrative." The term narratology (&ldquo;narratologie&rdquo; in French) itself was coined three years later by one of the contributors to that issue, Tzvetan Todorov, in his subsequent structuralist manifesto, <i>Grammaire du D&eacute;cam&eacute;ron,</i> which was published in 1969. </p><p> In this dissertation, I attempt to analyze the narrative texts of the Kuwaiti author Fawziyya Shuwaish al-S&amacr;lim, which include five fiction novels and one biography-autobiography, by applying modern narratological techniques suggested by leading narratologists, mainly Mieke Bal. My aim is to provide a systematic and objective assessment of her narrative techniques and style in an attempt to gauge her contribution to the Gulf novel and, perhaps, the modern Arab novel as a whole based on her use of technical and thematic aspects.</p>

<p> With the success of the <i>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</i> soundtrack, T Bone Burnett spent his cultural capital on repurposing traditional American music in subsequently successful soundtracks and artistic productions, providing a spark for a 21st century cultural movement that moves beyond music. This study aims to position Burnett has a cultural catalyst by grounding his work, and those abiding by a similar ethic, in the American South. In the process, I examine what Burnett&rsquo;s soundtracks and select artistic productions communicate about contemporary Southern cultures and identities, while negotiating the ever-enigmatic generational issues of identity and authenticity. By extending the analysis to artists, producers, and cultural tastemakers who operate by a similar ethic as Burnett as well, I also address the characteristics of and spark igniting the preservationist, heritage movement in contemporary roots music, and how this music community contributes to ongoing conversations regarding contemporary Southern identity? The purpose of my study is to explore these connections, the culture in which they reside, and most specifically the role T Bone Burnett plays in a contemporary cultural movement which seeks to (re)present a traditional American music ethos in distinctly Southern terms. Furthermore, I will set the movement within the contemporary context in which such sounds, symbols, and narratives reside. Within this study, I read films, songs, soundtracks, albums, fashion, and performances, each loaded with symbols, archetypes, and themes that illuminate intersection past and present issues of identity. By weaving ethnographic interviews (with musicians, producers, and other cultural tastemakers) with cultural analysis, I investigate how relevant cultural issues are being negotiated, how complicated discussions of history, tradition, and heritage feed the ethic, and how the American South as a perceived distinct region factors in to the equation.</p>

This dissertation traces the evolution of a formalist literary strategy through the twentieth century in both Yiddish and English, through literary and historical analyses of poets and poetic groups from the turn of the century until the 1980s. It begins by exploring the ways in which the Yiddish poet Yehoash built on the contemporary interest in the primitive as he developed his aesthetics in the 1900s, then turns to the modernist poetic group In zikh (the Introspectivists) and their efforts to explore primitive states of consciousness in individual subjectivity. In the third chapter, the project turns to Louis Zukofsky's inclusion of Yehoash's Yiddish translations of Japanese poetry in his own English epic, written in dialogue with Ezra Pound. It concludes with an examination of the Language poets of the 1970s, particularly Charles Bernstein's experimental verse, which explores the way that language shapes consciousness through the use of critical and linguistic discourse. Each of these poets or poetic groups uses experimental poetry as a lens through which to peer at the intersections of language and consciousness, and each explicitly identifies Yiddish (whether as symbol or reality) as an essential component of their poetic technique.

This dissertation examines the way in which the querelle des bouffons was conceived as abiding by the principles of eloquence, using previous rhetorical quarrels (including the Ancients and Moderns, and Atticism versus Asianism), as well as the fundamental tenets of both eloquence and music, to frame a wide-ranging debate that ultimately rethinks the two arts' roles. The supporters of Italian music (known as the coin de la reine) and the partisans of French music (known as the coin du roi) adhere to this common context, while defining the selection of its essential components, as well as their makeup, according to the values of their given side. I contend that it is the relationship between eloquence and music that allows the quarrel's thinkers—which include Rousseau, Diderot, Grimm, D'Alembert and Rameau, as well as lesser-known figures such as Castel, Caux de Cappeval, Cazotte and Jourdan—to engage in complex intellectual explorations that use the quarrel's innate divisiveness as a means of creating meaningful dialog. Through a system of multi-layering and intricate referencing—and based on a valuing of the essential and an evacuation of the ornamental—, the quarrel's texts themselves determine the debate's corpus, hinting at a new direction for this type of public discourse. The dissertation aims to show that the resulting theoretical considerations use the pamphlets' broad dualities of French and Italian, modern and ancient, harmony and melody, etc., to foster internal multiplicities in the development of subtext and cross-referencing, yielding a new collective, written conversation that achieves a form of musical eloquence.