"Tolstoy and Zola" juxtaposes the two writers to examine the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century. The juxtaposition is justified by the literary critical debates that were taking place in Russian and French journals during the 1870s and 1880s, concerning Tolstoy and Zola. In both France and Russia, heated arguments arose over the future of realism, and opposing factions held up either Tolstoy's brand of realism or Zola's naturalism as more promising. This dissertation uses the differences between Tolstoy and Zola to make more prominent a commonality in their respective novels Anna Karenina (1877) and La Bête humaine (1890): the railways. But rather than interpret the railways in these two novels as a symbol of modernity or as an engine for narrative, I concentrate on one particular aspect of the railway experience, known as motion parallax, which is a depth cue that enables a person to detect depth while in motion. Stationary objects close to a travelling train appear to be moving faster than objects in the distance, such as a mountain range, and moreover they appear to be moving backward. By examining motion parallax in both novels, as well as in some of Tolstoy's other works, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886), this dissertation attempts to address an intriguing question: what, if any, is the relationship between the advent of trains and the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century? Motion parallax triggers in a traveller the sensation of going backward even though one is travelling forward. This cognitive dissonance relates to Tolstoy's and Zola's depictions of Darwinism in their works. Despite their differences, both writers subscribed to a belief in the "fallacy of progress" and thought that technology was causing man, contrary to expectations, to regress. This dissertation explores the relationships between Darwinism, trains, and nineteenth-century notions of progress and degeneration in not only Anna Karenina and La Bête humaine, but also in The Kreutzer Sonata, and Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Germinal (1885). The goal of this multi-disciplinary dissertation, which interweaves literary analysis with sociology, history of science, and visual cultural history, is to provide a new perspective on the relationship between technology and narrative.

This dissertation explores the central place of semiotic interpretation in the instruction of several medieval genres--Latin and vernacular religious drama, French fabliaux, and Spanish exempla--encompassing both the lesson that is taught and the method for teaching it. It is my contention that teaching the proper way to interpret signs is the didactic focus in these genres and that their authors were also deeply concerned with scrutinizing their own use of signs in conveying this instruction. As medieval sign theory finds its origin in Augustinian semiotics, Chapter 1 of my dissertation raises key considerations in Augustine's discussions of signa that would continue to inform later treatments of interpretation. I establish the intrinsic connection between teaching and the interpretation of signs in his writings as well as his frequent ambivalence on the subject. For the Bishop of Hippo, the proper understanding of sacred signs is the paramount lesson of Christian instruction, with misreading Jews as the primary emblem of faulty interpretation. Signs are also a concern for the pedagogical process (doctrina in its second sense) because the success of any lesson is dependent on the effectiveness of its signs to communicate. Yet, Augustine also places the burden of understanding squarely on the learner who must labor with interpretation and attain personal enlightenment. Augustine clearly admires the pagan classics and acknowledges the dominant role of words in instruction, but, for him, the falsified verbal signs of fiction have no value for teaching. Moreover, non-verbal communication--through inner inspiration and visually apprehended signs or res significandi--is vastly superior to fallen language in transmitting meaning as well as creating memory of what is learned. Yet, Augustine also evinces a suspicion of sensory data. These ideas, including doubts about vision and the value of learning through fictive works, would continue to inform the instruction present in later medieval texts. Chapter 2 examines the persistence of Augustinian concepts in medieval religious plays from early church drama through the Middle English cycles. These texts are mainly concerned with teaching the proper interpretation of sacred signa, following Augustine, particularly through the characterization of Jews who fail to read signs correctly. Medieval religious drama also endorses the value of non-verbal communication--through a reliance on individual faith as a precursor to comprehension and through dramatic res such as setting, gesture, and costume--both in conveying semiotic instruction and rendering it memorable. Jewish characters are further portrayed as working against these ideas, representatives of a failure to learn by seeing and believing, who seek instead to force interpretation through violence. Chapter 3 examines a genre in which the presence of doctrinal instruction is debatable, the French fabliaux, and identifies a consistent emphasis on the risks of interpretation across the vast corpus. All signs, verbal and visual, are potentially insufficient in constructing meaning and open to manipulation, emblematized primarily by the actions of deceptive women. Fabliaux evince a self-consciousness about their ability to present these hazards both because they do so through the medium of poetry and because they must rely on signs to make their point. However, the genre ultimately flaunts the insufficiency of its own signs as part of its message, using laughter and mnemonic imagery to promote understanding. Chapter 4 extends the findings on fabliaux to the Spanish Sendebar or Libro de los engaños, a text of questionable didacticism that also emphasizes the role of women in manipulating signs. The practical wisdom derived from the collection--its interest in good counsel and prudence--can likewise be simplified to the need for careful interpretation of signs in a post-lapsarian world. However, through the didactic insufficiency of its tale-telling enterprise, it ultimately affirms the limits of teaching using signs. My dissertation concludes by examining the persistence of many of these ideas in twenty-first-century pedagogy. Recent emphasis on equipping contemporary students with the tools for interpreting signs in an increasingly image-based culture and on promoting the expanded use of visuals in the classroom reiterate longstanding concerns of doctrina. Assessing the instructional role of signs first raised by Augustine and its reconsideration in medieval texts thus sheds new light on didactic content and purpose that continue to inform our endeavors as teachers today.

This dissertation reads examples of early and contemporary documentary theatre in order to show that, while documentary theatre is often presumed to be an essentially realist practice, its history, methods, and conceptual underpinnings are closely tied to the historical and contemporary avant-garde theatre. The dissertation begins by examining the works of the Viennese satirist and performer Karl Kraus and the German stage director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s. The second half moves on to contemporary artists Handspring Puppet Company, Ping Chong, and Charles L. Mee. Ultimately, in illustrating the documentary theatre's close relationship with avant-gardism, this dissertation supports a broadened perspective on what documentary theatre can be and do and reframes discussion of the practice's political efficacy by focusing on how documentaries enact ideological critiques through form and seek to reeducate the senses of audiences through pedagogies of reception.

This dissertation offers a study of proper names and naming as a conceptual and thematic anchor in the work of S.Y. Agnon. Proper names, I argue, constitute an underexplored and highly fruitful prism through which to read literature, and specifically Agnon's fiction. My study consists of a series of readings in several of Agnon's major and most interpreted texts, all considered milestones of Modern Hebrew literature. Reading these works through the lens of proper names exposes facets of the texts that went largely unobserved by earlier readers, and yields a new understanding of them. The study's primary concern is to determine what names are capable of telling us about Agnon's texts. A secondary concern that emanates from my readings is the converse question, namely, what can Agnon's texts tell us about names? Agnon's literary preoccupations with proper names often line up with the major theoretical issues that concern them: the name as index and as description, the difficulties related to the translation of names, the arbitrariness versus motivation of names, their interpellative potential, and more. Drawing on various disciplines and theoretical dispositions - analytical philosophy of language, post-structuralism, literary theory, and the traditional Jewish corpus - I explore these theoretical issues and examine them vis-à -vis Agnon's literary texts. Given the name's unique status, across these disciplines, as a sign whose singularity derives primarily from the nature of its link with its extra-linguistic referent, I propose that asking questions about names is crucial to the understanding of language and especially its relation with the extra linguistic world, subjects with which Agnon's work is overtly engaged. In many of Agnon's works, and especially those I discuss in my dissertation, naming and names function as a full-blown thematic and conceptual element. I contend that, more than merely giving his characters `meaningful', `interpretable' names, Agnon undertakes an ongoing investigation of proper names and the questions and problems they breed. Within his literary world, names are by no means signifiers whose sole purpose is to point to those who bear them, or at most, also to describe them. Names act: they transform and engender transformation; they operate in the fictive world, and their operation often turns out to be deeply consequential. Acts of naming occur frequently in Agnon's works. Babies are named (and sometimes not-named), and their naming is cause for internal and external conflict. Naming does not end with the single initial act whose subject is a newborn baby. Names constantly change, they are forgotten, supplemented by nicknames, substituted by other names. In Agnon's fiction, names are often encountered at moments of extreme failure or distortion, and the radical effect of the name on its bearer cannot be revoked. Names can change lives - for better or worse, although Agnon chooses mostly to contemplate the latter. In Agnon's literary world, they are ultimately a site of catastrophe.

This study is concerned with the Indian "romance" (qissah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and "occult" sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as "romances," via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq).

This dissertation argues that the modernist doctrine of medium specificity, the idea that the autonomy of the arts arises from artworks' investigation of the properties and limits of their materials, grounds artistic production in the place where it was produced. The identity of artistic mediums (writing, painting, sculpture, and land art) depends on their literal placement in physical, geographic environments. Medium specificity requires site specificity. In the aesthetic, art-historical discourses I consider -- Gertrude Stein's account of Cubism, Soviet avant-garde writings on Constructivism, Robert Smithson's texts on landscape, earth art, and Minimalism -- the mediums of art-making are located in places that serve simultaneously as construction sites, sources of raw materials, and models of aesthetic form. They are both the subject of representation and the representational means, the work's content, form, and substance. Art derives its physical properties, its subject matter, and its formal laws from the geography, topography, and geology of the sites at which it is made. Stein retroactively models Picasso's Cubism (and her own plays) on the spatial juxtaposition of houses and mountains in the Spanish landscape. Shklovsky discovers Constructivist principles (and those of his own formalist aesthetics) in the daily life of post-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Smithson finds a model for earth art and for the recovery of history from universal entropy in the "dialectical landscape" of Central Park. For all three of these aesthetic theorists and practitioners, natural processes are entangled with social history, reciprocally modifying each other at the intersections of the built and the found. The specific site is constituted by such intersections and models site-specific art as a legible composition of modern life. By literally taking place, the site-specific artworks these writers describe, theorize, and propose acquire historical specificity, an identity that both indexes the social order that gave rise to them and resists or revises it. This autonomy of the artwork is the stake of site-specificity. An artwork's capacity to resist its present, to be autonomous from or non-identical with the dominant mode of production of its time, is a function of its localization in a socially determined site. A site-specific work is made from materials that are arranged in real space and organized by the laws governing this space. By turning social materials and social laws into its own constructive principle, such a work makes them perceivable and reveals the historical processes at work in them. Manifesting history in its material composition and formal arrangement, the site-specific artwork both remembers and remakes it.

Engaging with a variety of literary and historical sources, in both prose and verse, including letters, chronicles, treaties and the neo-Latin epic, this dissertation examines the centrality of the classically-informed, philosophical idea of friendship (amicitia) in the community-building discourse of Francesco Petrarca's Italy. The first chapter examines Petrarch's treatment of Scipio Africanus as humanistic leader and idealized friend in the Africa. The second chapter proposes a reading of Cola di Rienzo as the first "political Petrarchist" and contextualizes his epistolary campaign to unify mid-fourteenth century Italy. The third chapter explores Petrarch's politics of familiaritas in the letters he addressed to leaders of prominent Italian city-states attempting to reconcile old friends. This study presents an analysis of the rhetorical strategies underlying Petrarch's career as public intellectual, diplomat and poet.

Religions of Doubt: Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin is a work of comparative philosophy addressing selected works of the Iranian novelist and political thinker Jalal Al-e Ahmad and the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. I demonstrate that the perceived failure of utopian modern projects, particularly Marxism, led each of these twentieth century thinkers to re-engage with religious questions and concerns in a simultaneous critique of the corrosive, reductive, and catastrophic nature of the modern condition and the idea of traditional religion - static, irrational, regressive - that modernist thought had conjured. Furthermore, both Al-e Ahmad and Benjamin were compelled to move beyond the worlds of traditional philosophical inquiry or political action, into questions and practices of art, literature, science, technology, and ritual. I argue that reading these thinkers together allows a glimpse at ideas and modes in philosophical thought that were largely derailed by varying discourses of secularism, poststructuralism, naturalism, and fundamentalism. This reading suggests new synthetic possibilities for philosophy in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation examines quotation specifically, and intertextuality more generally, in the development of American/literary culture from the birth of the republic through the Civil War. This period, already known for its preoccupation with national unification and the development of a self-reliant national literature, was also a period of quotation, reprinting and copying. Within the analogy of literature and nation characterizing the rhetoric of the period, this study translates the transtextual figure of quotation as a protean form that sheds a critical light on the nationalist project. This project follows both how texts move (transnational migration) and how they settle into place (national naturalization). Combining a theoretical mapping of how texts move and transform intertextually and a book historical mapping of how texts move and transform materially, the dissertation traces nineteenth century examples of the culture of quotation and how its literary mutability both disrupts and participates in the period's national and literary movements. The first chapter engages scholarship on republican print culture and on republican emulation to interrogate the literary roots of American nationalism in its transatlantic context. Looking at commonplace books, autobiographies, morality tales, and histories, it examines how quotation as a practice of memory impression functions in national re-membering. The second chapter follows quotation in early nineteenth-century national and literary contests of space and fashioning, the movement for international copyright in the culture of reprinting and the calls for a national literature. The third chapter considers questions of appropriation, assimilation, and translation in hemispheric poetic interactions within the context of the annexation and Manifest Destiny. The last chapter examines quotation in the antebellum period where, in the absence of a unifying authority, the fragments of quotation offer a way to tell the story of the nation

Toward a Poetics of Animality is a study of the place and function of animals in the works of four major modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. Through a series of close readings of canonical as well as lesser-known texts, I show how the so-called "Sprachkrise"- the crisis of language and representation that dominated European literature around 1900 - was inextricably bound up with an attendant crisis of anthropocentrism and of man's relationship to the animal. Since antiquity, man has been defined as the animal that has language; hence a crisis of language necessarily called into question the assumption of human superiority and the strict division between humans and animals on the basis of language. Furthermore, in response to author and critic John Berger's provocative suggestion that "the first metaphor was animal" I explore the essential and constantly reaffirmed link between animals and metaphorical language. The implication is that the poetic imagination and the problem of representation have always on some level been bound up with the figure of the animal. Thus, the "poetics of animality" I identify in the authors under examination gestures toward the origin of poetry and figurative language as such.