This dissertation tells a new story about the way poets responded to the clichés of public speech in the four decades following the start of World War II. During the period, many public intellectuals lamented that political discourse had become saturated with abstract stock phrases like “the fight for freedom,” “revenue enhancement,” or “service the target” that are bureaucratic in origin, designed for the mass media, and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. This diagnosis, which was shared by such prominent critics as George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, and Herbert Marcuse, led to a unique response in the field of poetry. Instead of ridding their verse of such language, poets developed a distinctive approach I call “echo and critique,” whereby they would echo the clichés of political discourse and then examine their implications and study their effects. Poetry, with its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, was especially suited to this mode of close listening. At the same time, postwar poets were deeply conscious of their susceptibility to doublespeak, so that taking on political clichés obliged them to subject their own writing to scrutiny and admit to the inevitability of cant while pushing against it. Each chapter in the dissertation pairs a poet with a different form of public discourse he or she was especially drawn to: Robert Lowell and political speeches, Randall Jarrell and military propaganda, Elizabeth Bishop and news reports, and Seamus Heaney and everyday talk on political events. Crucially, these four writers were interested in specific genres for the traits they recognized in their own work. By taking apart various types of cant, therefore, they were also trying to understand where their language stood in relation to that of the politician, the propagandist, the reporter, or the ordinary citizen, and to push back against their own rhetorical tendencies. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible.

Thesis advisor: Christopher Wilson / Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / This dissertation explores traditional patterns of immigration narratives and reads them alongside not only their contemporary, divergent counterparts but also historical moments that contribute to the narrative transformations. By way of this examination, literary changes over time become readable, highlighting the speed at which the rhetoric and aims of many immigration narratives became patently anti-America in the twenty-first century, significantly departing from the traditions established in the twentieth century, which, at their core still held pro-America aims. The first chapter, "The Solution is the Problem: Immigrant Narratives of Internment and Detention," considers nonfiction narratives regarding immigration detention within the borders of the United States. I read Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying as narratives that explore detention as central immigrant experience, exposing a chronicle of national suffering after attacks on American soil. When paired with Sone's work, Danticat's Brother I'm Dying reveals a shift in traditional narratives, exposing links to criminality and a move away from affiliation. In my second chapter, "The Helpless Helper: Illegality, Borders and Family Reunification," I study Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, and Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over. In these films, the suffering of immigrant families designated as somehow "illegal" are often displaced onto a white, parental "helper" figure in order to scrutinize their processing and treatment. These three independent films probe the ways in which economic, judicial, and political interests negatively affect family reunification policies. Additionally, The Visitor, Frozen River, and Crossing Over rely on an alternative point of view - that of American citizens rather than immigrants - as a way to further fragment traditional immigrant narrative structures, which instead favored immigrant-as-narrator constructs. In chapter three, "Considering Conditions of Possibility: Canonical Modes with Modern Concerns," I transition back to the immigrant's point of view and turn to traditional "high" literature. The narratives studied in this chapter retell canonical American novels before placing an important twist on the story: the decision to leave America rather than assimilate and aspire to the American Dream. Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland both make use of the narrative mode of the novel of manners while H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist draw upon the ethnic bildungsroman tradition. By treating immigrant experiences as literary through adaptations of canonical novels rooted in American success and integration, these four authors make the choice of writing their protagonists out of America all the more resonant. The final chapter of this project, "The End Product of Our Deep Moral Exhaustion: Alternative Genres and Immigration Narratives," pulls upon Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to ground a discussion of the role of alternate history in contemporary immigration narratives. From there, the chapter pushes out to include Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as an example of speculative fiction. In each novel, a commentary on America's global social position is revealed by means of the degree to which the protagonists and their families do or do not become assimilated Americans, placing these novels in an intermediary position on the continuum of post-9/11 immigration narratives. Via my close readings, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which patterns of departure from traditional narratives became both enhanced and more rapidly altered at the start of the twenty-first century. The comparative work of this dissertation project allows access to a unique vision of twenty-first century America that is only available through the lens of immigration narratives, critiquing the modern nation's strengths, shortcomings, political climate, and social realities all while attending to conscious and significant modifications to traditional immigrant narratives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: James M. Smith / This dissertation examines individual experiences of grief and trauma in Irish writing from 1935 to 2013, focusing specifically on novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, and Eimear McBride. It offers a feminist reclamation of personal forms of loss that fall outside the purview of documented history and that typically go overlooked in literary criticism. Examples in this study include the suffering caused by the natural death of a family member, infertility, domestic and sexual abuse, social ostracism, institutionalization, and forced adoption. Through careful close readings of Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938), Beckett’s Molloy (1955), Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), and McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), I unpack how women’s insidious vulnerability to grief and trauma manifests in modern and contemporary Irish fiction. The works I discuss here reveal the depth and complexity of grief—making visible forms of loss and violence that society tends to ignore, working through what impedes the grieving process, and giving voice to underrepresented experiences of emotional and psychological suffering. Over three chapters, I engage with the discourses of trauma theory, Irish memory studies, and modernism and its afterlives. I draw on feminist psychiatrist Laura S. Brown’s discussion of “insidious trauma” to inform my own concept, “insidious vulnerability,” which I use to refer to the persistent threat of loss and violence that haunts marginalized groups in their daily lives. Likewise, I make reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to distinguish trauma from other forms of emotional and psychological distress. I contribute to Irish memory studies by extending the critical conversation beyond public historical events (like the Easter Rising of 1916)—to include private forms of grief and trauma, particularly in the lives of women. Furthermore, I focus on authors who innovate, whose novels exhibit dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional realist narratives and who attempt new modes of representation in an effort to articulate the inexpressible and the unexpressed. Bowen and Beckett stand as representatives of late modernism (1930s-1950s), while Barry and McBride help extend literary modernist afterlives into the twenty-first century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 ont eu un tel impact et un tel retentissement planétaire qu’ils sont parfois considérés comme l’événement historique marquant l’entrée du monde dans le XXIe siècle. Si ce bornage est discutable, l’importance du terrorisme dans la société contemporaine ne l’est pas. Ce travail s’attache à analyser la fictionnalisation de ces événements et à les mettre en perspective avec des fictions sur d’autres attentats-suicides. Il en résulte que l’exceptionnalité du 11 septembre 2001 réside principalement dans sa médiatisation. Cette étude s’organise en trois parties. Dans la première, nous interrogeons l’impact d’un tel événement sur la société ainsi que les enjeux de sa représentation fictionnelle. L’attention est centrée sur l’événement en lui-même, ses dimensions traumatiques et historiques ainsi que la valeur fictionnelle qu’il revêt dans les oeuvres du corpus. Dans la deuxième partie, nous entrons davantage dans les détails des oeuvres et nous observons la problématisation du langage et des discours face à l’événement, ainsi que la nécessité d’avoir recours à l’intertextualité pour aborder le traumatisme présent. Enfin, le parcours effectué dans les deux premières parties aboutit au constat que l’événement n’est pas traité dans le détail et constitue rarement le point central des oeuvres. Ainsi, l’attention se déplace de l’événement vers ceux qui le subissent : les personnages. L’absence d’ancrage temporel très précis nous permet d’élargir notre réflexion. L’étude de la configuration narrative en triple dispositif et l’analyse de la construction des personnages ont orienté notre interprétation des fictions du terrorisme comme une invitation à repenser l’humain et la société qu’il construit / The importance and the huge impact of the 9/11 attacks transformed them into the symbol of the entry of the world into the 21st century. If this status is questionable, the importance of terrorism in our contemporary society is not. This work focuses on the analysis of the fictionalisation of these events and on their comparison to fictions related to other attacks. This leads to the conclusion that the exceptionality of 9/11 is mainly due to its media coverage. This study is organized in three parts. In the first one, we question the impact of such events on society and the issues of their fictional representation. The focus is on the event in itself, on its traumatic and historical dimensions and also on the fictional part it plays in the novels of the corpus. In the second part, we go more and more into the details of the works and we observe the link between language, speeches and the traumatic event, and the necessity to use intertextual relations in order to deal with the present trauma. Then, the process carried out in the first two parts ends to the statement that the event is not represented in its details and is rarely the central point of the works. Thus, the focus slips from the event to those who suffer from it: the characters. The absence of precise temporal anchoring allows us to enlarge our reflection. The study of the narrative structure in a triple plan and the analysis of the construction of the characters lead our interpretation of fictions of the terrorist event as an invitation to rethink the mankind and the society they build.

Written within an existentialist mode, Nakamura Fuminori’s early fictional works lend themselves to be read as therapeutic technologies reaching out to Japanese youth whose lives are marked by anxiety, isolation, and precariousness. Because English-language scholarship on Nakamura is lacking, this thesis analyzes two of his novels – Child of Dirt and Evil and the Mask – in order to introduce how Nakamura understands the human, how his texts function formally as therapeutic technologies, and how, in the final analysis, they exhibit a nascent sexism that borders on misogyny.

In this project I explore the creation of female community in the novels of four contemporary feminist writers: Nicole Brossard, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau. I contend that in their diverse representations of female community, these women writers provide collaborative feminist models of resistance, creative transformation, and renewal. Building on Judith Butler's articulation of agency as variation on repetition, I argue that these writers transform the space of the novel in order to tell these stories of community, revitalizing this form as a potential site of collaborative performance of identity. They offer an alternative vision that is not only feminist and collective, but also transnational, translinguistic, historical, and epistemological - challenging and reconfiguring the way in which we understand our world. I develop the project thematically in terms of coming-of-age through and into female community (what the communities in these novels look like and the relationship between individuals and communities, seen through the process of individual maturity). I then consider the formal construction of female community through the collective narrative voice (both within the novels and outside them, in the form of each writer's collective body of engaged feminist dialogue in interviews and theory). Finally, I explore female community through alternative genealogies and quests for origin (demonstrating the implications of these novels' vision for transforming a more traditional worldview, with transnational communities and the transmission of historical knowledge across generations of women).

This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose.

Migration and exile due to human rights violations have long been key topics in Latin American studies. In the Colombian context, a compelling corpus of texts has surfaced that deals specifically with the phenomenon of forced internal displacement. Colombia is second only to Sudan in terms of the number of victims––some four million people––who have had to leave their homes and communities because of civil unrest. In this dissertation, I consider the socio-political construct of the displaced to be a homogenizing term used by the media and official discourse to refer to those affected by internal exile. This study centres on the uses and impacts of this identity marker at individual and collective levels within a cultural studies approach. In Chapter 1, I discuss three different genres: a novel, which references testimonio accounts, and a play that is partly based on both. The sheer diversity of characters that become part of the displaced category exposes relevant racial, ethnic, and ideological alliances that emphasize us-them relations. An analysis of Luis Alberto Restrepo’s film La primera noche, Chapter 2 deals with the juxtaposition of the rural and urban so as to expose the ramifications of dispossession at multiple degrees of individual and collective identification and examines effects of marginality by contrasting the conditions of the displaced against those of other marginalized populations. In Chapter 3, I argue that music is a tool of both denunciation and declaration through an analysis of a collection of songs written and performed by members of Afro-Colombian displaced communities. I study these vallenato and rap songs, fused with unconventional lyrics and musical elements, as testimonial texts that contest issues of land rights vis-à-vis collective identity and agency. Finally, Chapter 4 is a cross-examination of the shelter within a series of photographs. I first read the refugee centre as a bio-political space where residents are subject to extreme inhumane conditions, and I then show the shelter to be a space that elicits movements of solidarity and resistance, and counters the notion of the displaced as a homogeneous group.