Children’s Literature Grows Up proposes that there is a revolution occurring in contemporary children’s fiction that challenges the divide that has long existed between literature for children and literature for adults. Children’s literature, though it has long been considered worthy of critical inquiry, has never enjoyed the same kind of extensive intellectual attention as adult literature because children’s literature has not been considered to be serious literature or “high art.” Children’s Literature Grows Up draws upon recent scholarship about the thematic transformations occurring in the category, but demonstrates that there is also an emerging aesthetic and stylistic sophistication in recent works for children that confirms the existence of children’s narratives that are equally complex, multifaceted, and worthy of the same kind of academic inquiry that is afforded to adult literature. This project investigates the history of children’s literature in order to demonstrate the way that children’s literature and adult literature have, at different points in history, grown closer or farther apart, explores the reasons for this ebb and flow, and explains why contemporary children’s literature marks a reunification of the two categories. Employing J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as a its primary example, Children’s Literature Grows Up demonstrates that this new kind of contemporary children’s fiction is a culmination of two traditions: the tradition of the readerly children’s book and the tradition of the writerly adult novel. With the fairy tales, mythologies, legends, and histories that contemporary writers weave into their texts, contemporary fictions for children incorporate previous defining characteristics of children’s fantasy literature and tap into our cultural memory; with their sophisticated style, complex narrative strategies, and focus on characterization, these new fictions display the realism and seriousness of purpose which have become the adult novel’s defining features. Children’s Literature Grows Up thus concludes that contemporary children’s fiction’s power comes from the way in which it combines story and art by bringing together both the children’s literature tradition and the tradition of the adult novel, as well as the values to which they are allied. Contemporary writers for children therefore raise the stakes of their narratives and change the tradition by moving beyond the expected conventions of their category. / Comparative Literature

This study traces the cultural interplay between Irish and Old English literary landscapes. Combining an ecocritical approach to reading representations of the landscape with a comparatist perspective, each chapter shows that the landscape and the natural world were not only static motifs, but that they allow for the observation of literary influence. The first chapter investigates the political use of the landscape in Irish and Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives. I argue that the anonymous author of the Life of Cuthbert was following a common Irish hagiographic practice of using place-names to claim churches, monasteries, or lands for the writer’s monastic foundation. Furthermore, Bede was aware of this agenda when he rewrote the Life of Cuthbert some twenty years later and consciously removed many of the place-names that localize Cuthbert’s miracles and ministrations from the text. The second chapter compares the use of the natural world in the Old English Boethius to early Irish cosmological treatises. The Old English translator diverges from Boethius in the amplification of cosmological details (e.g., information about the universe and the elements) that have distinct analogues in early Irish sources. The third chapter examines Grendel’s mere in Beowulf as a reflex of the bog of Germanic pre-Christian worship and as a place which draws on imagery common to insular sources pertaining to hell. Reading the mere as an overlay landscape that places pagan past and Christian present in apposition, I argue that this layered landscape is analogous to landscapes in early Irish poetry and saga. In my final chapter, I explore the paradisiacal landscapes presented in Guthlac A and The Phoenix. These descriptions closely parallel representations of paradise in Irish tradition, especially in contemporaneous Irish poetry. Additionally, like early Irish writers, the Old English poets appropriate the landscape of Eden to reflect and emphasize the spiritual state of the monastic. While scholars have often noted connections between early Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature—though few concerning the representation of the landscape or the natural world—this project is the first study to address the influence of early Irish literary landscapes in Old English works. As such, my dissertation holds the potential to redefine ways of thinking about the transmission of influence between these two early medieval cultures. I show that the landscape and the natural world loomed large in early insular literature in ways that have gone unrecognized, while also providing a model to track the paths of literary influence. My investigations revise the received wisdom about Anglo-Saxon literary landscapes, while contributing to a body of scholarship concerned with connections between early Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

In 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed, “It is useless to deny that philosophy limps…. [In the philosopher’s] assent something massive and carnal is lacking. He is not altogether a real being.” My dissertation is a critical rereading of the Platonic dialogues and their reception through the lens of one key trope: “limping.” I trace limping through philosophical and literary texts and rhetorical treatises – through authors ranging from Plato, Sophocles, and Hippocrates to Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida. I show that this metaphor, a figure for one-sidedness or deficiency, offers new material for the longest and most-footnoted debate, the debate over Platonic idealism. My project is grounded in a sustained re-examination of Plato’s Phaedo – the most body-denying or “somatophobic” of the Platonic dialogues. I demonstrate how the figure of limping works in conjunction with other metaphors of the body – and the figure of Socrates itself, in all its corporeality – to subvert one-sided or somatophobic readings of the Phaedo and of Platonism. Part One of my dissertation looks at the rhetoric of the body; Part Two examines the body of rhetoric. Part One asks how Socrates’ body, in its satyr-like ugliness and strangeness, itself constitutes a deformity in ancient Athens. Examining the philosopher’s “body techniques,” I show that the Phaedo – which is framed by Socrates’ legs and feet – is mediated by the body it denies. Part Two closely examines Socrates’ terminology in the Phaedo’s first argument for the immortality of the soul. Focusing on the Greek abhorrence of nature as a “limping” body, I study associated tropes of completion and incompletion, balance and imbalance, and metaphors that rely on somatic, circular, and compensatory structures (among them, the periodos, or sentence, and the diaulos, the double racecourse). My project, which draws its title from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous characterization of European philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato,” concerns itself with the metaphorical feet, legs, and gait of philosophy itself. In examining the “lame inheritance” the ancients have provided the moderns, my project uses the rhetoric of disability and prosthesis to reframe Classical reception studies. / Comparative Literature

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The cultural turn in Translation Studies is the name given to the shift from an inter-lingual approach to the study of translation to an inter-cultural one. Since the cultural turn, meaning is no longer considered to be reducible to the level of word, sentence or even text within a specific situation of utterance. Instead, culture as a whole is considered to be the prime locus of meaning. Translators, then, are not expected to be simply bilingual, but to be bi-cultural. This thesis is a comparative discourse analysis that explores how pre-existing discourses in English Canada, Quebec and France affect the representation of the United States in print media coverage following terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. More specifically, the impact of the discourse of counter-Americanism in English Canada is analyzed in a corpus of newspaper articles selected from five major Canadian dailies. Similarly, articles from Le Devoir and La Presse are analyzed in relation to the discourse of americanite in Quebec and articles from Le Monde are analyzed in relation to the discourse of anti-Americanism in France. In each case, the construction of an American identity can be traced to the specific geographical, historical, political and economic relationships of each country to the U.S. This means that representations of an American Other serve primarily to support representations of self, thus revealing the relative and constructed nature of national identity. Drawing on scholars in both Cultural Studies and Communications, this study outlines how discourse constructs national identity. In addition, it illustrates how identity discourses affect the construction and interpretation of meaning, thus meriting attention in the field of Translation Studies. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Fictional texts represent a particular challenge for translators due to their use of expressive language. The translation of audiovisual texts in particular is complicated by various institutional and technical constraints. As such, assessing the quality of translated televisual fiction is a complex undertaking that requires an approach more flexible than that prescribed by proponents of textual-linguistic models. This thesis looks at translation quality from another angle, that of audience reception. As a case study, this thesis investigates the reception of the French dubbed translation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a popular American television show characterized by its frequent use of illocutionary elements, including wordplay, neologisms and cultural references. One interpretive community's response to the French dubbed translation is examined through the document analysis of a French chat room thread dedicated to the dubbed version of the show. In order to check the legitimacy of fans' claims, a translated episode of Buff the Vampire Slayer is assessed, with posters' comments informing the evaluation criteria. In particular, the target text is evaluated according to its treatment of illocutionary strategies. The results of the document analysis and the translation evaluation are compared to give a multidimensional perspective on the quality of the target text. The evaluation highlights the prevailing tendency of the target text to omit illocutionary elements in favour of neutral paraphrase, and the document analysis suggests that this tendency may in part account for the chat viewers' largely negative response to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's French dubbed translation.

In this study we examine the origins, development and distribution (popularity) of emblem books throughout western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inherent in such a study is the clarification of the differences between and relationships among emblems, empresas, epigrams and conceits. After a brief review of pertinent traditional and modern criticism on Gongora, we study nine sonnets, a "cancion," the Soledad primera and the Polifemo for emblematic allusions and/or content. All of these works seem to have emblematic allusions; however, many (at least six sonnets, the "cancion" and the beginning of the Soledad primera) are shown to be what we shall call "emblemorphic poems," i.e., poems that are based on specific emblems (one from Cesare Ripa and the others from Andreas Alciati) and then "metamorphosed" into unique, Gongoristic poems. By combining classical mythology, emblematic conceits and autobiographical material, Gongora uses a variety of literary techniques (formulae of elocution, latinization of the lexical and syntactical units, hyperbaton, hyperbole, etc.) to create his own personalized "emblems" or emblemorphic poems. Based upon these findings, we propose at least nine more sonnets as possible emblemorphic sonnets which for a variety of reasons (themes, allusions, "architecture" (form), etc.) would lend themselves to this sort of analysis. We also suggest that the Soledades, the Polifemo and other "major" works be studied "in the light of the emblem." Thus, it can be concluded that Luis de Gongora was, like many of his contemporaries, greatly influenced by the existent emblem literature of his time and, in fact, was one of the more active proponents of crafting these curious visual and conceptual images into his own repertoire of poetic materials and techniques. This then confirms the title of our study and the appropriateness of the label we apply to this complex baroque poet, "Gongora emblematico."

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