The literary image of the dangerously powerful woman indicates conflict around women's roles in the cultural milieu that gave rise to the text. This interaction between social reality and literary text is most apparent in a culture's legends. Legends may be briefly defined as narratives describing the unordinary to which the audience and/or the teller ascribe the status of reality or at least, plausibility. Underlying the analysis of society-text interaction are two assumptions: (1) the tales regarded by a community as true must at least overtly support the dominant values of that community, and (2) recurring legends point out central concerns of that community. Drawing from Chinese zhiguai (XXXl) collected in the third to sixth centuries and from Sagen compilations made by nineteenth century German folklorists, I argue for the similar function of these texts in the cultural contexts that produced them. There is no question of mutual influence between these two disparate cultural and historical settings. Instead I argue that, cross-culturally, legends featuring female demons and women with supernatural powers indicate conflict around women's roles in family and society. Furthermore, in a given cultural context, the particular characteristics of the supernatural woman in legend provide a mirror for the specific hardships faced and the compensating strategies exercised by women in that cultural system.

Since antiquity western texts have employed representations of consumption to articulate questions of desire and power. Images of eating and drinking serve not only to structure texts but also to question and subvert institutional practices, traditional dichotomies of value, and discourse itself. The primacy of desire is illustrated by a conflation with power that results in a textuality marked by excess. Its two poles are represented by cannibalism and a total refusal to eat; both are forms of absolute desire. Texts dealing with consumption are varied. Theoretical discourse such as Rumohr's Geist der Kochkunst or Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout disrupts traditional notions of genre by equating consumption with discourse. Polysemy and a state of constant metamorphosis are common characteristics of literary texts that concentrate on consumption. Although no unbroken development can be affirmed, earlier works such as Petronius's Satyricon or the Bible emphasize a transcendental aim, while modern ones such as Ror Wolf's Fortsetzung des Berichts stress indeterminacy and the overwhelming presence of death.

No description available.

Like all of Shakespeare's works, The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, has been translated into German and Japanese on numerous occasions. This thesis concerns itself with ten landmark translations of The Tempest, exploring them from a theoretical and historical point of view. The translations surveyed are those by Christoph Martin Wieland (1762), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1798), Heinrich Voß (1818), Richard Flatter (1952), Hans Rothe (1963), Rudolf Schaller (1971), Erich Fried (1984), Tsubouchi Shôyô (1915), Toyoda Minoru (1950), and Fukuda Tsuneari (1975). In The Tempest, Shakespeare's most consistently fantastic play, the Other is represented in magical terms. The results of this thesis suggest that in the translations, which are likewise a representation of the Other, the magical aspects become heightened. My analysis draws on a multitude of recent reconceptualizations of and approaches to translation. These include André Lefevere's description of translation as rewriting, Maria Tymoczko's concept of translation as a metonymic process, Lawrence Venuti's insistence on a translation's heterogeneity, Theo Herman's focus on translation as manipulation and as institution, Itamar Even-Zohar's idea of translation as systemic innovation, and Gideon Toury's emphasis on translators' norms. Chapter one gives the methodological groundings of this study. In order to explain what accounts for the comet's tail of translations that Shakespeare's writings have occasioned in German and Japanese, an outline of the modern history of these two vibrant translation cultures is given in chapter two. Chapter three is likewise an historical account, describing the major trends in Shakespeare reception in these two cultures. Chapter four presents the story of The Tempest and aspects of its critical and staging history. Chapter five investigates the literary language of The Tempest, arguing that Shakespeare's word magic is produced by what is always already a “translated” language. Chapter six delineates the ten translators' positions and strategies, their approaches to Shakespeare, and, where applicable, their specific appraisal of The Tempest. This chapter examines, moreover, how the translational practices of the various translators contribute to the construction of a narrative of national identity in the receptor cultures. In chapters seven and eight, five passages from The Tempest and their respective translations are examined, again with an emphasis on the supernatural and fantastic aspects. In the last chapter, the results are summarized and the rewriting of Shakespearean texts is placed in a global context.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Paul Doherty / Thesis advisor: Michael Resler / This thesis is a case study of translation, based upon the translation of Max Frisch's play "Don Juan: oder, die Liebe zur Geometrie". It includes a brief overview of translation theory from the Romans to the present century, an introduction to the life and works of Frisch and post WWII Swiss literature, and a translation of the full text of the play, complete with notes and observations on the translation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: Germanic Studies. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

A relatively modern genre, the literature of the absurd includes those works of drama, poetry and prose which have in common the theme that the human condition is illogical and without purpose. Having such a world-view, the characters of absurd literature attempt to create programs for investing existence with a modicum of meaning, whether it be simple hedonism, comic detachment or some form of social commitment. The works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and Hemingway exemplify this struggle. / For various reasons, the concerns of living in a world without satisfying existential foundations find frequent and pervasive expression in the twentieth century; however, it is also clear that these concerns are not unique to modern literature. In fact, the notion of the absurd has had a continuing, albeit erratic, development since at least the Greek Heroic Age. The Heroic Code of Homer's Iliad is an ancient paradigm created to generate order in an otherwise preposterous and untenable world. One also finds similar concerns expressed in On the Nature of the Universe, Hamlet and Candide, all recognized masterpieces of the Western literary tradition. Delineating the theme of the absurd in each of these four works demonstrates a long-established preoccupation with the concerns characterizing the literature of the absurd in our century. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-03, Section: A, page: 0645. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

Fictional narrative can be viewed as a communication between a sender and a receiver. In any narrative related by an overt speaker (or writer), "I," we can identify three sender-receiver pairs: narrator and narratee, implied author and implied reader, real author and real reader. While real author and real reader do communicate in a sense, they do so through their implied counterparts. Both the implied author/implied reader and the narrator/narratee pairs are immanent to the narrative text. The implied author and reader can be thought of as structures made up of the various perspectives of the text as a whole while the narrator and the narratee each provides one of these perspectives. By examining, within the context of narrative as communication, the roles and functions of narrator and narratee and their relationship to each other, the structures of implied author and implied reader become more clearly discernible. / The present study is an examination of the perspectives of the overt "I" narrator who tells his own story to a directly addressed "you" narratee and of how they structure the role of the implied reader. The first chapter is a survey and synthesis of the recent work of narratologists such as Genette, Bal, Chatman, and Prince on the concepts of narrator and narratee. It includes a discussion of Iser's conception of the implied reader as a textual structure made up of various perspective, including those of narrator, fictitious reader (narratee), characters and plot. In the type of self-conscious first person narration chosen for this study we see that the perspectives of narrator and narratee are the most dominant in the structure of the implied reader's role. / The following three chapters examine the narrator/narratee roles and relationships in John Barth's The Floating Opera, Albert Camus' The Fall, and Gunter Grass' Cat and Mouse. Each employs a self-conscious "I" narrator of questionable reliability who tells his story to an explicitly addressed "you." Barth's Todd Andrews, adopting the role of "author," addresses a "reader, " whose response to the fictionalized account of his past Todd carefully tries to direct by frequent interruptive commentary. For Todd, this unnamed "reader" comes to take the place of his long dead father. Camus' Jean-Baptiste Clamence, by confessing the ignominies of his past, attempts to persuade an unheard interlocutor to his vision of the world and to an answering confession of duplicity and guilt. Here there is no pretense of authorship. Clamence speaks with no apparent mediation to, and in response to, a companion who occupies the same fictional space in the here and now of the narrating situation. Grass' Pilenz, who purports to write the story of Joachim Mahlke, appears to address himself to several narratees, including the perhaps-dead Mahlke who is the subject of his story. Mahlke, described as "he" in the story, is addressed as "you" in the discourse. An examination of this unusual narrator/narratee relationship reveals that Pilenz's narration is as much his story as it is Mahlke's. / The narrator/narratee relationships in the Barth, Camus, and Grass narratives break or stretch conventions of narrating established by the traditional realistic novel, thereby forcing the reader, in his role as implied reader, to take special note of the narrating act or discourse. In each of these narratives, the discourse becomes a story in its own right, a story in which the narratee's presence is essential to the narrator's attempt to order his past. Thus, the perspective of the narratee must be recognized as pivotal in the structure of the implied reader's role in these first person narratives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-01, Section: A, page: 0205. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

France, although an enemy in the recent war, had always provided a reliable model in times of crisis, and since the seventeenth century, it had remained a static presence in the German consciousness. In the wake of the First World War, France, as an established nation with respected cultural traditions and enduring national myths, functioned as an important 'other' nation against which the Germans could compare their own national development This dissertation examines the Germans' understanding of France as a cultural counter identity in the years 1919 through 1945, calling attention to their repeated recourse to French cultural symbols in their cultural production of these years. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the broader German conceptions of France and its enduring cultural traditions. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the myth of France in general terms, exploring its persistence as a geographical and cultural presence in the German consciousness. As this dissertation will show, many of the traditional French symbols and ideals (the French Revolution, the French Resistance, French patriotism, the notions of the artiste engage, those of liberte, egalite, and fraternite) converged for the Germans in the symbol of Paris and the cultural heritage of France, both of which united for them the broad concept of the 'nation' with particular political, philosophical, and literary traditions. The two following chapters take a much narrower approach to the question of identity/counter-identity, examining the French symbols and heroes which populated German writing of the interwar years and their roles in helping the Germans negotiate their own road to nationhood. The concluding chapter, 'Ewiges Frankreich (Eternal France),' synthesizes the evidence presented in the five preceding chapters and attempts to elicit from these views a better understanding of the German expression 'Ewiges Frankreich,' a phrase which appears repeatedly in the writings of German exiles and soldiers in the 1930s and 1940s / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu