In Der Student von Wittenberg Wilhelm Raabe juxtaposes nature and society to show the harmony existing in nature and the lack of harmony in society. Society can be divided into a mental order and an order of force. Within the mental order, education is the element which separates the two orders. When united, the order of force goes astray, leading to conflict or war. The historical dimension of the story spans several centuries, making it as relevant to modern readers as to Raabe's readership. The story's relevance justifies the careful translation of each word and the quest for words that have similar meanings and connotations within their historical framework. Raabe makes us aware of the two orders in society and urges us to educate ourselves to prevent the joining of the two forces.

A comparison of Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes and La vida es sueno by Calderon de la Barca highlights a long tradition of social, religious, and political themes which preoccupied early 17th century Spain. Although one is a novel and the other a play, both works represent in their respective protagonists a gradual awareness, understanding and maturation of the human will in its quest to find meaning and freedom in life. Though one is replete with theological implications, both are essentially philosophical. Both protagonists begin with disadvantages: Don Quijote has a distorted view of reality while Segismundo has been isolated from the world since birth. Yet, as they confront reality, the protagonists overcome their circumstances and gradually unfold a deepened understanding and a meaningful fulfillment of the true human capacity to exert the will and thus determine a life's outcome.

For all they contribute to an understanding of modern lyric poetry, traditional tropological interpretations betray a number of limitations. In particular, the restrictive manner in which they impinge upon the dynamics of a poem and its potential for making meaning is the principal occasion for this dissertation, which postulates an alternative understanding of poetic space in modern German lyric poetry. The "scientific-topographical" method involved, like its terminology, is derived in Chapters I and II from the areas of geography and physics and would reveal a vibrant and expansive spatial dynamics in poetry hitherto subjected--with varying degrees of success--to an exhaustive yet more statically limiting and often exclusively allegorical analysis. This project is pursued with reference to poems by Rilke, Holderlin and Bachmann. The application of the method to Rilke's "Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens" in the third chapter constitutes an exemplary "spatial reading" of the poem, "mapping" as it does a network of dynamically charged landmarks. This example is then followed in Chapter IV with a detailed presentation of the spatial dynamics in Holderlin's "Andenken." As the poetic space unfolds here, the lyrical I is discovered in an unexpected location, one in fact that has until now been completely neglected in criticism of the poem. With the analysis of Bachmann's "Bohmen liegt am Meer" in Chapter V the "scientific-topographical" method is most fully vindicated; for it is here that the dynamic process of "spatialization" practised by the critic finds thematic representation in the creative process practised by the poet. In a concluding chapter a brief consideration of the spatial dynamics in Goethe's "Machtiges Uberraschen"--a poem unlike the earlier three insofar as it has repeatedly permitted an altogether fruitful allegorical treatment--is intended to suggest the method's potential for further and broader application.

El presente trabajo es el estudio de la falta de interlocutores y de como esta falta afecta a todos los personajes en Fragmentos de interior de Carmen Martin Gaite. Para llevar a cabo este estudio, se analizan los personajes, sus relaciones personales y la problematica que ocultan: desde la actitud rebelde, la frustracion sentimental y profesional, hasta los enganos amorosos. Mediante este analisis, vemos que la ausencia de comunicacion lleva consigo repercusiones serias y consecuencias tragicas. Prevalece una falta de interlocutores en Fragmentos de interior, ya que nos muestra no solo una familia, sino tambien una sociedad en crisis. Nos revela la actitud de los personajes ante una sociedad abulica y hostil cuyo sistema continua imponiendose sobre ellos. La ausencia de interlocutores lleva al individuo a un aislamiento personal, a una soledad sentimental, terminando por llegar hasta el colapso social.

Despite the remarkable economic prosperity of the 1990's, Americans purchased enormous numbers of evangelical prophecy novels that specialized in depictions of impending destruction. This phenomenon might appear counterintuitive, as the New Economy, driven by rapid technological development, materially enhanced the lives of many. The economic expansion, however, also revealed cultural fissures indicating deeper concerns about the self and the possibility of its absorption into the technological matrix. Evangelical prophecy writers responded with texts that while deceptively banal, nevertheless made the incomprehensible aspects of the emerging global culture appear familiar to their readers, depicting a world in which humans could regain responsibility over their futures. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins has emerged as the most popular exemplar of the genre in part due to its ability to address post-Cold War themes among a readership less interested in external threats. While Left Behind uses the same symbols as its predecessors, impugning globalization, multinational capital, and the cultural changes consistent with late modernity, its emphasis shifts towards the perceived effects of such developments upon evangelical identity. As the webs of relationships that bind the world together tighten, the novels speak to the anxieties of many evangelicals who feel their identity threatened. Most critically, the novels break with a history of resignation and inaction, proposing a means of resistance against the forces of globalization. The overarching response in Left Behind, however, is more problematic than those advocated by previous novelists, both for evangelicals and others in North American culture. Faced with the twin dangers of isolationism and over-accommodation, the novels suggest different possibilities. The first foregrounds faith, and accepts the ambiguity inherent in contemporary life, while the second, more dominant theme advocates a drive for security and certainty that ultimately incorporates the logic of the Beast culture evangelicals seek to resist, further endangering evangelical identity while increasing tensions with non-evangelicals.

This dissertation examines the evolution and interaction of the public policy debate on reproductive issues in Germany and literary portrayals of crisis pregnancies in German literature and concentrates mainly on literature produced in the 20th century. Clusters of works thematicizing infanticide and abortion appear when public attention is focused on issues of morality and population concerns. The discussion about the rising number of infanticide cases during the late 18th century was accompanied by a cluster of works aligned with the Storm and Stress movement. These works explored injustices committed by the upper classes against the lower classes and evoked sympathy for the woman by depicting the woman's circumstances and motivations. During the Weimar Republic left-wing and left-leaning political parties called for a liberalization of the complete ban on abortions in place since 1871. The plays and novels that appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s explored the class-discriminatory effects of the law. Many depicted young, single, working women, an image that called up both positive and negative cultural connotations including a rational, efficient outlook on life as well as decadence and consumerism. The postwar works fall into three phases. The early works of the 1950s and 1960s explore the issue within the context of war atrocities and question society's view of death and killing. In the mid-1970s, abortion was legalized in the East and liberalized somewhat in the West. A cluster of works appeared in the early 1980s that explores the longer-term effects of abortion on both men and women. Two novels by women written after reunification return to a more direct political message and explore how choice affects women's lives. These last two works represent the opposite viewpoint of the works from the 1920s and 1930s, but like their historical precursors, they are opposed to the prevailing legal status of abortion.

<p> In this project, I focus on the function of the &ldquo;amtal,&rdquo; or test of definition or destruction, in Frank Herbert's <i>Dune</i>. It is my argument that these tests &ldquo;to destruction&rdquo; determine not only the limits or defects of the person being tested, but also&mdash;and more crucially&mdash;the very limits and defects of the definition of humanity in three specific cultural spheres within the novel: the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen, and the Faufreluches. The definitions of &ldquo;amtal&rdquo; as well as &ldquo;humanity,&rdquo; like all definitions, are somewhat fluid, changing depending on usage, cultural context, and the political and social needs of the society which uses them. Accordingly, <i>Dune</i> remains an instructive text for thinking through contemporary and controversial notions about the limits of humanism and, consequently, of animalism and posthumanism. </p>

<p> On a metaphoric level, the zombie is an extremely malleable and dynamic figure because it can act as a template for exploring the hazy definitions of humanity. The trope of the zombie I trace in this dissertation is the performance of an absence: the zombie as fragmented and incomplete human. I examine examples of the zombie in American literature across the last century that reify the absence of something crucial in the ontological makeup of a complete human, a component I term `the absent quale.' In the first two chapters, I establish the trope of the zombie as a figure that lacks a particular quale essential to humanity. Chapter One examines H. P. Lovecraft's zombies in "Herbert West: Reanimator" (1921&ndash;22) in the context of scientific materialism, which denies the existence of the soul. By 1959, when Robert Heinlein wrote his time travel classic "All You Zombies&mdash;," the figure of the zombie as an embodied absence was so established in popular culture that Heinlein's narrator uses the word "zombies" as a metaphor; Chapter Two reads the figurative zombie as a characterization of the fragmented along the temporal dimension. In Chapter Three, I consider Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg's "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970) alongside Walter Benjamin's influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," using the latter's concept of the aura to denote a sort of material analogue to the human soul. I argue in Chapter Four that the bricolage of popular culture motifs that Robin Becker's zombie rehearses throughout <i>Brains: A Zombie Memoir</i> (2010) enacts the postmodern estrangement from an authentic dimension of being. Expanding on this theme, Chapter Five explores the ways in which popular culture dictates reality for the living and the undead members of the pre- and post-apocalyptic American society Colson Whitehead describes in <i>Zone One</i> (2011). </p>

<p> By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Great Britain led the European contest for imperial dominion and successfully extended its influence throughout Africa, the Americas, South East Asia, and the Pacific. National pride in the world's leading empire, however, was laced with an increasing anxiety regarding the unbridled frontier and the hybridization of Englishness and the socio-ethnic and cultural Other. H. Rider Haggard's <i> She,</i> Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula,</i> and Richard Marsh's <i> The Beetle,</i> three Imperial Gothic novels, personify the monstrosity of hybridity in antagonists who embody multiple races and cultures. Moreover, as representatives of various ancient empires, these characters reveal the fragile nature of imperial power that is anchored in the conception of human and cultural evolution. </p><p> Hybridity works to disrupt the fragile web of power structures that maintain imperial dominance and create a fissure in the construct of Britain's national identity. Yet, the novels ultimately contain the invasion narrative by circulating power back to the English characters through the hybrid, polyglot, and metamorphosing English language by which the enemy is disoriented and re-rendered as Other. Using New Historicist and Postcolonial theories, this work examines the aporia of linguistic hybridity used to overcome the threat of racial and cultural hybridity as it is treated in Haggard, Stoker, and Marsh's novels.</p>

<p> <i>Queer Creatures, Queer Times</i> makes a critical intervention in queer theory and queer poetics through a combination of critical and creative approaches to explore how posthumanist thought and animal studies might correct a blindspot in current critical work on queer experience and texts. Queer theory tends to neglect non/human subjects, yet an ecological and posthumanist critique helps to trouble its humanist bias as well as its overly neat ties to constructivist and performative notions of selfhood. I argue that modern lyric poetry, in emergence during the cultural transmission of Darwinian precepts and the social invention of the homosexual, is uniquely situated to challenge the exclusivist principles that underlie specieisim, Social Darwinism, and heterosexism. While queer theory tends to overlook evolution in the construction of subjectivity and sexuality, I posit that such tendencies diminish opportunities for thinking through non-coherent selfhood and the radical contingency of beings upon other life forms. Accompanying my critical essays on three modernist queer poets, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, are my poetics essay entitled "Towards a Poetics of the Animal" and my poetry manuscript <i> Queer Fish.</i> Both poetic texts explore non-dominant forms of queer relation between animals and humans.</p>