Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-09, Section: A, page: 3375. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.

Acting the Child examines the ways in which adult male characters in film and literature from Europe and America can use the role of the child to their political and emotional advantage. As childhood became an increasingly powerful cultural concept, adult men accessed that power to define themselves and organize social relationships. The thesis proposes “infantilization” as a term to describe how these characters act like children or force other characters into the role of the child. The thesis analyzes key moments in the development of infantilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first chapter explores the uses of infantilization, which produce strong effects in Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. These novels demonstrate the ways in which infantilization creates surrogate families in Parisian society. These roles can define and justify extramarital affairs or same sex relationships, which have no legitimate expression. The second chapter demonstrates how H. G. Wells' criticisms of Victorian culture and politics often revolve around male identity such as the scientist-adventurer. As the concepts of boyhood and girlhood solidified, they could describe individual adults or entire social groups. Infantilization was already part of the political discourse, and my thesis demonstrates how Wells challenged these categories. The third chapter extends the analysis of aggressive, masculine characters by examining D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914) and Broken Blossoms (1919) in conjunction with a selection of American recruitment posters for World War I. The analysis shows that World War I had a profound impact on infantilization. Griffith's satirical representation of the man-child subtly criticizes World War I and echoes Wells's attack on Empire. The last chapter explores the effects of the war on infantilization by analyzing three delayed responses: Bernward Vesper's The Trip, Alfons Heck's A Child of Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Like Fassbinder, I find German adults acting like children in order to cope with a troubled present.

In this dissertation, Wor(l)ds in Progress, I intend to offer, as indicated in the subtitle, a study of contemporary migrant writings. In so doing, I assume a double role: that of literary student, in the first part; and that of translator, in the second. My assumption is that both translation and criticism are essential factors in assuring the continuity of literature. During the last decades, the world has rapidly changed. Mass movements of people characterize the contemporary world, and have become fundamental to its new order. The ways of representing, and narrating, the world have changed as well. Much migrant fiction has been written, and much has been written about it. In spite of individual differing positions, there is a general agreement that migrant literature considers, and urges readers to consider, people, places, histories, languages and poetics dynamically, in relation to each other, rather than as mutually exclusive absolutes. From a comparative perspective, I contribute to a conceptualization of migrant literature by analyzing what I consider some of its most representative works. In Part 1, "Words across Worlds" (Chapters 1-4), I examine three texts, each written by a migrant writer, respectively, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore (2003) and Nuruddin Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000), concluding with an account of the recent birth of what might be called a "multicultural Italian literature". In Part 2, "Eccentric Visions of Italy" (Chapters 5-7), I propose the translation of three narratives---two from English into Italian, and one from Italian into English---by three of the authors whose works I examine in the first part---Farah, Phillips, and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah. Together, these texts offer an atypical, complex vision of Italy, challenging traditional ideas of a national, homogeneous, cultural identity. Although this dissertation cannot give a full account of the world's most recent migrant dynamics and their representational strategies, I intend nonetheless to focus on this evolving literary phenomenon through the study of a human experience common to men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories.