Matrixial reading is a new methodology for literary criticism that emphasizes the ethical relevance of literature. Adhering to an interdisciplinary approach, I adopt feminist artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's paradigm of subjectivity-as-encounter, based on the maternal/late pre-natal infant relation, to refigure reading relations. Analyzing selected texts, I show how readers are invited to form an ethical covenant based on matrixial, as opposed to phallic, relations. I discuss exile and the foreign in Dany Laferrière's novels; Marguerite Duras' work provokes an epistemological reflection on ignorance; with Nancy Huston I demonstrate the role of reading in healing trauma.

This dissertation centers on the theme of "the woman warrior," historically grounded in premodern Chinese culture and represented in contemporary Asian American literature as well as in visual art forms. I apply a historical perspective to this interdisciplinary project in order to examine the global evolvement of one particular woman warrior, Mulan's legend, starting from the Northern Dynasties (386-581 A.D.) until the beginning of the twentieth-first century. This work conceptualizes the transmission and transformation of Mulan's story as a palimpsest, thereby highlighting the enduring interplay of continuity and erasure in the construction of her tale in China and the United States. The thesis investigates what the development of her tale reveals to us not only about womanhood, heroism, filial piety, and loyalty in premodern China but also about the construction of female agency, ethnic identity, and cultural origin in contemporary Asian America. Contextualizing Mulan alongside other heroines in premodern China my discussion considers the woman warrior as a paradigm of women warriors at large, thereby addressing Mulan as a culturally and historically rooted image coming out of a fascinating typology rather than as a singular character. Through the phenomenal example of Mulan this dissertation explores representations of female identity in the complex and frequent negotiation between womanhood and warrior value in premodern Chinese society, thus contributing to the current discussion on transnational feminism. By way of scrutinizing the multiplicity and complexity characterizing the "origin" of this particular figure, my research complicates the debate on cultural authenticity in the context of Asian America and the Asian diaspora. By looking at Mulan as a character claimed by various regions in China as their local heroine, the discussion deconstructs the monolithic "China" in Chinese America, and by extension, that of the "Asia" in Asian America. Through examining Mulan as a cross-cultural palimpsest, I hope to broaden our understanding of the interrelations between cultural heritage, gender politics, and ethnicity as exemplified by the global journey of her story and to inspire further scholarly engagement with her warrior sisters in Chinese as well as other cultures.

Early in her reign, in response to Parliament's formal requests that she marry and secure the succession, Elizabeth calls herself the "mother of England." Her metaphorical maternity signals a rhetorical transaction between Elizabeth and her people that stretches across time, space, and genre; writers respond to Elizabeth by modifying the metaphor in order to shape her behavior. Conceptual blending theory, developed by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, provides language to articulate the complexities of Elizabeth's metaphor—to understand how language, culture, and cognition interact to create and modify meaning. Furthering the work of critics who analyze Elizabeth's self-presentation and in light of Amy Cook's work with conceptual blending theory and theater, this dissertation examines Elizabeth's maternal metaphor in her speeches and considers Sidney's Arcadia (c. 1581-82, 1584; published in 1590), Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1588), and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) as examples of responses to and explorations of Elizabeth's mother–queen blend. By manipulating the mother–queen metaphor in various ways, these writers urge Elizabeth to fulfill her responsibilities as a figurative mother: first, through actual marriage and motherhood, and later, as Elizabeth's age led to infertility, by naming an heir. Elizabeth's attempts to control her image through metaphor were thwarted by the very nature of her method. This examination of her metaphor in the context of imaginative writing reveals the malleability of Elizabeth's carefully crafted image.

The objective for this dissertation is twofold: I first examine how the Israeli poet Rahel Bluvshtain-Sela (1890-1931) reclaimed the Hebrew language of the Bible in order to create a Modern Hebrew vernacular. I then evaluate Rahel's creative strategies in light of her contribution to Hebrew poetry and Israeli culture that has evolved since her death more than seventy years ago. My study focuses on the biblical intertextuality in Rahel's poems. In particular, I examine Rahel's creative use of biblical allusions, and the complex ways in which she reflects on and connects with historic memory. This strategy allowed the poet to express her intensely personal experiences in the present as they reflected on a new collectivity. By reclaiming the Hebrew language, which until her time was primarily associated with the religious sphere, this pioneering intellectual integrated the practical aspects of everyday life into both her language and her poetry. My dissertation work integrates hermeneutic literary analysis, as well as analyses of intertextuality, literary history, and translation to explore the relationship between ancient and modern Hebrew in Rahel's poetry. My project is complicated by the fact that I translate a poet who wrote in a fresh new language, one that had not been spoken colloquially for hundreds of years—indeed, Rahel herself was translating from ancient Hebrew into a developing new language. The first chapter of this dissertation is an introduction of my project as well as an overview of Rahel's status as a poet. The second chapter provides an intellectual biography of Rahel, introducing her life in light of her intellectual background and context. This chapter thus goes beyond traditional biographical readings of Ra hel that focus on her personal life, particularly her romantic relationships, and her illnesses and depressions, while removing her from the social context and community in which she lived—a community that she played a key role in creating through her poetry. For the third chapter, I selected poems from Rahel's work that serve as examples for the way in which the poet positioned biblical texts within the new context of the emerging state of Israel. The poems are grouped by sub-topics: (1) Personalities as Destinies—The Bible as the Intimate Other, (2) Writing the Land as Desire, and (3) Between Ideology as Identity and Sense of Self. In order to show Rahel's use of intertextuality with the biblical idiom and content, I introduce each of her poems in the original Hebrew, in English transliteration, and also provide my own translations. The biblical sources are identified, traced and cited at the beginning of each poem analysis. I then provide an extensive prose analysis of each poem in which I analyze the biblical allusions as palimpsestic references that are used to retain the trace of biblical history within a new Hebrew language. The analyses offer a literal interpretation of the poem interwoven with an explanatory discussion, focusing on the biblical themes and language that appear in each poem. Such detailed examination of the selected poems will present Rahel's personal and unique approach to the biblical text, an approach that grasps the Bible not only in a metaphoric way, but also with the intention to highlight collective memories. The final chapter focuses on the popular reception of Rah el's poetry, and is a mosaic reflecting Rahel's influence on the Hebrew language and culture. The section's pieces come from different areas of Israeli life: contemporary poetry, literature and songs, as well as from literary reviews, folklore/cultural features and political editorials in newspapers. The purpose of this look at snapshots of contemporary Hebrew language and Israeli culture will reveal the effectiveness of Ra hel's palimsestic writing strategies for the complex negotiations of personal, spatial and national identities.

This dissertation examines representations of Muslim women in contemporary Germany and considers them in the context of the intensely gendered politics of cultural difference at work. It particularly addresses how immigrant women are understood as Muslim women. As a consequence, immigrant women are considered primarily as representatives of an essentialized and racialized culture. Such discursive reductions ignore immigrant women's participation in the realms of economy, politics, and knowledge production in Germany. The first part of my dissertation critiques representations of Muslim women by revealing the national and nationalist forces that overdetermine these representations. Utilizing transnational feminist cultural studies and feminist deconstruction as my theoretical and methodological underpinnings, I explore representations of Muslim and immigrant women in Der Spiegel from the time of reunification to the present. I then analyze discourses around Germany's headscarf debates in legal texts, newspapers, and court decisions. In the next section I work to theorize potential alternative discursive fields for representing immigrant women. Drawing in particular on Gayatri Spivak's notion of teleopoeisis, I discuss the need for representations and discourses that also imagine immigrant women as political actors, economic agents, and agents of knowledge. I then perform readings of interviews with Muslim and Turkish women as well as of Feridun Zaimoglu's literary rewritings of interviews with Turkish women to consider what a politics of teleopoeisis and careful listening might mean for literary and cultural studies. I suggest that even in texts that explicitly choose their subjects based on participation in a particular "culture," it is possible to read for subjectivities as agents of politics, economics, and knowledge production. The final chapter performs such an alternate reading through an analysis of the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. By reading textual figures for political, worker, and intellectual subjectivities one discovers that Özdamar herself has provided a transnational critique of histories of the political movements of the 1970s. In my concluding chapter I consider the difficulties of interdisciplinary work in relationship to my trainings in Comparative Literature, German Studies and Women's Studies.

Ovid's version of the Philomela legend provides a pertinent analogue from which to examine how verbalizing in silence creates a powerful textual and textural eloquence. The women writers considered in this project--Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Alice Walker (Meridian and Possessing the Secret of Joy), and Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts)--explicitly or implicitly have predicated their works on this legend. Their writing offers a means for inferring a definition of voice that includes text, texture, and silence as its major qualities. But voice does not develop in a vacuum, and the tension existing between speaker and audience constitutes a necessary sounding board for its evolution. These works do not rely on the gods to intervene to save or to punish a character for taking revenge against the source of her enforced silencing. These characters develop the confidence to speak out as they do because of their verbal interplay with their audiences. Philomela's artistry gains power from its text because her audience--her sister, Procne--"reads" the "words" which the pictures in Philomela's tapestry convey to her. For a woman's voice to exert an impression, however, the writer must draw from the cultural context within which those words acquire meaning. Additionally, silence becomes a language tool in its own right since it prompts or inhibits dialogue. This project focuses on the longer silences predominant in a sisterhood sensitive to deciphering unspoken nuances and drawing inferences. The women writers considered here approach their relationships with their respective audiences from at least two vantage points. Sometimes they appeal to an audience in the text itself; at other times, they envision "ideal" listeners. In either case, the writer focuses on audience response to stimulate her creativity in weaving a text from the context of her experiences. Text, texture, and silence overlap and enrich the voices which result, voices which echo Philomela's protest against imposed silence. These women writers use their audiences as sources of inspiration to reveal the underlying strength, creativity, and courage which introspection generates.

In this study we examine the development of the female poetic voice in the Puerto Rican context. Taking from the theoretical frameworks of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and New Historicism we re-read the political, cultural and literary history of Puerto Rico and its relation to the construction of the representations of Woman in texts written by women as well as those by men. In the first chapter we analyze the weight of gender and history in the elaboration of general discourse. We point out how all texts speak from a particular gendered perspective and respond to a historically determined moment which requires critical analysis that takes into consideration these contextual phenomena. From here we begin to re-examine the development of the female poetic creation from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. We study the change of sovereignty and the political, social and cultural impact that this had on the literature of Puerto Rico. Mainly, we look into the gestation of a political-literary discourse created by Puerto Rican intellectuals, who were at the same time, responsible for the political and cultural events of the island. The second chapter explores the creation of a new political project for Puerto Rico which begins in 1940s and culminates with the Commonwealth. In addition, we review the political projects of the Commonwealth which required the active participation of literature since it was through literature that a cultural nationalism would be built, a nationalism that would compensate for the lack of an independent political state. Concluding this second chapter, we re-examine the decades of the sixties and seventies, viewing them as a period of change and of social and political struggle. We study the gradual separation of the literary and political spaces, which allowed a more transgressive discourse as well as a more authentic female voice. The third chapter is a critical analysis of the female poetic voice through the twentieth century. Among the selected poets are: Clara Lair, Haydee Ramirez de Arellano, Marigloria Palma, Angelamaria Davila, Olga Nolla, Manuel Ramos Otero and Mayra Santos Febres.

“Culinary Scapes” analyzes culinary cultural production produced and consumed by South Asians in various “national” sites: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain, Canada and the United States. It juxtaposes contemporary South Asian cultural production to identify the potentials as well as limitations of thinking through culinary practices to understand how South Asian subjects inhabit multiple identitarian locations made possible by particularized relationships to food and culinarity. This juxtaposition of texts reveals that food is implicated in vital ways in a number of cultural, political and economic debates that both produce and contest ideas about gendered national culinary identity. The dissertation uncouples the seamless link between “food” and “nation” in a range of South Asian contexts to argue that food and nation and gender are not naturally linked, but instead are rendered isomorphic within the popular imagination for politically motivated reasons. The first chapter offers a schematic overview of culinarity in different disciplinary locations. It ends with an exploration of the politics of food production in Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala (Spices ). Chapter II analyzes how the rhetoric of cookbooks, including those by Kala Primlani and Madhur Jaffrey, discipline middle class “housewives” in India and the United States into performing versions of Indianness, upholding the values of middle class Hindu India. Chapter III explores how queer desire—routed through culinarity—emerges against the backdrop of the classed and sexualized domestic sphere in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Chapter IV examines how food is embedded in discourses about authenticity and citizenship within diasporic contexts, comparing Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” with Sara Suleri's Meatless Days . Chapter V asks what it means to think “beyond the nation” analyzing the gendered, culinary television and cookbook performances of Padma Lakshmi and Raji Jallepalli as well as the writings of Geeta Kothari. It asks how fusion cuisine can be read against U.S. racial discourses of assimilation and otherness. The final chapter reflects on the politico-economic implications of thinking about food and nation in isomorphic terms by reading Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn alongside debates over basmati rice patenting in South Asia.

The basic characteristic of Postmodern times manifests itself through the dissolution of totalitarian theories. In a more complex and scattered world, postmodern thinking rejects the absolutist interpretations of Big History. This approach implies the multiplicity and acceptance of each and all perspectives that might contribute to a new dimension of a given literary work. We approach this ideology as the end of all ideologies through three critical methods that enhance the textual features as well as the internal contradictions that emerge from the text. The study of the unconscious understood as being structured as language is achieved following the parameters of French anti-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Next, Julia Kristeva's linguistic theories are used to analyze the semiotic content of Tusquets' feminine voices. Finally, the break with the Western system of thought is developed by means of Derrida's deconstructive criticism.

In 1639, a law prohibiting women any head covering; veil, mantilla, manto for example, is promulgated for the fifth time in the Iberian Peninsula under the penalty of losing the garment, and subsequently incurring more severe punishments. Regardless of these edicts this social practice continued. My dissertation investigates the cultural representation of these covered women (tapadas) in Spain and the New World in a vast array of early modern literary, historical and legal documents (plays, prose, and regal laws, etc.). Overall, critics associate the use of the veil in the Spanish territories with religious tendencies and overlook the social component of women using the veil to simply explain it as a mere fashion practice. In my dissertation, I argue that it is more than just a garment; the veil was used by women to make political statements, thereby challenging the restrictive gender and identity boundaries of their epoch. A critical analysis of early modern historical and legal peninsular texts and close-readings of Golden Age literary works, together with colonial cultural productions, allow me to identify patterns in how the tapadas were represented both artistically and culturally. Accordingly, my project attempts to reassess the significance of the tapadas in Hispanic culture for 350 years and demonstrate how their resilience to stop using the veil publicly is symptomatic of the absolutist monarchy inefficiencies in imposing social control. I move away from the tendency to investigate works including tapadas exclusively, and I conclude by reconstructing more accurately their cultural impact on the social dynamics in Spain as well as the New World.