<p> In Jewish Studies in general and Jewish literary studies in particular, the autobiography has taken on renewed significance in the twenty-first century. A recent wave of Hebrew autobiographical writing has reinvigorated long-standing debates about the connections between family drama and national history in the modern state of Israel. This dissertation examines the discourse of selfhood generated by a select group of authors from the 1950s-1990s, the decades immediately preceding the genre's current boom. The "confessional mode of Israeli literary autobiography," as I designate this discourse, exposes the religious underside of early Israeli life writing. </p><p> The proposed genealogy uncovers a heretofore unacknowledged stream of autobiographical writing positioned at the nexus of public and private expression. Starting with Pinhas Sadeh's <i>Hah&barbelow;ayim kemashal</i> (1958), I deconstruct the author's sacred-profane terminology and his embrace of sacrificial tropes. I then explore David Shahar's <i>Kayitz bederekh hanevi'im</i> (1969) and <i>Hamasa le'ur kasdim</i> (1971), two works engaging with the Lurianic kabbalistic mythology of fracture and restoration (<i> tikkun</i>). The next turn in my discussion, Hanokh Bartov's <i> Shel mi atah yeled</i> (1970), focuses on the development of individual memory and artistic identity. Haim Be'er's confessional oeuvre anchors the final two chapters, which reveal the therapeutic and theological motivations behind <i>Notsot</i> (1979) and <i>H&barbelow;avalim</i> (1998). </p><p> My interdisciplinary engagement offers fresh readings of these autobiographical performances. The narratives by Sadeh, Shahar, Bartov, and Be'er deploy memories as a conscious, aesthetic act of self-construction. Riffing on the portrait of the artist as a young man, each author reveals the intimate connections among memory, trauma, and artistic creation. Concurrently, they mediate their religious identities in the new Jewish state, Oedipally rejecting the father's faith. The combination of literary self-reflexivity with spiritual self-accounting (<i>h&barbelow;eshbon nefesh</i>) links these Israeli writers with the classic confessional "double address," which engages both God and the human reader. My analysis thus contributes a new consideration of the relationship between author and audience in modern Hebrew culture. </p>

<p> This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional <i>Bildungsroman</i>. Specifically, I read Jos&eacute; Mar&iacute;a Arguedas&rsquo;s <i>Los r&iacute;os profundo </i>s (1958) and Sherman Alexie&rsquo;s <i>Flight</i> (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border-<i> Bildungsromane</i>, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(<i>dung</i>)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., <i>Bildungsroman</i> and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.</p>

The dynamics between "American" constructions of ethnicity and the aspiration for and resistance to "American" identity are central to this study of several novels marked by their subjects' diverse racial, ethnic, gendered, regional, and class provenance. Beginning with the African-American tradition, I consider how Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) recognize and critique the evolution of race and class politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. These novels, positioned as "bookends" to the troubled history of post-emancipation politics, sharply delineate the problems of self-authorizing "other" voices in dialogue with national identity at the same time that they establish prior historical ground for considering what is at stake in subsequent texts. The major portion of this study concerns four novels from the 1920s and 1930s, and is drawn from two cultures differently absorbed in the dialogicism of borders--urban Jewish New York and Chicano Texas along the Texas-Mexican border. The texts include Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Jovita Gonzalez's and Eve Raleigh's Caballero, and Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez. Among these texts exists a wealth of discourses that constitute rich pre-conditions for current debates on multiculturalism. The juxtaposition of Jewish and Chicano novels suggests parallel problems in cultures marked both by strong religious and secular traditions and by histories of diverse persecutions that finally meet within the contested meaning of Americanization. The worlds these novels reveal assert an ongoing making of an "America" that is fundamentally multicultural in the complex, often fraught negotiation of Anglo hegemony. The uneven parallel between the immigrant Jew who arrives from elsewhere and the colonized Mexican who remains surrounded by colonizers provides variant ways of looking at persistent conceptions of the "New World." If early Anglo mythology has long been dependent on notions of recurrent frontiers harboring "a nation of immigrants" within a consensual state of monologic Anglo hegemony, the shifting continental borders of the U.S. along with the immensity of its ongoing demographic changes have always offered a different model. The ways in which these novels dissect and contest that hegemony give this subject its voice.

This dissertation employs the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche in order to analyze the role of the "rhetoric of seduction" in masculine self-identifications and in transformations of the meaning of masculinity between 1890 and 1918. Seduction is understood as simultaneously a process of disrupting the subject's illusion of a stable masculine identity and a process through which that illusion is regained and sustained. Chapter 1 discusses the competing discourses of corruption and the Platonic model of male bonding in the Oscar Wilde trials and the unstable boundary between self-development and influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter 2 focuses on Andre Gide's construction of an "authentic," masculine homosexual identity in his memoir If It Die and in The Immoralist, arguing that such an identity necessarily contains the impulse of its own internal disintegration. Chapter 3 argues that the vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula resembles the psychoanalyst in facilitating the subject's access to his unconscious but also serving the subject's retreat within the boundaries of a stable ego formation. Finally, Chapter 4 explores E. M. Forster's Maurice as an account of the development of a masculinity appropriate for a "liberal individualist," through an emphasis on the role of sexuality and personal relationships in Forster's political vision.

<p> Compilation encompasses many steps. Parsing turns the input program into a more manageable syntax tree. Verification ensures that the program makes some semblance of sense. Finally, code generation transforms the internal abstract program representation into an executable program. Compilers strive to produce the best possible programs. Optimizations are applied at nearly every level of compilation. Instruction Scheduling is one of the last compilation tasks. It is part of code generation. Instruction Scheduling replaces the internal graph representation of the program with an instruction sequence. The scheduler should produce some sequence that the hardware can execute quickly. Considering that Instruction Scheduling is an NP-Complete optimization problem, it is interesting that schedules are usually generated by a greedy, heuristic algorithm called List Scheduling. Given search-based algorithms' successes in other NP-Complete optimization domains, we ask whether search-based algorithms can be applied to Instruction Scheduling to generate superior schedules without unacceptably increasing compilation time. To answer this question, we formulate a problem description that captures practical scheduling constraints. We show that this problem is NP-Complete given modest requirements on the actual hardware. We adapt three different search algorithms to Instruction Scheduling in order to show that search is an effective Instruction Scheduling technique. The schedules generated by our algorithms are generally shorter than those generated by List Scheduling. Search-based scheduling does take more time, but the increases are acceptable for some compilation domains.</p>

<p> Engagement with global children's literature is an effective way to introduce multiple perspectives into the classroom dialogue. Yet teachers are often unfamiliar with ways of helping students understand diverse cultural practices and beliefs. The result is that global children's literature continues to be an underused resource. </p><p> This action research study looked at 25 highly diverse educator study groups as they used global literature with pre-K - 12 students. The goal was to support the development of intercultural understanding. The study groups received $1,000 grants from Worlds of Words (wowlit.org) to fund their yearlong inquiry. The groups met face-to-face throughout the year to reflect on the interactions taking place in their classrooms. All groups met online on a members-only site. Data collected included proposals, reports, teacher vignettes, and interviews. The data was used to document range of study group structures and interactions with global literature. The study groups and online forum were supported by a grant from the Longview Foundation. </p><p> Through constant comparative analysis, new transformative understandings were identified. Key elements in the development of intercultural understanding included open inquiry, recognition of complexity and multiple perspectives, thinking about culture at a conceptual level, and engaging in open dialogue. Teachers reported an increased understanding of their competence as professionals, their student's competence as problem-posers and thinkers, and the parents' competence as important contributors to intercultural understanding. </p><p> The study concludes with implications for practitioners wanting to engage in classroom inquiries using global literature to support developing intercultural understanding. A second set of implications suggests ways in which the study group process can be made more effective. New questions are proposed for future research related to the use of global literature in various contexts, including classrooms, online professional development, and libraries.</p>

<p> This thesis explores the literary manifestation of patriarchal embodiment in several multicultural novels: Ama Ata Aidoo's <i>Changes: A Love Story, </i> Fadia Faqir's <i>Pillars of Salt,</i> and Jeanette Winterson's <i> Written on the Body.</i> Using theories of embodiment, gender, and power, I analyze how the female body is cast as a surface onto which gendered power structures can be inscribed, as well as the ways in which the body subverts cultural gender norms. The novels exemplify the relationship among literature, culture, and consciousness and offer visions of feminism outside of a Western paradigm. [Trigger Warning: This thesis features instances of sexual violence that may be triggering to some readers.]</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the nature of the anthropological writings of Georg Forster (1754-94), the German world-traveler (who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage in the South-Seas 1772-75), cultural-historian and translator in the late eighteenth century, showing how his anthropology proposes an "ironic" or "sentimental" (in the Schillerian sense) mode of narration. Although many others at the time were exploring what it is to be human, my dissertation argues that Forster's anthropology concerned itself primarily with what it means to <i>write</i> about humanity when one supplements the empirical-rational method of observation with an emphasis on "self-reflexive" and "ironic" (&agrave; la Hayden White) modes of writing anthropology, or the story of humanity. This study therefore focuses on those writings gathered around three salient concepts in his anthropological understanding, to which he returns frequently: observation, narration, and translation, presented in three chapters. The thesis not only undertakes close readings of Forster's texts centering on observation, narration, and translation but, crucially, places them within the historical context of late eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological discourses in Germany. This study ultimately underscores the manner in which Forster's concepts of "sentimental" &ndash; i.e. self-reflexive, ironic, and striving towards the goal of perfectibility &ndash; observation and narration allow him to accept the fragmentary, exploratory, and temporary nature of knowledge about humanity. At the same time, his "aesthetic" &ndash; sentient and open to testing &ndash; translation allows him to engage and educate his readers' tolerance towards a provisional, composite and temporal truth in anthropology. In highlighting the self-reflexive as well as an open-to-testing attitude of Forster's anthropology, this dissertation underscores the mutual interaction between eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological modes of thought.</p>

<p> In December 1911, the public exhibition of Kandinsky's Komposition V shattered the world of Western illusionism as audiences knew and understood it - or so the traditional tale goes. Yet the relative abruptness with which abstraction supposedly shocks the art world not only presents a misleading impression; it in effect creates a great riddle. If the Western art world spent centuries organized under a unifying goal of perfecting imitation, why would it now so suddenly turn its back on its institutional underpinnings by challenging, negating, or exploding the principles it had worked so hard to develop? This project responds by rejecting the presuppositions of the riddle and arguing against the traditional narrative, claiming instead that the invention of abstract art in the 1910s was neither abrupt nor unprecedented, but was already being described, theorized, or created in the 19^th century, only in literature rather than painting. Through close reading and literary analysis, I present three moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist's Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Howards Ehrenged&auml;chtnis" (1821), and Gottfried Keller's Der gr&uuml;ne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write at three different decades, speak through three different genres, and conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a 19^th-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early 20^th century. With such images in circulation well before 1911, this study features the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments essential for abstract artworks to "speak for themselves" in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions involving need, spectatorship, and the self-awareness of the artist. Thus by conceptualizing abstract images in their writing, these three 19^th-century German authors also produce necessary components of the theoretical grounding required for the 20^th-century birth of abstract art.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines strange literary phenomena I call "unfinishable novels," or novels whose very structure and/or worldview would seem to prohibit the possibility of their own "successful" conclusion. Famous examples include Laurence Sterne's <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, Franz Kafka's <i>The Trial</i>, and Robert Musil's <i>The Man Without Qualities</i>. Focusing on a canonical and historically diverse selection of Euro-American texts and authors ranging from Rabelais to Thomas Pynchon, my project not only contributes to the critical literature on my primary texts by examining and contextualizing their "unfinishability," but also suggests a new historiography of the novel by focusing less on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the zenith of the novel's cultural and political importance, but also a period dominated by linear plotlines--and more on periods (early modern and twentieth century) in which the status of endings was far more uncertain, thus tracing something like a "backstage history" of the genre. </p><p> To develop a theoretical-historical framework in which to read these texts, both on their own terms and in the context of the history of the novel, my dissertation puts into practice a "prosaics of unfinishability," a critical methodology that privileges prose and the novel and attempts to be less weighed down by what I call "the poetic prejudice," i.e. the assumption that all literary texts worthy of the name should form organically unified totalities. This prejudice has historically dominated the discourses surrounding unfinished works, which, when they are acknowledged at all, are traditionally described in terms of an author's "failure" to achieve perfection. </p><p> The dissertation is divided into three section ("The Modern Novel," "The Modernist Novel," and "The Postmodern Novel,"), preceded by an Introduction that uses Pessoa's unfinishable <i>Book of Disquiet</i> to articulate a theory of both unfinished works and unfinishable novels, which I define as "novels that can only be completed as unfinished works." The Introduction offers a critique of the traditional poetics of the unfinished work and its corollary rhetoric of failure before describing my own "prosaic" methodology and outlining my project.</p>