Inaug.-diss.--Strassburg. / Lebenslauf. Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-diss.--Munich. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": prelim. leaves 3-4.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-10, Section: A, page: 4287. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Added t.p., with thesis statement, inserted.

This dissertation examines the themes of subversive language and representations of the body in an eclectic selection of feminist science fiction texts in French and English from a French materialist feminist point of view. The goal of this project is to bring together the theories of French materialist feminism and the theories and fictions of feminist science fiction. Chapter One of this dissertation seeks to clarify the main concepts that form the ideological core of French materialist feminism. Theoretical writings by Monique Wittig, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu provide the methodological base for an analysis of the oppression of women. Works by American author Suzy McKee Charnas and Quebecois author Elisabeth Vonarburg provide fictional representations of what Wittig calls "the category of sex". Imagery that destabilizes our notions about sex is studied in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. French materialist feminism maintains that the oppression of women consists of an economical exploitation and a physical appropriation. The second chapter of this dissertation looks at images of women working and images of (re)production in science fiction by Quebecois authors Esher Rochon, Louky Bersianik, Elisabeth Vonarburg, and American authors Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, James Tiptree, Jr., Suzy McKee Charnas and Octavia Butler. The third chapter examines the theme of justified anger, as expressed in feminist science fiction, when women become aware of their own oppression. In addition to authors already mentioned above, I take examples from works in English by Kit Reed & Suzette Haden Elgin, and in French, by Marie Darrieussecq, Joelle Wintrebert and Jacqueline Harpman. Chapter Four seeks to show the importance of the act of writing and producing a text as a recurring theme in feminist science fiction. Highlighted examples from works by many authors including Elisabeth Vonarburg and Suzette Haden Elgin are representational of what Wittig calls "the mark of gender", the use of pronouns, marked speech and linguistic experimentation and invention.

"A book," write Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , is "an assemblage," one that is connected to "other assemblages." Once it is understood as such, literary interpretation becomes less a quest for meanings in the form of fixed destinations as an investigation into what the book under consideration "functions with." What, in other words, is the relation of "this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.---and an abstract machine that sweeps [it] along?". Specifically, this dissertation examines the production of ethnicity in various North American literary works from the Twentieth Century. Each section juxtaposes "State apparatus-books" with "war machine" ones. The first posit the ethnic group as a minority, as an "objectively definable state", whether of language, ethnicity, or sex, as a subsystem of a Majority, and give emphasis to such strategies as centering, unification, totalization, integration, interiority, hierarchization, and finalization as the means to affirmation. The second posit the ethnic group as "minoritarian" in nature, as a "potential, creative and created," as a becoming "over which they do not have ownership" and "into which they themselves must enter". It attempts to make its reader cognizant of the various strategies by which ethnic groups both empower and delimit themselves in the process of self-affirmation.

Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.

"Displaced Memory: Oscar Micheaux, Carlos Bulosan, and the Process of U.S. Decolonization," uses new applications for existing colonial and postcolonial theories in order to explain common incongruities in ethnic minority autobiographies in early twentieth-century America. Using Carlos Bulosan (1914-1956) and Oscar Micheaux's (1894-1951) "fictional autobiographies" as case studies, I argue that the seemingly contradictory coexistence of assimilationist and subversive narratives can be explained when understood as textual representations of the process of decolonization. Reading these narrators as postcolonial subjects, however, would require both a radical rethinking of colonial and postcolonial theory and careful revaluation of early American mythology. While recognizing the United States as a former (or neo-) colonial power poses no insuperable problem for scholars in Philippine American studies, analyzing other disenfranchised ethnic communities in terms of a U.S. colonial context is more problematic. My project addresses precisely this problem: part one begins with the Philippine context and asks why even this overt example of colonization remains unacknowledged within U.S. cultural memory. The answer to this question is grounded in the literary, political and ideological national foundations emergent during nascent U.S. development. In the second part of my project, I stress the necessity of comparing multi-ethnic experiences within parallel historical trajectories, addressing questions about how a U.S. postcolonial theory would become complicated when applied to slavery and its aftermath. I argue that the unique position of displaced colonials occupied by African slaves and the colonial memory instilled in their offspring suggest the applicability of postcolonial theory to the African American community. Questions of U.S. postcoloniality are invariably tethered to multiple perspectives from early literature, from captivity to emancipation and reconstruction. Thus, understanding the ways in which African Americans have been colonized is important not only for re-reading African American literature like that of Micheaux, but for revising American ideological holdovers from the seventeenth century to the present. Read together within the postcolonial context, Bulosan's and Micheaux's views on nation, race, masculinity and women take on new significance.

This dissertation investigates rhetorical theories and practices in Chinese cultural history. I examine the rhetorics that are explicit and implicit in Chinese philosophical, political, and academic theories and practices. Based on my case studies in Chinese history, I argue that rhetoric is a social, cultural, and historical construct, and rhetoric in the Chinese context is better understood as the study and practice of putting philosophy into social action for practical purposes. These case studies also illustrate that since assumptions about rhetoric are integrally related to particular cultural assumptions, the conventions of "good writing" are also culture-specific. I begin by refuting the notions that rhetoric is entirely Western and that Western rhetoric is universal. Rhetoric is better understood as having a cultural dimension. In the succeeding chapter, I examine the rhetorical expositions and implications of Han Fei-tzu's (c. 298-233 BCE) legalist philosophy. A concept of rhetoric, I argue, is explicitly developed in Han's theories of quan-fu or the art of speaking to convince and shui-shu or the art of advising. I also explore the conceptions of rhetoric that is implicit in his legalist theories of fa, shu, shi, which assume that persuasion and coercion are used simultaneously to preserve social order. In Chapter 3, I argue that the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) provides a good example of how ideology functions as a system of rhetoric. I analyze The Little Red Book as an exemplary ideological discourse to show that the Thought of Mao Zedong, which was the dominant ideology of the Cultural Revolution, determined what was discursive, what was possible, and what was acceptable. In Chapter 4, I argue that Chinese academic writing has always served clearly defined sociopolitical purposes that have historically adapted with changes in political ideology. My analyses in the preceding chapters should give readers an historically grounded sense of Chinese rhetorics. With my case studies as points of reference, I conclude by exploring the implications of this project for the theories of rhetoric and comparative rhetoric. I examine how theories of comparative rhetoric can be developed with historical research on rhetorical conventions, cultural assumptions, and social practices. I also show how such an historically informed comparative rhetoric can be applied to teaching students to negotiate cultural differences in their writing.

Sigmund Freud has much to say about the subject of war and death in his later work, written after 1914. Freud explores the effect of war on the soldier, his adjustment to war, his retreat to the primitive, the development of neuroses in combat, and the soldier's reaction to death. War and death are also important subjects found in German literature of the First World War. The aim of this thesis is to briefly review Freud's ideas on the individual in war, and to juxtapose these ideas to various accounts provided by German soldiers of the First World War. The four works of German World War I Literature used in this comparison are: Im Westen Nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque, Feuer und Blut by Ernst Junger, Seelenleben des Soldaten an der Front by Ludwig Scholz, and Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten edited by Philipp Witkop.