Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 17, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4559. Adviser: Andrew Durkin.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4322. Adviser: Harriet Murav. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-193) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: David Hertz.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3879. Adviser: Aaron B. Beaver.

Is there a direct correlation between the degree of an artist’s participation in ideologically defined discursive practices and the aesthetic value and expressive innovation of her or his work? How does the concept of the implied audience influence an author’s approach to the creative process? How relevant is the author’s own self-projection in her or his works to their aesthetic quality? Examining these and other questions, this dissertation studies the strategies of an artist’s engagement with or disengagement from repressive political systems which are understood here as mechanisms of putting forward demands regarding the artist’s creative output. Questions of late Socialist Realism and its national variants, ideological art, kitsch, mass literature, narodnytstvo (populism), “chimerical” (“whimsical”) prose, totalitarian culture, shistdesiatnytstvo (movement of the generation of the 1960s), and cultural heritage define the theoretical framework of the dissertation. The study discusses the period of the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union, focusing on Ukrainian literature and its dynamics during the Stagnation Era and perestroika. Examples from Russian literature test the argument and provide opportunities for comparative analysis. Within Ukrainian literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the dissertation examines the prose works of Valerii Shevchuk and Volodymyr Drozd and poetry of Petro Midianka and Oleh Lysheha. Within Russian literature, the study discusses Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s prose works and Elena Shvarts’s poetry. The authors and their works illustrate the range of possible attitudes towards participation in the system of Soviet cultural production. Close readings of the authors’ representative works demonstrate how complex negotiations with the system are reflected in the aesthetic quality and expressive ability of literary works. The dissertation shows the significance of the author’s concept of the implied audience and her or his own self-projection as an author for the creative process and its outcome. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines Piero Gobetti’s activity as a student of Russian language and culture, and proposes that it be understood as a formative phase in a larger process of self-construction, through which Gobetti attempted to incarnate the ideal figure of the Genius. Gobetti, an icon of the Italian antifascist resistance, has long been known to have nurtured a particular interest in Russian culture, but the details of his engagement with Russian language, literature and history have generally been left aside in discussions of his accomplishments, or presented as a response to the October revolution. Examination of Gobetti’s personal library, his published writings and correspondence, and the personal papers and correspondence left by his wife, Ada, reveals that Gobetti’s interest in Russia and Russian culture began before the October revolution, however, sparked by the discovery of literary heroes in whom he could see himself reflected. From these beginnings the dissertation traces the development of Gobetti’s Russian studies through language learning, literary translation and criticism to the historical study of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and proposes that the stages of Gobetti’s pursuit of the Russian spirit were driven by a search for images of genius which contributed, in turn, to a larger process of imaginative self-construction. Viewed in this light, Gobetti’s Russian studies appear integral to his life and work, and open a new perspective on his achievements and his heroic myth. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation analyzes medical and literary sources from Russia, Italy, and France in the years 1870-1930. By tracking imagery, rhetorical devices and, above all, emplotment strategies that are employed in medical texts and practices as well as in literary works by Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Svevo, Bulgakov, and Romains, my study argues for the narrative structure of medical knowledge, both in its formulation and its transmission. I address plot-construction as the theoretical node that lies at the core of several practices in the medical field, regardless of their variety and their social and cultural situatedness. Perspective and agency are the organizing principles for chapter subdivision—from the surgeon as the sole author of illness narratives in Chapter 1, on death as the ending, which focuses on the late nineteenth century, we move to the negotiation of that same authorship and authority between doctors and patients in Chapter 2, devoted to the theoretical concept of narrative reliability and tracks the fin-de-siècle emergence of psychoanalysis; from the rhetoric of pharmaceutical advertisement in the 1920s and the diffused authorship it entails, addressed in Chapter 3, we take a post-human turn in Chapter 4, by exploring bodily glands as endowed with narrative agency with the rise of endocrinology and experimental surgery in the years 1900-1930. This formal structure, which shows a gradual shift in perspective and agency as the inquiry moves from one chapter to the next, foregrounds a double historical trajectory that underlies the project– the non-linear transition from the positivist model to the Freudian and post-Freudian stage in the history and epistemology of medicine runs parallel to a gradual and not less problematic evolution of the literary medium. / Comparative Literature

After the onset of the Cold War, literature and culture continued to circulate across the so-called Iron Curtain between the United States and the countries of the Eastern bloc, often with surprising consequences. This dissertation presents a narrative history of literary exchange between the US and Czechoslovakia between 1947 and 1989. I provide an account of the material circulation of texts and discourses that is grounded in the biographical experiences of specific writers and intellectuals who served as key intermediaries between Cold War blocs. Individual chapters focus on F. O. Matthiessen, Josef Škvorecký, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth, and I discuss the transmission of literary works by writers like Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera. I also discuss a range of institutions—from literary magazines and book series to universities and government censors—that mediated the circulation of literature between the US and Czechoslovakia. To reconstruct this history, I draw on a multilingual archive of sources that includes transnational correspondence, secret police files, travelogues, and samizdat texts. A central argument of “Cold War Bohemia” is that the transnational circulation of literature produced new lines of countercultural influence across the Iron Curtain. By the 1970s and 1980s, literary exchange also helped constitute a network of writers and intellectuals who promoted new discourses about the relationship between literature, dissent, and human rights. The literary counterculture that emerged between the US and Czechoslovakia took on many local and contingent forms, but in each case, the circulation of literature allowed a new transnational public to imagine an alternative world beyond Cold War boundaries. / American Studies

The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigraphon only extant in a fourteenth century Old Church Slavonic manuscript, has not received much attention from scholars of Ancient Judaism, due in part to a lack of readily available information regarding the history and transmission of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. This dissertation examines the historical context of these works with the aim of assessing the probability that they contain ancient Jewish material. The rest of the dissertation is focused on the Apocalypse of Abraham specifically, discussing its date and provenance, original language, probability that it comes from Essene circles, textual unity, and Christian interpolations. This includes treatments of the issue of free will, determinism, and predestination in the Apocalypse of Abraham as well as the methodological complexities in trying to distinguish between early Jewish and Christian works. It also provides an in-depth comparison of the Apocalypse of Abraham with 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch and takes up the question of the social setting for these texts based on relevant precedents set by recent scholars of midrash who seek to probe the “socio-cultural and historical situatedness” of midrashic texts. This discussion includes a survey of parallels between the content of the Apocalypse of Abraham and rabbinic literature to support the argument that a sharp distinction between apocalyptic ideas and what later became rabbinic tradition did not exist in the time between 70 and 135 C.E. Overall, this dissertation argues that the Apocalypse of Abraham is an early Jewish document written during the decades following the destruction of the Second Temple. While seeking to warn its readers of the dangers of idolatry in light of the apocalyptic judgment still to come, it also provides sustained exegesis of Genesis 15, which gives cohesion to the entire document.

Abstract not available.