In the past twenty years, autobiography has generated various, sometimes controversial, discussions about its limitations and possibilities as a genre. Questions, such as truth and fiction, life and art, arise when considering the ramifications of an autobiographical endeavor. While not bound to any one theory of autobiography, this dissertation will address some of the essential problems and promises of autobiographical writing as illustrated by the seven contemporary American poets under discussion. Thus, for example, the idea of the representative life comes into focus in the chapter on Robert Lowell, the assimilation of the mask appears in the chapter on John Berryman, the creation of a sui-generic myth occurs in the chapter on Sylvia Plath, the quest for origins and identity emerges in the chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, and both the desire to communicate the self in language and the absurdity of the effort can be seen in the chapter on John Ashbery. In addition to these generic concerns about autobiography, these poets will be placed in light of a literary tradition, advanced by Emerson, which advocates self-examination as a means to self-creation. The influence of an American autobiographical stance, one found in not only Emerson but Whitman and Dickinson, underscores the readings of these poets, as this dissertation attempts to illuminate the commitment toward an invention of self which seems to be part of our heritage.

This dissertation reopens the literature of the thirties by using a concept known in psychoanalytic discourse as "splitting" to analyze four representative works--Call It Sleep, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Unpossessed. In object relations theory, splitting refers to the mental processes of projection and introjection that enable separation of comforting and discomforting thoughts. When subjected to analysis using this concept, new issues appear in each text. The dialectical role of splitting--the integrative and moral function of emotional exorcism--emerges as a central concern for Roth and Hemingway. The relationship of splitting to economic exploitation can be seen in Steinbeck's writing. The aesthetic implications of splitting becomes the topic of discussion when analyzing Slesinger's novel. I base my discussion on the assumption that the brutal ethnic, class, and national divisions of this decade suggest that these texts were conducting a correspondence about the mental position of the nation.

This dissertation analyses the role of popular music in contemporary Spanish culture. The eighties were a fascinating period of Spanish history, as the country was making its transition from dictatorship to democracy, and there were high national and international expectations connected to this change. The popular music of this period amply reflects the changes that the new country was undergoing. This study is theoretically grounded in new trends in Cultural Studies which open up and expand what we understand by “Culture” today. In this new theoretical reconfiguration, popular music today plays a predominant function in the conception of the social and cultural space of Spain. Through the study of these songs, we are able to understand this particular historical moment better, and also see how this culture has shaped us today. In the present “age of mechanical reproduction” (using Walter Benjamin's terminology) we are key contributors to Culture, yet we are also shaped by it. Because of this, all processes of cultural production deserve to be examined. The analysis responds to the recent parameters in contemporary Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies, an area which needs more scholarly attention, reflecting as it does current changes in our world. This work seeks to develop and legitimate a previously neglected and ignored area of study, using an interdisciplinary approach, by integrating different disciplines such as Music, Literature, or History.

An important line of adverse criticism maintains that Faulknerian form reflects only confusion of the mind, thus reducing the felt tragic intensity in Faulkner's fiction to mere emotionalism. Using Nietzsche's philosophy as a model and examining closely four of Faulkner's most discussed novels, this dissertation proposes that the question raised about Faulknerian form has resonances beyond the evaluation of Faulkner's achievements. The clarity of Faulknerian form must be understood in connection with a mode of thought steeped in tragic pathos. At the core of tragic thought is supreme strength: in the modern era, tragic thought invariably begins with the nihilist belief that there is no moral world order; yet it overcomes the value of nil by affirming the plurality of life as the primal fund of creativity. As such, the tragic is the triumph of Art over the rational concept of knowledge, a true reaction to modernity. The tragic defined as an aesthetics of multiple affirmation is the informing idea of this study. In Part I, several implications of the aesthetics relevant to an evaluation of Faulknerian form are discussed: the principle of life, perspectivism, the plural I, tragic pathos. The term tragic reaction is used alternately to suggest that the basic Faulknerian form is an environment of reactions in which the tragic functions as a differential element. Part II is concerned with Faulkner's uses of voice. It is argued, in Chapter 4, that a single voice in Faulkner's fiction manifests the plurality of the ego fatum. In Chapter 5, polyphonic music is used as an analogy to illustrate how Dionysian depth of vision is created in Faulkner's fiction. Each of the four chapters in Part III examines a novel in the light of the defined aesthetics. In Chapter 6, the interaction of nihilisms as embodied by the troubled kinships is identified as the main theme and form in The Sound and the Fury. Chapter 7, concerning Absalom, Absalom!, begins with a premise which undermines any single, superior view of history, namely: history is made and reshaped by various creative uses of remembrance propelled by needs and desires. In Chapter 8, Ike's consciousness in Go Down, Moses is cited as an example of the plural soul. Chapter 9 discusses the joy of the circle as a structuring principle in Light in August in terms of Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

Esta disertacion busca, interdisciplinariamente, un material y un nuevo contexto, desde una perspectiva feminista, como base para analizar, las obras escritas por mujeres y en especifico, las de poetas espanolas del siglo XX, esperando entrar en dialogo con la tradicion poetica patristica. Asi, el Capitulo 1 sirve de marco y guia al material provisto en los capitulos siguientes.El Capitulo 2 narra procesos interdisciplinarios realizados por investigadoras feministas, quienes desde los anos 60 encuentran nuevas narraciones y diversas categorias de analisis producidas por la presencia de mujeres en la historia.El Capitulo 3 sintetiza las diversas etapas y las respectivas prioridades de la critica literaria feminista, especialmente la anglo-americana, desde sus origenes en grupos heterogeneos pro derechos civiles, hasta la organizacion de grupos exclusivamente de mujeres, a la par con la entrada de intelectuales feministas a la Academia.El Capitulo 4, es una bibliografia de 223 poetas espanolas, que presenta su incursion en otros generos literarios y la recepcion inmediata a sus obras en resenas, antologias, prologos, revistas de poesia, anuarios y textos criticos.El quinto capitulo se dedica a poetas y antologias, tanto generales como especificas, representativas del quehacer poetico en la Espana del siglo XX.El Apendice consiste de dos Cuadros antologicos. El primero incluye poetas que aparecen en antologias generales. El segundo, poetas en antologias tematicas, nacionales y/o regionales representativas. Es una nomina de 825 poetas incluidos en 75 de las antologias mas importantes que presentan y/o marginan poetas a la vez que establecen el canon, y su relacion con obras de las poetas rescatadas. Esta disertacion se cierra con una bibliografia (alfabetica y cronologica) de las antologias senaladas.Los trabajos de referencia, dedicados a las escritoras espanolas, han aumentado en los ultimos anos. En ellos, como en este, se busca fomentar el analisis de la amplia participacion de las mujeres no como fenomenos literarios aislados sino como evento que amplia la esfera separatista de cualquier proceso en el que participan las escritoras, o que la integran a un espacio mas amplio que permita ver sus obras dentro de otra nueva historia-literaria.

In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible.

No description available.

Patrick Kavanagh's position in twentieth-century Irish literature is both influential and anomalous. His rendering of rural Irish life leads some critics to emphasize his social realism, while others praise him as a lyricist in the Romantic tradition. This study suggests that Kavanagh's varied and often mixed literary strategies respond satirically to his cultural milieu throughout his career. Kavanagh reclaims the materials of Irish stereotype by placing them in dialogue and by exploiting his own reputation as an "authentic" peasant-poet. Chapter one traces the terms of his social and aesthetic critique that reaches fruition in "The Great Hunger" through the treatment of landscape, agriculture, and rural society beginning with Kavanagh's earliest poems. The use of the theater as a framing device in "The Great Hunger" evokes the stage Irishman and the drama of the Irish Literary Revival in order to redefine the rural subject against its dominant-culture representations. The second chapter examines the figure of the peasant-poet in Kavanagh's semi-autobiographical The Green Fool and in satirical verse-plays. By employing and undermining an ethnic stereotype aimed at his own personal history, Kavanagh satirizes the Irish Literary Revival, Anglo-American modernism, and de Valera's rhetoric of national purity. Kavanagh's responses to the commodification of tradition by Irish nationalism are further examined in the third chapter; his satires play upon the wake and the mummery as customary occasions for social criticism, but do not represent them as artifacts of an essential Irish culture. Chapter four links Kavanagh's critique of nationalist essentialism to modernism's ideology and style, culminating in a reading of "Lough Derg." The poem explores and rejects both social documentary and modernism's fragmentation of experience, setting the Catholic pilgrimage in the context of Irish Partition and isolation during World War II, and ultimately affirming the spiritual dimensions of human change and communication. The fifth chapter concludes that rather than surrendering earlier themes, the Canal Bank poems employ Kavanagh's familiarity with the natural world within a liminal urban setting that reflects his career-long concerns with audience, cultural commodification, and the poet's comic role.

This dissertation analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary novel (1990-2010). Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, I analyze the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions. This study examines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by the novelists Lorenzo Silva, Concha López Sarasúa, Ramón Mayrata, María Dueñas, Fernando Gamboa, Montserrat Abumalham, Javier Reverte, Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, and Donato Ndongo. Their works are representative of a recent trend in Spanish letters that signals a literary focus on Africa and the African Other. I examine these contemporary novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later. In addition, the work of theorists such as Gil Anidjar, Emmanuel Levinas, James C. Scott, Ryszard Kapuściński, Georges Van den Abbeele and Chandra Mohanty contribute to the analyses of specific works. These theorists provide a theoretical framework for my thesis that contemporary Spanish authors are writing Africa in ways that undermine and circumvent the legacy of Orientalist discourse. I seek to highlight the innovative approaches that these authors are taking towards their literary engagement with Africa. The imaginary that pertains to Africa has served an integral role in the history and creation of modern Spain, and it is illuminating to trace the influences that it continues to exert on Spanish writers. In the last thirty years, Spain’s relationship with Africa has dramatically changed through peace treaties, the independence of nations, migratory patterns, tourism, and in other substantial ways. Within this dissertation, I address these changes by focusing on literary representations of political engagement, gender issues, and travel to highlight how Africa is represented in light of these recent developments. As Spanish authors continue to engage with and to write about Africa, this study hopes to show that Orientalism is no longer a prevalent discourse in the contemporary Spanish novel.

<p> This dissertation examines the dissemination of power represented in the works of Panamanian writers Roberto D&iacute;az Herrera, Rose Marie Tapia and Mauro Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z. My work focuses on two important periods in Panama's history: the repressive dictatorial era of Manuel Noriega and the post-dictatorial era during which subjugation and power operate in subtle ways, through institutions, mechanisms of civil society, and globalization. The primary sources are D&iacute;az Herrera's testimony, and the novels of Tapia and Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z. In my analysis, I draw upon the notions of power, subjugation and normalization developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I also draw upon the thoughts of Mikhail Bahktin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Beatriz Sarlo.</p><p> Chapter one presents the historical overview of Panamanian history and its literature. It shows how power, subjugation and normalization have operated in Panama at different points of its history. Chapter Two analyses the political terror of Noriega through D&iacute;az Herrera's <i>Estrellas clandestinas </i> and Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z's <i>El chacal del general. </i> Both narratives are challenges against Noriega, using scenes of actual persecutions, disappearances and tortures. Chapter Three explains how Tapia uses <i>Roberto por el buen camino</i> to denounce a wide range of inequalities existing in the post-dictatorial society. She focuses specifically on the culture of violence perpetrated by the underclass. Chapter four analyses how Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z's <i>Espejo de miserias </i> takes the reader to a deep journey through a diverse range of social problems affecting women in Latin America, focusing on the subjugation and control of women's bodies through prostitution. This chapter uses Foucault's notion of biopower to illustrate how subjugation operates through globalization and the sex trade market. Chapter five uses Tapia's <i>Mujeres en fuga </i> to show globalization and the global market&mdash;through casinos and shopping malls&mdash;manipulating society, and contributing to Panama's socio-economic fragmentation. In addition to bringing attention to the literature of a country that is often ignored in contemporary Latin American Studies, my analysis demonstrates how these writers examine problems and questions concerning the use and dissemination of power that remain vitally important not only in Panama, but also throughout Latin America.</p>