abstract: This dissertation is a study of place and the ways that place plays a role in the stories we tell about ourselves and the ways we interact with the world. It is also the study of a moment in time and how a moment can impact what came before and all that follows. By taking on the subject of 1920s anglophone modernism in France I explore the way this particular time and place drew upon the past and impacted the future of literary culture. Post World War I France serves as a fluid social, political, and cultural space and the moment is one of plural modernisms. I argue that the interwar period was a transnational moment that laid the groundwork for the kind of global interactions that are both positively and negatively impacting the world today. I maintain that the critical work connected to the influence of 1920s France on Modernism deserves a more interstitial analysis than we have seen, one that expressly challenges the national frameworks that lead to a monolithic focus on the specific identity politics attached to race, gender, class and sexuality. I promote instead a consideration of the articulations between all of these factors by expanding, connecting and providing contingencies for the difference within the unity and the similarities that exist beyond it. I consider the way that the idea, history, social culture and geography of France work as sources of literary innovation and as spaces of literary fantasy for three diverse anglophone modernist writers: Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and William Faulkner. Their interaction with the place and the people make for a complex web of articulated difference that is the very core of transnational modernism. By considering their use of place in modernist fiction, I question the centrality of Paris as a modernist topos that too often replaces any broader understanding of France as a diverse cultural and topographical space, and I question the nation-centric logic of modernist criticism that fails to recognize the complex ways that language in general and the English language in particular function in this particular expatriate modernist moment. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

Orientador: Igor Rossoni / Banca: Dinamara Garcia Rodrigues / Banca: Rubens Pereira dos Santos / Banca: Margarida Gandara Rauen / Banca: Luis Carlos Santos Simon / Resumo: O objeto de estudo da pesquisa é a obra O mez da grippe e outros livros (1998) de Valêncio Xavier, escritor contemporâneo influenciado pelas artes visuais, fascinado pela imagem e por textos híbridos. A produção literária labiríntica, eclética está alicerçada nos princípios da montagem cinematográfica, na colagem e na intertextualidade. A vocação multitextual do autor leva-o a construir textos descontínuos, polifônicos, multidiscursivos. De modo não linear, incorpora vários códigos que se entrelaçam formando um mosaico, um caleidoscópio literário. A obra é analisada à luz de referências sobre o pós-modernismo, a fim de discutir a relação entre erotismo e morte na ficção de Xavier. / Abstract: The research is focused on Valêncio Xavier's O mez da grippe e outros livros (1998, The influenza month and other books). Xavier is a contemporary writer who is influenced by the visual arts and is fascinated by the image and by hybrid texts. His eclectic literary production resembles a labyrinth and is supported by the principles of cinematic assemblage, collage and intertextuality. The author's vocation leads him to produce texts that are marked by discontinuity, polyphonic and multi-discursiveness. The result of the juxtaposition of the various codes that he appropriates in a non-linear fashion is a mosaic, a literary caleidoscope. The works are read in light of references about post-modernism, so as to discuss the relation between eroticism and death in Xavier's fiction. / Doutor

abstract: In contemporary Indian literature, the question over which sets of Indian identities are granted access to power is highly contested. Critics such as Kathleen Waller and Sara Schotland align power with the identity of the autonomous individual, whose rights and freedoms are supposedly protected by the state, while others like David Ludden and Sandria Freitag place power with those who become a part of group identities, either on the national or communal level. The work of contemporary Indian author Aravind Adiga attempts to address this question. While Adiga's first novel The White Tiger applies the themes and ideology of the worth of the individual from African American novelists Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, Adiga's latest novel, Last Man in Tower, shifts towards a study of the consequences of colonialism, national identity, and the place of the individual within India in order to reveal a changing landscape of power and identity. Through a discussion of Adiga's collective writings, postcolonial theory, American literature, South Asian crime novels, contemporary Indian popular fiction, and some of the challenges facing Mumbai, I track Adiga's shifts and moments of growth between his two novels and evaluate Adiga's ultimate message about who holds power in Indian society: the individual or the community. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2013

This thesis endeavors to intervene in the manner Plath’s maternity poems have been discussed by examining the psychological negotiations of identity that occurred while the speaker’s in Plath’s poems are pregnant with child. The method of this thesis is also a departure from the historicized criticism and interpretations of Plath’s poems that often conflate the experience of the speaker with the details of Plath’s life. This analysis will focus on the poems “Metaphors,” “You’re” and “Nick and the Candlestick” which feature subtle imagery that not only illustrate the speaker’s preoccupation with her own pregnancy but also constructs a metaphorical representation of the maternal body as the locus for the mother’s negotiation of identity. The different forms that the maternal body is represented through, from inanimate objects to a cavernous opening, allow the speaker to fully explore a broad gamut of emotions related to motherhood. The enlargement and reduction of the maternal body, the use of relational language and local instances of transformation are all motifs and conventions that the speakers in Plath’s poems use to navigate the shifting terrain of individual identity during and after maternity. In examining the more abstract poems related to maternity that depict the maternal body through metaphor, this article endeavors to explore the disparate sensations and experiences conveyed in Plath’s poetry.

A reelaboração de mitos caracteriza, fundamentalmente, a obra do francês Michel Tournier. Nesta pesquisa, procurou-se analisar o romance Le Roi des Aulnes, publicado em 1970, que narra a trajetória de uma personagem fantástica em busca de seu destino em plena segunda guerra, no centro do império nazista. O trabalho foca as estratégias empregadas para construir uma narrativa que vincula tão fortemente questões históricas com elementos míticos, além de investigar o potencial crítico da obra. A partir de bibliografia específica, procurou-se situar o conceito de mito, observar seus aspectos religiosos e políticos e analisar a configuração que o autor deu ao mito em sua obra. De modo geral, a recriação mítica se mostrou um conceito insuficiente para a análise e interpretação literária, pois a limitação do romance em sua esfera mítico-religiosa empobrece a compreensão da obra. A pesquisa revelou ainda que entre mito e história há vários processos de travessia de sentido, que operam graças à fabulação e à criatividade do autor, de modo que os elementos históricos foram incorporados à obra de maneira distorcida, velada, por vezes mitologizada, assim como os elementos míticos e fantásticos conduzem uma crítica severa à ideologia e política nazistas. Os aspectos míticos da obra trabalham em função sobretudo de criar as balizas morais dentro das quais as personagens atuam, além de abrir um espaço para que o leitor participe da construção do sentido da obra na medida em que ele é envolvido pelas regras do sistema mítico configurado. Por sua vez, a historicidade da obra conta sobretudo com a instabilidade dos elementos formais, bem como dos paradoxos e vicissitudes engendrados pelos elementos míticos para indicar, muito mais do que o registro de uma época, a projeção literária de uma dilema histórico. Em outras palavras, este romance é profundamente crítico e historicizante justamente porque ele não conta com uma linguagem realista, descritiva e estável; é no reconhecimento da precariedade da expressão, no momento em que apenas uma linguagem multireferenciada e delirante consegue abordar um contexto histórico problemático que a possibilidade de lucidez e elaboração desponta no horizonte. / The re-elaboration of myths deeply characterizes the work of the French writer, Michel Tournier. The present research focused itself on the analysis of his novel Le Roi des Aulnes, published in 1970, which narrates the trajectory of a fantastic character in a quest for his fate in the middle of World War II, at the center of the Nazist Empire. The research focused on the strategies employed to build a narrative that so strongly links historic issues with mythic elements, aside from investigating the critical potential of that work. From a specific bibliography, it tried to place the concept of myth, observe its religious and political aspects and analyze the configuration that the author gave to myth in his work. In general, mythic re-creation showed itself to be an insufficient concept to the literary analysis and interpretation, since limiting the novel to its mythic-religious sphere leads to poor comprehension of the work. The research also revealed that between myth and history there are several sense transference processes, which operate thanks to the author\'s storytelling and creativity, so that historic elements were incorporated to the work in twisted, veiled and at times mythologized ways, just as mythic elements conduce severe critics to nazist ideology and politics. Mythic aspects of the work operate above all to create moral guidelines within which characters act, besides making room for the reader to participate in the construction of the sense of the work, as he gets involved by the configured mythic system. On its turn, the historicity of this work counts above all with the instability of formal elements as well as of the paradoxes and vicissitudes engendered by mythic elements to indicate, far more than the record of a time, the literary projection of a historic dilemma. In other words, this novel is deeply critical and historicizing precisely because it does not employ realistic descriptive and stable language; it is in the recognition of the precariety of expression - on those moments that only multireferenced and delirious language can approach a problematic historic context - that the possibility for lucidity and elaboration shimmers on the horizon.

In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process," James Baldwin begins by stating, "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone." By the 1960s, Baldwin knew all-too-well the state of black male subjectivity in an America fraught with social disharmony. His musings highlight that while the struggles of black manhood can be reduced to discussions of race, class, and/or sexuality, its fate is primarily governed by a subtler phenomenon, namely—this "state of being alone." Baldwin's consideration is a sort of self-dichotomization, as he is at once both artist and man, and while suggesting that the artist must cultivate "loneliness," he also recognizes the necessity for its avoidance. In this regard, James Baldwin as writer emerges as a critical recourse for James Baldwin as man, becomes the medium through which he, through himself and for himself, reaches a particular end. This project examines the male emotion and vulnerability in the novels of James Baldwin. Within his novels, from Go Tell it on the Mountain to Just Above My Head, James Baldwin foregrounds male relationships in a way that exposes fraternal crises. This fraternal crisis, in one vein, points to this project as a theory of space, as it denotes an absence of male intimacy, a state of being where distance, disconnect, unwillingness and fear shape a symbolic space-in-between men. In another sense, it reflects how Baldwin's preoccupation with the state of being alone leads to his fictional pursuit of the fraternal, a metaphysical construction of spatial manhood detectable by intimacy: the vulnerable, emotional and physical closeness of men. Essentially, the search for the fraternal in Baldwin's fiction captures black manhood's cry for male intimacy in a world of isolation, rejection, and oppression while marking the redemptive power of male love through the emergence of salvific manhood.

This thesis is based on the theoretical framework of memory studies and deals with the question of memory and trauma representation in the prose works of Patrick Modiano, Georges Perec and W. G. Sebald. The thesis analyses a number of their works and focuses on the possibilities and difficulties of representing the traumatic experience of the Holocaust as well as the tension between the authors' personal memory and the collective and cultural memory expressed in post-war literature. Looking at the individual texts, the thesis traces various signs of traumatic narrative displayed in them, such as hypertrophied memory motifs and instruments, disruptions of linear chronology or a specific register that makes elements of extreme experience penetrate into the everyday. The thesis reaches two conclusions: first, that the traumatic narrative scheme is firmly tied to narration per se and reveals its transformative potential; second, that by means of the tools of traumatic narration, the authors find common ground in the ethical imperative of testimony.

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abstract: This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

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