Esta tese procura compreender de que modo a elaboração modernista da colagem e da montagem no romance Manhattan Transfer, de John Dos Passos, expressa e ilumina processos sociais e políticos de seu tempo. Publicada em 1925, essa obra é a primeira a investigar as transformações pelas quais passava Nova York, desde a virada do século XX até o início dos anos 1920, por meio de uma experimentação formal então única na literatura dos Estados Unidos. Além disso, defende-se a especificidade do romance de 1925, o qual não seria apenas uma preparação para a trilogia U.S.A. (1930-1936), mas configuraria um retrato singular do espírito de sua época. A sua forma se revelaria, então, não ruptura, mas continuidade do projeto realista de interpretação da sociedade. Propõe-se igualmente desenvolver uma discussão sobre a complexa interação entre modernismo e cultura periférica no começo dos anos 1920, com base em certa tradição da crítica literária brasileira (da qual os grandes nomes são Antonio Candido e Roberto Schwarz) atenta às relações contraditórias entre o processo de modernização e a forma literária. Nesse sentido, busca-se entender de que maneira a cultura dessa ex-colônia refletiu, pela obra de Dos Passos, sobre a sua própria condição periférica no período em que os Estados Unidos cresciam como potência econômica e militar. Por fim, procura-se mostrar como Manhattan Transfer foi capaz de formular literariamente e tornar visíveis os nexos na época, nada evidentes entre a urbanização de Nova York, a industrialização, a guerra e as novas tendências imperialistas que começavam a despontar. / This thesis looks at how the modernist use of collage and montage in John Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer expresses and sheds light upon the social and political processes of its time. Published in 1925, the book is the first to investigate the transformations undergoing New York from the turn of the 20th Century to the beginning of the 1920s by means of a formal experimentation hitherto unique in the literature of the United States. Moreover, this thesis argues for the specificity of the 1925 novel, which should not simply be understood as groundwork for the U.S.A trilogy (1930-1926), but rather as a singular depiction of the spirit of its time. Its form, accordingly, would prove to be not a break, but rather an unfolding of the realist project of interpretation of society. The complex interaction between modernism and peripheral culture in the early 1920s is likewise addressed here through a discussion based on a certain tradition of Brazilian literary criticism (featuring, among its major authors, Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz) particularly attentive to the contradictory relations between the process of modernization and the shifts in literary form. In this regard, the analysis carried out seeks to grasp in what way the culture of this former colony reflected, though the work of Dos Passos, on its own peripheral condition during the period marked by the rise of the United States as an economic and military power. Lastly, this thesis aims to show how Manhattan Transfer was able to formulate literarily and render visible the links far from evident, at the time connecting the urbanization of New York, the process of industrialization and the new imperialist tendencies that were beginning to emerge.

<p>My dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation to the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to post-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel with three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the institutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the institutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that storytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security politics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> (1956), and <i>The Manchurian Candidate</i> (1962) in the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories cooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the national security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie Lee’s <i>Still Life with Rice</i> (1996), Susan Choi’s <i>The Foreign Student</i> (1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s <i>Memories of My Ghost Brother</i> (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase Korean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance against the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of racial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further reading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s <i>Home</i> (2012), Ha Jin’s <i>War Trash</i> (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s <i>The Surrendered</i> (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories, the Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on Terror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives on healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society. Taken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling that engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual narratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing of the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the “forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.</p>

<p>This dissertation identifies four American novels published between 2016 and 2018—Colson Whitehead’s <em>The Underground Railroad</em> (2016), Jesmyn Ward’s <em>Sing, Unburied, Sing</em> (2017), Celeste Ng’s <em>Little Fires Everywhere</em> (2017), and Tommy Orange’s <em>There There</em> (2018)—that deploy a multifocal narrative structure to facilitate readers’ ethical engagement with their content. Specifically, these novels’ narrative structures guide readers through spatial reading, or reading across numerous characters’ perspectives of a shared space instead of with the grain of chronological time. Contextualizing these novels within the nation’s shifting racial beliefs initiated by the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I argue that, in these novels, multifocalization and the spatial reading it activates dismantle the cognitive schemas and cultural discourses that sustain unjust racial ideologies. Spatial reading engages readers in acts of rereading and contextualization that diverge from the practices of generalization and erasure affiliated with myths of racial progress and the rhetoric of colorblindness, and it accordingly builds readers’ capacity to acknowledge racism as systemic, structural, and multifaceted. By emphasizing how each novel facilitates readers’ racial literacy, this project diverges from and complicates the widespread belief that the humanities contribute to antiracism by building readerly empathy, instead championing how the humanities impart upon readers the tools to analyze and critique systemic racism. </p>

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:45:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Patricia Hradec.pdf: 733412 bytes, checksum: 650b52ba448ff4625df8880300e658ee (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-01-31 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This dissertation aims to analyze the novel Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, the first of ten books in the Vampire Chronicles". The aim of this research is to demonstrate how the vampires presented by Rice are humanized. It begins with a historical study about vampires, both legendary and literary ones, then there is a study about the life and work of the American writer as well as a survey of the differences between the vampires from Rice and others described in the literature, including the icon of the genre: Dracula, by Bram Stoker. The analysis still continues with some theoretical notes on the fantastic genre, including concepts about Todorov, Ceserani, among others. There is also an analysis of the main characters: the vampire Louis who denies his vampiric nature; the vampire Lestat who also fights against human problems; Claudia, the vampire kid, who does not accept her condition as a woman stuck in a child s body; the vampire Armand, one of the oldest vampires in the world that looks for human peace. There is also an analysis of a human character, a supposed journalist, who listens to the story of mortal and immortal life of the vampire Louis. The analysis also covers the time and space in the narrative and its relationship with the fantastic genre, as well as some differences between the book written in 1976 and the film released in 1994, a big hit, reference for many other vampire movies. / Esta dissertação tem por objetivo analisar o romance Interview with the Vampire de Anne Rice que é o primeiro livro dos dez que constituem suas Crônicas Vampirescas . Pretende-se com esta pesquisa demonstrar como os vampiros apresentados por Rice são humanizados. Inicia-se com um estudo histórico sobre os vampiros, tanto lendários quanto literários, depois há um estudo sobre a vida e obra da escritora norte-americana bem como um levantamento das diferenças entre os vampiros de Rice e outros descritos na literatura, entre os quais o ícone do gênero: Drácula, de Bram Stoker. A análise continua ainda com alguns apontamentos teóricos sobre o gênero fantástico, incluindo conceitos de Todorov, Ceserani, entre outros. Há também uma análise dos principais personagens: o vampiro Louis que renega sua natureza vampírica; o vampiro Lestat que também luta contra problemas humanos; Cláudia, a menina vampira, que não aceita sua condição de mulher presa a um corpo de criança; o vampiro Armand, um dos mais velhos vampiros do mundo que almeja a paz humana. Há ainda a análise de um personagem humano, um suposto jornalista, que ouve toda a história de vida mortal e imortal do vampiro Louis. A análise ainda abrange o tempo e espaço da narrativa e sua relação com o gênero fantástico, bem como algumas diferenças entre o livro escrito em 1976 e o filme, lançado em 1994, um sucesso de bilheteria, referência para muitos filmes sobre vampiros.

Essa tese analisa a obra literária dos escritores Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) e Jack London (1876-1916) produzida nos anos 1900-1910, procurando compreender a maneira como se deu o diálogo entre a ficção e a realidade histórica, como aquela produziu uma leitura e uma interpretação desta, sobretudo no que tange às mudanças no sentido histórico do trabalho. Dado o fato de que ambos os escritores em questão viveram num momento decisivo de transformação histórica nos Estados Unidos, quando na transição entre o século XIX e XX se estabeleceram novas dinâmicas sociais e econômicas, articuladas estas com a consolidação do capitalismo de regime monopolista, essas literaturas trazem em seu corpo as cicatrizes históricas dos esforços de adaptação e compreensão desse processo. Atrelada a essa momentosa transição em curso, havia o fato de que ambos os escritores eram trabalhadores, e num momento crucial da formação da classe trabalhadora estadunidense, quando as transformações materiais impunham severas readequações na divisão do trabalho, na organização produtiva estrutural, na estratificação social dele oriunda, nas respostas políticas de resistência deles, e também nos sentidos subjetivos que o trabalho e o trabalhar poderiam possuir. Por conta de tudo isto, a literatura de Sherwood Anderson e Jack London produz uma interpretação ficcional dessa experiência histórica, permitindo com que se rastreie e compreenda como as velhas tradições do \"Evangelho do trabalho\" dos Oitocentos foram sendo brutalmente modificadas pela dinâmica produtiva de ordem fabril, pelo controle financeiro, pela concentração econômica e pela acentuação da exploração capitalista pelo regime monopólico. Essa situação, dadas as particularidades biográficas e os históricos de formação das regiões onde viveram os dois escritores (um do Meio-Oeste, outro do Extremo Oeste dos Estados Unidos), foi traduzida ora como crise de consciência íntima, ora como uma grande crise civilizacional que a punha em pé de igualdade com a selvageria da natureza. Ambas, pois, fornecem ao historiador chaves analíticas com as quais pensar a mudança do lugar e do sentido histórico do trabalho naquele processo, e como essa mudança participava da formação da classe trabalhadora, tanto em sentidos estruturais quanto subjetivos, tanto progressistas como conservadores. / This thesis analyzes the literary work of writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jack London (1876-1916) produced in the years 1900-1910, aiming at understanding the way how the dialogue between fiction and historical reality happened, how the former produced a reading and interpretation of the latter, especially regarding to shifts in the historical meaning of labor. Given the fact that both writers concerned lived in a decisive moment of historical transformation in the United States, when in the transition between the 19th and the 20th century new social and economical dynamics were established, articulated with the consolidation of the capitalism of monopolist regime, these writings bring in their body the historical scars of the efforts of adaptation and comprehension of this process. Attached to this momentous ongoing transition, there was the fact that both writers were workers, and during a crucial moment of the formation of the US working class, when the material transformations imposed severe readjustments in the division of labor, in the structural productive organization, in the social stratification originated from it, in the political answers of resistance from them, and also in the subjective senses that labor and work could have. Due to all that, the literature of Sherwood Anderson and Jack London produces a fictional interpretation of this historical experience, allowing to track and understand how the old traditions of the Gospel of work of the Eighteen hundreds were being brutally modified by the productive dynamics of the manufacturing industry, by the financial control, by the economic concentration and by the intensification of the capitalist exploration by the monopolistic regime. This situation, given the biographic particularities and the historical formation of the regions where the two writers lived (one from the Midwest, the other from the Far West of the United States), has been translated sometimes as a crisis of intimate consciousness, sometimes as a big civilizational crisis that put it on an equal footing with the wildness of nature. Both, therefore, provide the historian with analytical keys with which to think the shift of place and historical sense of labor in that process, and how this shift participated in the formation of the working class, both in structural and subjective senses, both progressives and conservatives.

<p>This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective. </p><p>This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in <i>The Origin of Species</i>and focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in <i>The Descent of Man</i>, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s <i>Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature</i>, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel <i>Quicksand </i>interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel <i>Herland</i>and select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.</p>

<p><i>She Will Be: Literary Authorship and the Coming Woman in the Postbellum United States </i>argues that postbellum women writers deployed the figure of the Coming Woman, an archetype for the nation’s improved female future, to articulate expanded sociopolitical opportunities for women, interrogate prevailing standards of literary art, and validate their own literary pursuits. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the American reading public became increasingly fascinated with identifying who the Coming Woman would be, what qualities she would possess, and how her arrival would alter the nation’s future. Such questions flooded US print culture in the decades between 1865 and 1900, demonstrating that the Coming Woman not only occupied a space between the antebellum True Woman and fin de siècle New Woman but also that she was a major feminine archetype in her own right.</p><p><br></p><p>Even so, existing scholarship on the Coming Woman tends either to identify the Coming Woman anachronistically as an early iteration of the New Woman or, when naming her directly, to overlook her complex function as both a harbinger and manifestation of manifold sociopolitical changes. These limited examinations elide the Coming Woman’s ubiquitous influence on postbellum literary culture, particularly in terms of the complex links Susan Coultrap-McQuin and Lawrence W. Levine have traced between middlebrow culture and postbellum national identity. <i>She Will Be</i> builds on recent scholarship by demonstrating how the American Coming Woman helped reshape notions of women’s literary authorship, modernity, and national identity in the late nineteenth century. By examining her literary life through four key middlebrow genres (<i>Bildungsroman</i>, sentimentality, utopianism, and regionalism), <i>She Will Be</i> reveals how female authors used the Coming Woman figure to imagine—and, indeed, write into being—an expanded vision for the US’s female future.</p>

<p>This dissertation investigates the traumatic legacies of colonialism, imperialism and authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, the diasporic conditions of Southeast Asian refugees in North America after 1975, and the relationship among literature, ethics, and reconciliation more broadly. Focusing primarily on contemporary novels that intervene in the cultural memory of the Cambodian genocide, the War in Viet Nam, and the World War II Japanese Occupation of Malaysia, my dissertation conceptualizes an intimate politics of reconciliation that routes the study of justice foremost through questions of affect, epistemology and ethics. An intimate politics of reconciliation, I argue, encapsulates a constellation of intimate memorial acts—ritual, testimony, collaboration, gifting, and narrative reconstruction—that operate within and against macro-political and juridical modalities of justice. My research highlights productive scenes of convergence between discourses of post-genocide reconciliation and alternative spiritual cosmologies, between refugee collaborative writing and theories of gifting, and between theories of forgetting and social and psychic reparation. In arguing that Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies paradoxically foreground the necessity of both remembering and forgetting in the collective work of reconciliation, this dissertation engages with and challenges two key theoretical paradigms in Asian American Studies—a politics of social justice premised upon a discourse of “subjectlessness” and a psychoanalytic paradigm of productive melancholia theory.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p><i>Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States </i>is an exploration of contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels written in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. Framed in the long tradition of <i>Bildungsroman </i>studies, this study illuminates the structural transformations that the coming-of-age genre has undergone in contemporary diasporic communities. <i>Children of Globalization</i> analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for the tercentennial genre. While the most traditional iteration of the <i>Bildungsroman </i>genre follows male middle-class heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection to become citizens and workers, contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard, narratives of nationhood. Recent changes in the global genre are the direct consequence of the intricacies of the formative processes of culturally-hybrid protagonists who must negotiate their access into adulthood and citizenship, and puzzle over sexuality and gender identity, in host societies that at times regard them with contempt and distrust. The study spans three centuries as it traces both perennial and volatile elements of the genre through its contemporary state. In doing so, it identifies thematic and structural seeds which, planted through the centuries in varied locations, have bloomed into nuanced explorations of the self in an interconnected world where regional and national definitions of identity are increasingly contested and in flux.</p><p>In order to contextualize the genre and provide evidence of its enduring malleability, the study begins in Germany, tracing what I term Proto-<i>Bildungsromane, </i>long medieval narrative poems that follow the formative processes of knights and heroes in grandiose style. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century poem <i>Parzival </i>and the coeval Gottfried von Straßburg’s <i>Die Geschichte der Liebe von Tristan und Isolde </i>ponder the development of the self but too heavily rely on destiny to be considered <i>Bildungsromane. </i>Still in Germany, I illustrate the fundamental characteristics of the genre in Wolfgang von Goethe’s <i>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. </i>In order to showcase the flexibility of the genre, I analyze its early transformations in England in prominent works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and E. M. Forster. The last four chapters focus on the exciting development of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in England, the United States, and Germany. Despite the stark differences between these societies and the particular cultural wealth of diasporic groups that have migrated there, the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel has enabled sophisticated explorations of identity and belonging in all three countries. As the chapter summaries show, contemporary writers have used the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel to untangle complicated formative processes, understand the expectations of their social environments, and achieve different levels of belonging and maturity.</p><p>With <i>Children of Globalization, </i>I seek to deepen our understanding of the exciting influence that contemporary diasporic movements have on the coming-of-age genre in particular and literary studies in general. Additionally, it is my hope that the exploration of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels contributes to a capacious understanding of the important role of literature in the study of migration.</p>

<p>This project argues that industrial fires have the capacity to illuminate the complex entanglements (political, ecological, economic, etc.) of life in the era of industrial capitalism. It retells and reframes the stories of five such fires, each off which shines a light on the networks of social, political, technological, economic, and ecological relationships in particular communities at particular moments. It thus contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies and the environmental humanities, furthering our understanding of the unfolding experience of industrial capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States. It takes the form of a public humanities project and is produced for a popular audience, using journalistic, literary, historical, and other techniques to tell the stories of these fires. In doing so, I also hope to contribute to the expansion of public humanities scholarship and help foster a thriving and creative future for the humanities both in academia and beyond.</p>