Dante the Pilgrim, the main character of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, has his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven recorded by Dante the Poet in poetic form. In the literal sense of things, readers follow Dante the Pilgrim’s journey downward into the infernal hellscape, upward onto a mountain of purgation and atonement, and into the metaphysical world of the divine. Allegorically, however, readers can also choose to view Dante the Pilgrim’s journey through The Divine Comedy as that of a person experiencing the hopelessness of depression, the challenging climb upward and outward of healing after spiraling deeply inward and, then, upon the journey’s conclusion, rejoicing in streams of light as the heavy weight of the darkness—of depression—is lifted. Throughout this thesis, I isolate instances scattered throughout Dante’s poetry that can allegorically represent the journey one undertakes as the fog of depression settles in and the valid possibility of including the medieval work into the practice of bibliotherapy.

<p>This dissertation investigates a turn in the modernist period towards organicist and life-science frameworks to explain political conflicts. How is it, I ask, that organic form comes to be a leading aesthetic ideology in a period in which the reproduction of social relations was in crisis? In my introduction, I frame a historical argument that the remainder of the dissertation draws out in detail: modernism is best understood as a response to the failure of nineteenth-century liberalism's organization of social relations, and a politics of life in different guises—decadence, vitalism, organicism, and everyday life—is modernism's way of conceptualizing alternative modes of social reproduction under new, transnational conditions and pressures.</p> <p>In the first half of the dissertation, I outline how the historical avant-garde's revolutionary aim to merge art with everyday life presumes that life can offer a new foundation for social organization beyond liberalism’s institutional forms. Turning to the Futurists in Italy, I argue for a more complex understanding of how intertwined discourses of national organicism and a revolutionary vitalism resulted in their self-contradicting political program for anti-liberalist and, occasionally, anti-colonial revolution that frequently exceeded its own self-imposed national limits. The dissertation’s second half shows how modernism’s politics of life were eventually recuperated to a liberal consensus in the twentieth century, first in William James’s figure of a new social body traversed by overwhelming and destabilizing sensations, which required better systems of self-management, and which, I argue, anticipates the regulated national space of mid-century welfare state liberalism. Meanwhile, D. W. Griffith's compulsive return to scenes of rebirth in two films, <em>Birth of a Nation</em> (1915) and <em>Intolerance</em> (1916), expresses an ideology of imperial rebirth that rearticulates liberalism as the management of sensations and populations in America’s turn of the century, transnational moment.</p> <p>Focusing on two national contexts in which migration and imperialist expansion were transforming domestic politics, this study extends a recent turn towards transnational articulations of modernity, by reconsidering how the cultural forms emerging in these sites are marked by a biopolitical discourse that reimagines how social reproduction can take place.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This creative dissertation is a novel titled Into the Attic. The novel tells the story of Sullivan Young, a junior at a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s, and James Shelley, a young literature professor at the college, with whom Sullivan initiates an affair. The narrative switches between the points of view of these two men, neither of whom is happy with the person he is becoming, and develops around the fears each has about the relationship. The novel is concerned with character, sexuality, and power; in order to explore these issues fully within Sullivan and Shelley’s relationship, the novel alternates between the two characters’ points of view, thus attempting to illustrate the way the negotiation of power in the relationship also alternates between them as the relationship develops. The novel relies heavily on Sullivan’s and Shelley’s experiences as gay men and uses explicit sex scenes to develop character; therefore, my critical introduction examines the implications of writing a political or social “other” and references writers and critics—such as Dorothy Allison, Wayne Booth, Tillie Olsen, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Calvin Thomas—who have informed my understanding of writing “the other.”

Motivated by the lack of scholarship surrounding female characters in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I sought to examine the distinct identities of four female characters. The collapse of dualities and embodiment of hybridity in Ursula, Pilar Ternera, Amaranta, and the Remedios women reveals the hegemonic power structures that are disrupted by these empowered women. The exploration of these women and their relationships to gendered dichotomies points to the potential of their identities in enacting colonial resistance and reclaiming traditional cultural heritage.

This thesis endeavours to investigate some of the many ways literary works can engage with the tradition of extremism. In so doing, the author hopes to demonstrate the importance of the tradition as a vessel for understanding the world around and within us. In an effort to show the breadth and endurance of this tradition, this thesis critically analyses selected works by Robert Browning, Harold Pinter, and Frank Bidart in context with various other literary works.

This study examines Maya Angelou as a powerful African-American woman in the twentieth century who impacted generations of African Americans. Her biographies and selected works speak strongly and wisely about gender and racial empowerment. This empowerment was sown in her childhood and could be traced throughout her life. It is also a fact that seldom does the realization of one’s race and gender take place at such an early age as with Maya Angelou. She was highly marginalized not only in terms of gender but also in terms of race with acute consciousness.

This thesis discusses Langston Hughes’ poetry and details the African-American experience in a discriminatory society which was an essential theme of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement which enriched American life. Hughes’ body of work covers the entire range of the human experience, especially the experience of ordinary people. He believed that the role of the artist was to cover and illuminate every aspect of people’s lives. Part of this expansive philosophy towards art included giving a voice to African-American women and men who experienced both racist and patriarchal oppression.

This essay outlines the problems associated with the history and current absence of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun in the English language. The combination of the social and grammatical consequences of this language gap results in pronoun choices that are either politically incorrect or verbose. Experts’ attempts to fill this language gap have failed to take root on any widespread basis; but, interestingly, middle school children in Baltimore, Maryland created and started using “yo” as their own gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun. Stotko and Troyer’s (2007) study on this development sheds some light on exactly how students use “yo” as a third-person pronoun and proposes some theories regarding the origin of this change in language. This spontaneously produced gender-neutral pronoun has gained as much recognition as many gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronouns proposed by linguistic experts, perhaps as a result of children’s unique understanding of and ability to create language. This recent development indicates that common English speakers will likely spontaneously generate a solution to the current pronoun gap, although this will probably take some time to occur.

For centuries, people have been telling stories of the traumatic events in their lives in order to deal with the lasting effects of those traumas. This thesis will explore the way Gábor Schein applies this belief to his own writing by focusing on his protagonists’ connection with the Holocaust. In his novels, The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus, Schein uses the protagonists to reveal the process of recovery through storytelling. By applying the theory of narrative therapy to Schein’s writings, it becomes apparent how vital the moments of sharing are for those suffering from trauma. Schein’s protagonists have suffered several forms of mental and physical displacement, but they find a new home and sense of community with the people that they share their stories. Many studies have been done on the effect that trauma has on memory and how those memories, no matter how terrible they may be, can be shared with happiness. Schein’s protagonists engage in social sharing of their stories to build off of each other’s memories and regain a semblance of the community they lost.

When her sister goes missing, Kattel Macé must fly to France to find her. While the police are cooperating, they have no leads to go off of forcing Kattel to start her own investigation. In her search, Kattel stumbles across evidence that implicates her own family members in her sisters mysterious disappearance.