Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2004. / Title from title page screen, viewed Jan. 10, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Christopher C. De Santis (chair), Ronald Strickland, Cynthia A. Huff, Alison Bailey. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-193) and abstract. Also available in print.

Contemporary Canadian literature and drama that features racial hybridity represents the racially hybrid soma text as a unique form of embodiment and pays particular attention to the power of the racialized gaze. The soma text is the central concept I have developed in order to identify, address, and interrogate the signifying qualities of the racially hybrid body. Throughout my dissertation, I use the concept of the body as a text in order to draw attention to the different visual "readings" that are stimulated by this form of embodiment. In each chapter, I identify the centrality of racially hybrid embodiment and investigate the power of the racialized gaze involved in the interpellation of these racially hybrid bodies. I have chosen to divide my study into discrete chapters and to use specific texts to illuminate my central concepts and to identify the strategies that can be used to express agency over the process of interpellation. In Chapter One I explain my methodology, define the terminology and outline the theories that are central to my analysis. In Chapter Two, I consider the experiences of mixed race people expressing agency by self-defining in the genre of autobiography. In Chapter Three, I explore the notion of racial drag as represented in fiction. In Chapter Four, I consider the ways in which the performative aspects of racial hybridity are represented by theatrical means and through performance. My analysis of the soma text and racialized gaze in these three genres offers critical terms that can be used to analyze representations of racial hybridity. By framing my analysis by way of the construction of the autobiographical voice I suggest that insight into the narrative uses of racial hybridity can be deepened and informed by a thorough analysis of the representation of the lived experience of racial hybridity in a given context. My crossgeneric and crossracial methodology implicitly asserts the importance of the inclusion of different types of racial hybridity in order to understand the power of the racially hybrid body as a signifier in contemporary Canadian literature and drama. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

ŠUMAVA - NATURE AND PEOPLE - THROUGH THE EYES OF KAREL KLOSTERMANN (with special attention to the frequency,ways and possibilities of individual colours' usage) The aim of this thesis is to designate and describe qualities of the residents of the central Bohemian Forest and the attributes of local nature in the way they were depicted by the writer Karel Klostermann (1848-1923). The results of individual analyses performed in this thesis present the inhabitants of the Bohemian Forest as a society that is conservative, religion-based, maybe even superstitious and bearing a certain distrust to the surrounding world. The Bohemian Forest's landscape is very demanding, the impact of which is visible in the inhabitants' character traits - the increased directness and, in certain aspects, vulgarity of people living under these conditions. Nature is often approached as a literary image that is further developed in accordance with the spirit of impressionism. This is concluded, among other sources, from the specific use of colours that is further analyzed. The emphasis of sense perception pervades almost every descriptive passage.

This thesis starts with an overview of the historical record tied to the birth of a new nation studied by Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Steele Commager. It singles out the works of Henry Nash Smith and Eugene D. Genovese for an understanding, respectively, of the "myth of the frontier" tied to the conquest of the American West and the "plantation myth" that sustained slavery in the American South. Both myths underlie the concept of hybridity or cross-cultural relations in America. This thesis is concerned with the representation or lack of representation of hybridity and the roles played by female characters in connection with the land in two seminal American novels and their film versions---James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind---and Alice Randall's rewriting of Mitchell's novel, The Wind Done Gone , as a point of contrast. Hybridity is represented in the mixed-race bodies of these characters.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:35:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-02-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:07:06Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ando_my_dr_sjrp.pdf: 1180267 bytes, checksum: 8cb754b92a44c5e01ba7b1c6b6d4918c (MD5) / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Na presente pesquisa, realizamos uma leitura de duas narrativas ficcionais de Lygia Bojunga Nunes: Fazendo Ana Paz (1991) e Retratos de Carolina (2002). Na análise empreendida, verificamos alguns procedimentos experimentais relacionados ao fazer metalinguístico, operacionalizados pela autora em seu laboratório poético, a saber: a corporalidade verbovisual, a manipulação da linguagem poética e a construção do foco narrativo. Antes, porém, de nos determos em tais procedimentos, apresentamos dados sobre a autora e sua obra e colocamos em evidência a fábula das narrativas selecionadas e suas respectivas temáticas. Para a análise dos recursos experimentais mencionados, tomamos como fio condutor a noção de performance, em função da natureza metalinguística agenciada nessas narrativas, em que o dizer constantemente coincide com o fazer. É tendo isso em vista que analisamos o fazer escritural lygiano, considerando os seguintes aspectos: performance gráfica, performance linguística e performance enunciativa. Dando início ao exame desses recursos, detivemo-nos na estruturação verbo-visual, por meio da qual o texto, literalmente, se mostra, configurando inusitadas formas de interação entre texto e leitor. Em seguida, examinamos a manipulação da linguagem poética, levando em consideração a noção de jogo e os efeitos produzidos no leitor. Finalmente, analisamos a enunciação narrativa, em seus aspectos relacionados à articulação das vozes discursivas e à dramatização. Em relação ao primeiro aspecto, verificamos os modos como se opera a fusão e alternância de vozes no discurso; quanto ao segundo, em um primeiro momento, voltamos a atenção para a presentificação dos eventos narrativos e, a seguir, analisamos o caráter mostrativo dos signos em sua construção dêitica, em que se privilegia, no processo compositivo, o aqui-e-agora da enunciação / Current research analyzes two fictional narratives by Lygia Bojunga Nunes, namely, Fazendo Ana Paz [Making Ana Paz, 1991] and Retratos de Carolina [Portraits of Caroline, 2002]. The experimental procedures with regard to metalinguistic resources, such as the verbal-visual configuration, the handling of the poetic language and the construction of narration point of view, used by the authoress in her poetic laboratory, are verified. Prior to such procedures, data about the authoress and her literary work are provided and the story of the selected narratives and their respective themes are given. The concept of performance, highlighted for the analysis of experimental resources, is analyzed owing to the metalinguistic nature materialized in these narratives in which narration often coincides with doing. Within the above point of view, Lygia Bojunga‟s writings are analyzed according to the graphic, linguistic and discursive performance aspects. Investigation of these resources is undertaken by studying the verbal-visual structure by means of which the text literally manifests itself and configures uncannily the interaction between text and reader. Further, the handling of the poetic language is examined, taking into account playfulness and its effects on the reader. Finally, the narrative enunciation is analyzed with regard to the articulation and the dramatization of discursive voices. Whereas in the first aspect, fusion and alternation of voices in the discourse are investigated, in the second, the presentification of narrative events and the demonstrative character of signs in their deictic construction are analyzed. Within the composition process the here-and-now of the enunciation is consequently enhanced

Literary descriptions of shifting from and transgressing assigned sex were common in 19th Century Sweden. This thesis forms a contribution to the larger project of writing a history of Swedish trans literature, and develops new interpretations of certain works of fiction by applying a transgender studies perspective. Through trans readings the thesis also examines what potential and possible implications literature might have for trans people beyond the literary realm. Trans readings are able to supplement earlier research by providing a nuanced understanding of the production of trans- and cisgenders. The theoretical perspectives used in the thesis are drawn for the most part from queer and transgender studies. The thesis adopts a conceptual understanding of trans as a movement, and aims to widen the scope of what may be considered relevant to a history of trans literature. The primary objects of analysis are the 1833 autobiography of widely known thief and cross-dresser Lasse-Maja (Lars Molin), C.J.L. Almqvist’s Drottningens juvelsmycke (1834), and Aurora Ljungstedt’s Moderna typer (1874). In closing, two texts from the fin-de-siècle are also closely read; Amanda Kerfstedt’s Reflexer (1901) and Frida Stéenhoff’s “Ett sällsamt öde” (1911). A wide range of other fiction is additionally studied in order to establish a contextual pattern of trans literary traditions. The thesis demonstrates that trans permeates all kinds of fiction, and that the characters analysed construct both trans and cis gender categories. It concludes that trans is done in a variety of ways, and with a variety of meanings in 19th and early 20th century literature. Trans is often depicted as a positive, fruitful and desirable act, through trans characters who are both themselves subjects of erotic desire and who become symbols of liberty and emancipation. Other trans figures however are often counter images of what are considered to be correct sexes, and are depicted as threatening and/or ridiculous. Both these negative and positive representations of trans affirm the gender binary. At the same time, they also break and destabilize that same binary, and the trans characters in the study both can and cannot be interpreted as transgressing cis- and heteronormativity respectively.

Dans l’Amérique et les Caraïbes des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’œuvre du poète national est au cœur d’un trafic d’images qui nourrit un lien social fragile dans un temps où les collectivités reposent moins sur un lien direct entre leurs membres que sur un lien imaginé. Prenant ses distances vis-à-vis des représentations en circulation à son époque, comme les représentations exotiques de la nature, le poète offre une vision démocratique ambitieuse pour l’avenir de la communauté à travers des images nouvelles du territoire, du peuple, de l’esclavage et de l’histoire. L’ethos auctorial encourage l’appropriation de ce discours par le lecteur en désignant le poète comme figure de référence. Mais c’est surtout à travers son procédé d’écriture qui met à mal les normes littéraires de son temps que celui-ci est à même d’influer sur la société. Plutôt qu’ils ne parviennent à saisir l’esprit de leur peuple, Whitman, Martí et Césaire participent par leur travail sur le fragment, les formes populaires ou le tremblement du sens à la création d’un devenir collectif. / In 19th and 20th centuries America and West Indies, the national poet’s works lay at the centre of a traffic of images. This traffic feeds the fragile social ties of young collectivities, at a time when communities are bound by imagination rather than by direct contact between their members. Distancing themselves from the representations of the community circulating at that time, like the exotic images of the New World’s nature, the poet offers an ambitious democratic vision for the future which is channeled through images of the territory, the people, slavery and history. The poet’s ethos encourages the reader to appropriate this discourse by presenting the author as a role model. However, it is mainly thanks to his style, at odds with the literary norms of his time, that the poet is able to act upon society. Whitman, Martí and Césaire do not so much contrive to capture their people’s spirit, as they participate through their work on the fragment, on popular poetical forms or on the destabilizing of meaning, in the creation of a common devenir.