<p>This dissertation compares the responses of Italian Jewish and Catholic intellectuals to the process of secularization and modernization triggered by Italian national unification (1861-1870). Arguing that, in the case of Italy, the borders separating Jewish and Catholic communities have been more porous than generally thought, my research intends to destabilize simplistic historiographical oppositions based on a dichotomous anti-/philo-Semitic approach. In comparing Judaism and Catholicism vis à vis the new, modern, and secular nation-state, I offer a more complex picture of the relation between these two religions. In order to avoid presenting a one-sided account, my comparative approach brings together studies and perspectives from different fields. The first three chapters analyze a wide variety of sources, ranging from official speeches to journal articles, archival documents, and literature. I analyze the Commemoration of the Capture of Rome (1870) given by Roman mayor Ernesto Nathan in 1910 and Salvatore De Benedetti’s 1884 Opening Address at the University of Pisa on The Hebrew Bible as a source for Italian literature, as well as articles published in the Jewish journals Il Vessillo Israelitico and Il Corriere Israelitico, the Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and the anticlerical journal L’Asino. The last chapter focuses on the Jewish historical novel The Moncalvos, written by Enrico Castelnuovo in 1908, investigating the problematic appeal of secularism and Catholicism for a Jewish family settled in Rome. By drawing on this variety of sources, my dissertation both scrutinizes the interrelated role of Jewish, Catholic, and secular culture in Italian national identity and calls for a reconsideration of the starting point of modern Jewish-Catholic dialogue, well before the events following the Shoah, the rise of the State of Israel, and the Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate.</p> / Dissertation

Drawing from tourism studies, travel literature, and cultural studies, this dissertation uses textual analysis to explore the implicit ideological agendas of international development in a selection of popular narratives written to describe efforts of Spanish individuals to combat poverty in “developing” countries: Pura vida (1998) by José María Mendiluce, Una maestra en Katmandú (2002) by Victoria Subirana, Sonrisas de Bombay (2007) by Jaume Sanllorente, and Los colores de un sueño (2013) by Alba de Toro. This study provides a sociological framework for understanding the politics of production, distribution, and reception of such narratives and examines the discourse of individual altruism by juxtaposing the fields of mass tourism, international development and contemporary popular literature. Although development-themed narratives present themselves as depictions of charity work, they are also stories of touristic exploits. This dissertation explores how the colonial myth of the explorer is refurbished in narratives of altruistic development within the postmodern mood of “global consciousness”, which is triggered by globalization, commodification and a sense of uncertainty—factors that produce a relentless drive to “save the world”. Despite the postmodern gloss, however, these narratives exoticize “non-modern” scenarios in which the narrators (adventure development tourists) represent themselves as intrepid white saviors in the style of explorers, missionaries and survivors of the past. In this sense, these narratives depend on traditional travel literature tropes. The deliberate status of these popular narratives as commodities is highlighted, exposing their utility as marketing tools for NGOs. To this end, this dissertation connects the idea of “a good story” to a publishing objective. Reception is approached by exploring the role of interpellation: the subliminal ways in which readers become financial supporters within the context of “global consciousness” wherein altruistic impulses are commodified and incorporated into lifestyles. In this sense, literature plays a key role in formulating and naturalizing the discourse of development. This dissertation exposes the double mechanism at work in development-themed narratives: the pursuit of progressive development used to veil complicity with exploitation.

No description available.

In this dissertation, I examine the evolution of the Gypsy trope in Romantic French literature at a time when nostalgia became a powerful aesthetic and political tool used by varying sides of an ideological war. Long considered a transient outsider who did not view time or privilege the past in the same way Europeans did, the Gypsy, I argue, became a useful way for France's writers to contain and tame the transience they felt interrupted nostalgia's attempt to recapture a lost past. My work specifically looks at the development of this trope within a thirty-year period that begins in 1823, just before Charles X became France's last Bourbon king, and ends just after Louis-Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France in 1852. Beginning with Quentin Durward (1823), Walter Scott's first historical novel about France, and the French novel that looked to it for inspiration, Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), I show how the Gypsy became a character that communicated a fear that France was recklessly forgetting and destroying the monuments and narratives that had long preserved its pre-revolutionary past. While these novels became models in how nostalgia could be deployed to seduce France back into a relationship with a particular past, I also look at how the Gypsy trope is transformed some fifteen years later when nostalgia for Napoleon nearly leads France into two international conflicts and eventually traps the French into what George Sand called a dangerous "bail avec le pass&eacute." In new readings of Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (1845) and George Sand's La Filleule (1853), I argue that both authors personify the dangers of recapturing the past, albeit in two very different ways. While Mérimée makes nostalgia and the Gypsy accomplices, George Sand gives France an admirable Gypsy heroine, a young woman who offers readers a way out of nostalgia's viscous circle. I conclude by arguing that nostalgia and this Romantic trope found their way back into France at the dawn of a new millennium, and the Gypsy has once again been typecast in art and politics as deviant for refusing to dwell in or on the past. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines the narrative and psychological significance of sister relationships in works from late Victorian fiction through literary modernism and contemporary cinema, including Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man, May Sinclair's The Three Sisters, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy, Colette's "The Toutounier," Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and the films of Diane Kurys, Allison Anders, Jane Campion, and Margarethe von Trotta. The study uses various classic and revisionist psychoanalytic approaches to frame the comparative analysis of fictional representations of sisters in selected texts from different historical and cultural traditions. An overview of psychoanalytic responses to the sibling bond yields no single explanatory model. However, contemporary discussions of intersubjectivity and female bonding by Winnicott, Chodorow, Gilligan, Baker, Kristeva and others suggest useful ways of appraising the representation of internal and external bonds between female siblings. From a critique of the Victorian legacy of sisterhood in Schreiner's novel to the role of sisters in "passing" novels to the political and personal conflicts between sisters in von Trotta's cinema, twentieth-century authors and directors have imagined sisterhood in a variety of ways to suggest its enduring influence. Splitting and doubling are recurrent themes in these narratives about sisters whose "transference" relationship with each other exposes their competition and identification, rivalry and attachment. Increased attention to the representation of sibling bonds in literary and cinematic texts allows for new avenues of interpretation of works that have been neglected by feminist and psychoanalytic theory and literary history. The representation of sisters is a missing link in analyses of the "family drama" which have focused exclusively on oedipal and preoedipal conflicts between parent and child. In modern and contemporary fiction and film, traditional patterns of sisterly opposition and competition (the good sister/bad sister model) are retold in the context of the complex role of intersubjective identification and female bonding in women's identity formation. In the works under study, the sister relationship expresses a crucial dimension of women's psychosexual development, which expands our understanding of the meaning of sisterhood beyond that of an idealizing metaphor.

Acting the Child examines the ways in which adult male characters in film and literature from Europe and America can use the role of the child to their political and emotional advantage. As childhood became an increasingly powerful cultural concept, adult men accessed that power to define themselves and organize social relationships. The thesis proposes “infantilization” as a term to describe how these characters act like children or force other characters into the role of the child. The thesis analyzes key moments in the development of infantilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first chapter explores the uses of infantilization, which produce strong effects in Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. These novels demonstrate the ways in which infantilization creates surrogate families in Parisian society. These roles can define and justify extramarital affairs or same sex relationships, which have no legitimate expression. The second chapter demonstrates how H. G. Wells' criticisms of Victorian culture and politics often revolve around male identity such as the scientist-adventurer. As the concepts of boyhood and girlhood solidified, they could describe individual adults or entire social groups. Infantilization was already part of the political discourse, and my thesis demonstrates how Wells challenged these categories. The third chapter extends the analysis of aggressive, masculine characters by examining D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914) and Broken Blossoms (1919) in conjunction with a selection of American recruitment posters for World War I. The analysis shows that World War I had a profound impact on infantilization. Griffith's satirical representation of the man-child subtly criticizes World War I and echoes Wells's attack on Empire. The last chapter explores the effects of the war on infantilization by analyzing three delayed responses: Bernward Vesper's The Trip, Alfons Heck's A Child of Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Like Fassbinder, I find German adults acting like children in order to cope with a troubled present.

In this dissertation, Wor(l)ds in Progress, I intend to offer, as indicated in the subtitle, a study of contemporary migrant writings. In so doing, I assume a double role: that of literary student, in the first part; and that of translator, in the second. My assumption is that both translation and criticism are essential factors in assuring the continuity of literature. During the last decades, the world has rapidly changed. Mass movements of people characterize the contemporary world, and have become fundamental to its new order. The ways of representing, and narrating, the world have changed as well. Much migrant fiction has been written, and much has been written about it. In spite of individual differing positions, there is a general agreement that migrant literature considers, and urges readers to consider, people, places, histories, languages and poetics dynamically, in relation to each other, rather than as mutually exclusive absolutes. From a comparative perspective, I contribute to a conceptualization of migrant literature by analyzing what I consider some of its most representative works. In Part 1, "Words across Worlds" (Chapters 1-4), I examine three texts, each written by a migrant writer, respectively, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore (2003) and Nuruddin Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000), concluding with an account of the recent birth of what might be called a "multicultural Italian literature". In Part 2, "Eccentric Visions of Italy" (Chapters 5-7), I propose the translation of three narratives---two from English into Italian, and one from Italian into English---by three of the authors whose works I examine in the first part---Farah, Phillips, and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah. Together, these texts offer an atypical, complex vision of Italy, challenging traditional ideas of a national, homogeneous, cultural identity. Although this dissertation cannot give a full account of the world's most recent migrant dynamics and their representational strategies, I intend nonetheless to focus on this evolving literary phenomenon through the study of a human experience common to men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories.

This dissertation examines vernacular saint plays in French, Italian, and English from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It focuses on the genre of hagiographic drama as an expression of popular religion and popular culture in the Middle Ages, serving as a test of current theories pertaining to popular culture. Sociohistorical methods are employed throughout the work as a basis for determining the role of religious theater in medieval society. Contextual analyses of theoretical approaches are provided, including New Historicism, the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the work of Victor Turner. The chapters offer information concerning the cultic traditions that gave rise to the saint plays, an examination of social changes related to the performances, aesthetic conventions, and issues of reception.

No description available.

My dissertation analyzes the Spanish Nobel Laureate poet’s transatlantic path and his relationship to Spain, the United States and Puerto Rico as expressed in his archival practices from 1916 (his first trip to the U.S.) until his death in 1958. Jiménez went into permanent exile in 1936, when he and his wife Zenobia Camprubí fled from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During the war and subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Jiménez would live in Cuba, Coral Gables, Baltimore and Washington before settling in Puerto Rico in 1951. In Madrid, supporters of Franco broke into his residence and ransacked his papers, books and personal items ––his carefully-kept life's work–– which would take many years to recover only partially. Jiménez never returned to Spain. He died in Puerto Rico in 1958, not only writing new poems but rewriting, recreating and “reliving” his poems and prose, labors for which he had always depended upon his personal archive. Before his death, Jiménez destined his Nobel Prize earnings to the institutionalization of his archive (Sala Zenobia-Juan Ramón Jiménez, University of Puerto Rico) and to a museum (Casa-Museo Zenobia/Juan Ramón Jiménez) located in his childhood home in the Andalusian town of Moguer. The dissertation presents Jiménez as a steward of memory across borders and studies how the partial recovery of his papers and the establishment of his Sala in the University of Puerto Rico —one of the very first examples of the acquisition of a major writer’s papers in the U.S. or Puerto Rico— coincides with the formation of a national, cultural narrative and with archival practices heavily dependent upon a shifting national conception of Puerto Rican identity. Jiménez was attempting to reconstruct and preserve his work on an island still struggling to establish national, educational, cultural and archival institutions and to recover from the dispersal of its historical documents throughout Europe and in Washington, D.C. My dissertation examines Jiménez’s archive in the context of Puerto Rico's loss and repossession of its colonial archive and modernization of its own archival practices.