<p> The author argues that ecocriticism has overlooked important works of mid-20th-century American literature because of their unorthodox approaches to writing about nature. These unorthodox approaches revolve around the use of humor and play to formulate arguments about nature. The author argues that because ecocriticism as a political critique emphasizes ecological catastrophe, humor and ludic writing tend to get ignored in the critical discussion. The author expresses the desire to expand the conversation on ludic texts. The author argues that two texts with relatively little ecocritical attention, Thomas Pynchon&rsquo;s <i>Gravity&rsquo;s Rainbow</i> and Vladimir Nabokov&rsquo;s <i>Pale Fire,</i> use the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Nietzsche to explain the role of the non-human in human civilization. </p><p> In the first chapter, Vladimir Nabokov&rsquo;s <i>Pale Fire</i> is argued to be a novel that is about the natural source of human aesthetic production. The author synthesizes studies of the novel and argues that Nabokov&rsquo;s novel, both in its language and form, valorizes mimesis as the source of all aesthetic production. Nabokov&rsquo;s belief in some form of design is examined through mimicry, and is found to permeate the novel through structural and descriptive references to games and nature. Nabokov is found to be influenced by the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Johan Huizinga, and Walter Benjamin. Nabokov ultimately finds that the justification for the world is aesthetic, that nature is important to humans as the origin of all artistic impulses. </p><p> The second chapter reads Thomas Pynchon&rsquo;s <i>Gravity&rsquo;s Rainbow</i> through the many references to Nietzsche&rsquo;s <i> Birth of Tragedy,</i> finding that the novel sets nature against civilization according to Nietzsche&rsquo;s distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The author finds that the novel holds up the natural world as a counter-force to the capitalist impulse to control and exploit the natural and human worlds. The author examines how Pynchon uses Dionysian tropes like drunkenness, absurdity, music, and feelings of oneness in the novel in moments of resistance to the dominant order. </p><p> The conclusion suggests that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche ought to be examined as an influential source for modern views on the value of nature. </p>

Focusing on transborder travel narratives by two German authors and one Polish author, “Cold War Crossings” investigates how their writing responds to the postwar demarcation of separate Eastern and Western spheres of influences. Central to each of their oeuvres is the topos of the border broadly conceived, from the material, ideological, and psychic boundaries of the Iron Curtain to the Saussurean bar of the linguistic sign. By presenting border-crossing as an act of both political and aesthetic transgression, these writers advance uniquely literary alternatives to the rigid geopolitical divisions of their age. This dissertation analyzes the way in which each author’s poetics of the border informs, among other things, their manipulation of narrative structure, their unique employment of figurative language, and their shared proclivity for intertextuality, all of which address and reorient different kinds of textual boundaries. In this way, it is a contribution to the ever-expanding field of border studies and other scholarly investigations of the discursive production of mental maps. At the same time, however, the dissertation argues by way of its three case studies for a closer examination of the formal elements of literary texts that often go overlooked in such analyses. Conceived as an interdisciplinary and comparative study, “Cold War Crossings” seeks to overstep barriers between national literatures as well as disciplines by combining cultural studies, literary criticism, and historical analysis. Furthermore, the dissertation’s joint study of German and Polish literatures also contributes to recent debates on Europe as it counteracts traditional Eurocentric approaches that disregard Eastern Europe.

This dissertation examines key texts from the intermediate and mature periods of Vasily Grossman’s career in order to determine the relationship between his evolving philosophy and the poetics that characterize his writing. While significant critique has been applied to the nature of Grossman’s philosophy, comparatively less has looked at the aesthetic and technical aspects of his writing itself; still less to the connection between Grossman’s abstract concepts and his accomplished texts. My effort has been to bridge the gap between these two areas of inquiry and to ascertain the quality of their tightly intertwined and complex relationship. I analyze four of Grossman’s key texts in depth, with reference to several other writings. Of the primary texts considered in my study, two are essays from the writer’s intermediate period: “The Hell of Treblinka” («Треблинский ад») and “The Sistine Madonna” («Сикстинская мадонна»);” of the two longer works, one is Grossman’s multi-volume masterpiece novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) and the other is his novella (повесть) and final fictional work Everything Flows (Все течет). These texts were chosen for their aptness at demonstrating key features of Grossman’s prosody and philosophical thinking, both those that remained constant and those that evolved over time. The following study establishes that Grossman’s writing itself, by means of the formal structures he employs throughout his works, constitutes the embodiment and realization of his ethics. Specifically, the following work considers modes of movement and generation in Grossman’s writing that speak to the value he places on the individual human experience.

The main aim of this dissertation is to provide an English-language edition of the poems written by Aleksander Wat in the last five years of his life (1962-1967), with annotations elucidating the complex literary, intellectual, historical and religious context and publication history of the poems, as well as an extensive biographical-critical essay examining the circumstances in which the poems arose - including political exile, physical pain, and philosophical doubt - and the triad of aesthetic, ethical and spiritual concerns that dominated the poet's final years. The essay also considers the problems of translation posed by Wat's poetry, the role in shaping his corpus and reputation played by Wat's widow Ola, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and the art by Jan Lebenstein used for Wat's book covers. The essay proposes a broader intellectual framework for the understanding of Wat's life and work that draws on Kierkegaard and Jewish studies. The main body of the translations consists of poems of 1962-1967 that Wat published in his posthumous volume Ciemne Świecidło (Lumen Obscurum) and poems written in the same period but not included in the book, some of which were subsequently published in periodicals. The dissertation also includes a basic chronology of Wat's life and contemporary events and a list of the poems translated in the order in which they were composed, to the extent this can be determined from available sources.

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In den zeitgenössischen slavischen Literaturen ist Gewalt allgegenwärtig – als Echo der Revolutionen, Kriege, Diktaturen und Systemumbrüche des 20. Jahrhunderts, als Reaktion auf andauernde und neu ausbrechende Konflikte, als Faszination, Sensation und Kaufanreiz. Gewalt erscheint als narrativ-ästhetischer, tradierter Bestandteil der literarischen Darstellung und als aussagekräftiges, tabubrechendes Motiv. Dieser Band trägt die Ergebnisse einer internationalen Konferenz an der Universität Hamburg zusammen, die sich im Herbst 2012 diesem Thema unter der Trias "Verbrechen – Fiktion - Vermarktung" gewidmet hat. Das breite Spektrum der untersuchten Literaturen (von ost- und west- über südslavische Literaturen, von Prosa über Lyrik und Dramatik) aber auch der Blick über die Literatur hinaus (unter anderem auf Film und Musik), die Vielfalt der Themen, Darstellungsweisen und analytischen Zugänge ergeben ein vielfältiges Bild, das eine Annäherung an die Frage nach den Spezifika literarischer Gewaltdarstellungen ermöglicht. / Violence is omnipresent in contemporary Slavic literatures: in response to revolutions, wars, dictatorships and changes of regimes in the 20th century, and as a reaction to continuing and new conflicts, as fascination, sensation and sales appeal. Violence appears as a narrative-aesthetic, traditional part of literature and as a meaningful and taboo-breaking motif. In September 2012, an international conference at Hamburg University dealt with this topic entitled "Crime – Fiction – Commercialisation". This volume presents the results of this conference. The wide range of the analyzed literatures and genres (Eastern, Western and South Slavic literatures, prose, poetry and drama), the look beyond the borders of literature to film and music, the variety of topics, ways of representation and analytical approaches create a polyphonic picture that allows us to discuss the specific character of the presentation of violence in literature.

Double exposure has often been used as a metaphor for the condition of emigration: of being between two places simultaneously, of layering the memory of one place onto another. To extend the metaphor of double exposure, this study turns to the medium of photography itself to explore how it functions within Russian émigré narratives of the self. I examine how Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Gary Shteyngart, and the visual artist Ilya Kabakov use photographs in their autobiographical works—from literary memoirs to art installations—as a device for representing the divided self in emigration. “Double exposure” works as a flexible concept in this dissertation: as a metaphor for exilic double consciousness; for the autobiographical tension between multiple selves; and as a model for the composite structure of these texts that join together word and image. Bringing together photography and autobiography in this study, I explore how the “objective” medium of photography offers these authors a version of the self as visual object to be used creatively within their own self-representations. Self-representation, after all, involves the transformation of one’s own subjectivity into an object of investigation. And the objectivity of the photograph cannot be divorced from the subjective experience of looking at and interpreting the sense data that the image supplies. The photograph’s uneasy relationship between objectivity and subjectivity makes it a rich source for autobiographical practices of self-creation and self-investigation. The photographs and their textual mediation work as visual metonyms that stand in for the larger project of self-representation; they picture the act of picturing the self. This dissertation charts the critical ambivalence to family photographs in these works, how they stage a back-and-forth between an affective or nostalgic attitude to images and a sharp awareness of the limits or dangers of such an attitude. The subjects of this dissertation reveal a divided attitude to the visual medium, both attracted and repelled by the promise of photographs. The divided attitude to photographs in these works, I argue, stems in part from a crisis in vision. From the semiotic appraisal of photographs to the disciplinary and propagandistic abuses of photography, to see the photograph as an uncomplicated restoration of the past is no longer possible by the second half of the twentieth century (if, indeed, it ever was). And yet, it is the very losses of the twentieth century that make urgent the need to collect and preserve the fragments that remain. These authors exhibit an ambivalence about how photographs preserve the past and what kind of information they provide us with, about how these images represent the self (and the family), and finally about how this form of representation compares with the written word. Each of my four chapters examines a different modality of this ambivalent approach to photographs as they intersect with narrating the self: Nabokov’s agonistic contest between photography and his visual memory; Brodsky’s resignation to the modern photographic condition that ruptures the continuity of memory and experience; Shteyngart’s divided reading of the self from a hyphenated Russian-American perspective; and Kabakov’s ironically sincere recuperation of an affective response after postmodernism. Considering photos as both indexical documents that provide evidence but also as indeterminate images that demand interpretation, I read the photographs as an integral component of self-construction in these works, rather than as transparent illustrations of the self. These photographs offer a productive site for representing the divided self in emigration, the experience of trauma, and the convergence of personal and social history.

This dissertation traces the development of Alexander Pushkin's sense of the tragic in the context of Russian and European Romanticism. Pushkin was a self-proclaimed skeptic in matters of literature: though deeply influenced by Romantic poets and theorists, he never subscribed to any one school or creed, experimenting in a range of genres to express his changing tragic vision. Many of his works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama; and yet, they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. My study explains Pushkin's idiosyncratic approach to tragedy by re-situating his works within their literary, historical, and philosophical contexts. In my readings of The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, and The Little Tragedies, I connect Pushkin's works to those of a range of European writers, including Shakespeare, Racine, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, the Marquis de Sade, and Hugo; and I examine such topics as tragedy and the tragic, the sublime and the grotesque, the relationship between literature and history, irony and tragic ritual. While I ground my work in traditional Russian philology, I use recent Western scholarship to help frame my study theoretically. In particular, I aim to contribute to the ongoing debate between scholars who claim that Romanticism marked "the death of tragedy" and those who see the change less as a death than as a redefinition.