Between Boulevard and Boudoir examines the nineteenth-century obsession with documenting the modern metropolis and analyses visual and verbal portraits of working women to investigate how urban literature invented the seamstress as a type. Approaching the nineteenth-century city as a site of passive voyeurism where social relationships were increasingly mediated by print culture, I argue that sketches of French grisettes and British sempstresses replaced the endless variety among working-class women with a repetitive sameness through the fictionalization of these urban figures. Transforming producers of commodities into objects of consumption, popular fiction showcased the visibility of the city’s working women while ignoring their actual labor. These women were thus portrayed as exploited bodies, rather than exploited workers, destined to adorn, and then disappear into, the crowded city. This dissertation looks first at what Walter Benjamin dubbed “panoramic literature” — texts that sought to describe the metropolis and its inhabitants through a categorization of people and places based on appearances — and asserts that these fragmentary depictions created a widely recognizable urban typology that gained cultural currency and, ultimately, influenced other authors. Analyzing French and British urban text, I maintain, however, that even the most stereotyped representations destabilized the structures of classification that defined the working woman as a type. While novelists Eugène Sue, G.W.M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all seem to valorize self-supporting women, I demonstrate that, by turning their workers into wives and expelling them from the city, they discredit the premise of an urban destiny that confined these women to a type. This examination of the unique position of working women in Paris and London not only challenges established notions about nineteenth-century constructions of gender but also provides insight into the anxieties – vis-à-vis the rapidly changing city – that plagued the writers who codified these women as types. Investigating the fictionalization of working women, this study opens up urban literature to considerations of how gender and class determine inclusion within the city as it was produced by print culture. / text

This dissertation examines the works of four Chicana/o writers who write about Los Angeles, California urban spaces, and how the literary protagonist experiences the material realities of everyday life. The objective of this dissertation is to look at the mechanisms used by the narrator and the meaning they transmit through the description of urban space. David Harvey's theory on the Urbanization of Consciousness is used to analyze the spatial transformation taking place in Los Angeles from the 1960's to the 1980's. Moreover, I utilize Michael de Certeau's explanations of how the practices of everyday life influence the author's cartographic imaginary. These practices are manifested in the narrator's description of the physical and social space and they convey an ideological message that points to the process of urbanization of consciousness in a capitalist society. Additionally, it draws together the work of important theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Rodolfo Acuña, Mario Barrera, and James Diego Vigil. Chapter one introduces the theoretical framework that is used throughout this study. It establishes a definition of the urbanization of consciousness and how the main characters' interact with money, family, community, class, and the State. Chapter two explains how the rapid urban development in East Los Angeles during the 1960's shaped the characters' upbringings in the novel Their Dogs Came With Them (2007) by Helena María Viramontes. Chapter three analyzes how urban space molds the consciousness of the individual in Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) by Luis J. Rodríguez. Chapter four examines the architectural imagination in the novel of Alejandro Morales' Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975). Chapter five studies the urbanization of gang violence among Chicana/o youth in the work of Yxta Maya Murray, Locas (1997). My investigation leads me to conclude that the Chicana/o community became urbanized when its members began to mirror its fragmented environment and when they began to see themselves as wage workers.

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / Thesis advisor: Cynthia A. Young / From the BLKARTSOUTH literary collective in the 1970s, to public-storytelling-based education and performance forms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and fiction and nonfiction collections in the years since the storm, this study traces how New Orleans authors, playwrights, educators, and digital media makers concerned with social justice have mirrored the aesthetics and epistemologies of the collaborative African diasporic expressive traditions that began in the antebellum space of Congo Square and continue in the traditions of second-line parading and Mardi Gras Indian performances today. Combining literary analysis, democratic and performance theory, and critical geography with interviews and participant observation, I show how New Orleans authors, theatre makers, and teachers have drawn on "second-line" knowledges and geographies to encourage urban residents to recognize each other as "divided subjects" whose very divisions are the key to keeping our social and political systems from stabilizing and fixing borders and ethics in a way that shuts down possibilities for dissent, flux, and movement. Building on diverse scholarly arguments that make a case both for New Orleans's exceptionalism and its position, especially in recent years, as a model for neoliberal urban reform, this study also shows how the call and response aesthetics of community-based artists in New Orleans have influenced and benefited from the rise of global democratic performance and media forms. This dual focus on local cultures of resistance and New Orleans's role in the production of national and transnational social justice movements enables me to evaluate New Orleans's enduring central role in the production of U.S. and transnational constructs of African diasporic identity and radical democratic politics and aesthetics. Chapter One, "Second Line Knowledges and the Re-Spatialization of Resistance in New Orleans," synthesizes academic and grassroots analyses and descriptions of second lines, Mardi Gras Indian performances, and related practices in New Orleans through the lenses of critical geography and democratic theory to analyze the democratic dreams and blues approaches to history and geography that have been expressed in dynamic ways in the public spaces of New Orleans since the era of Congo Square. My second chapter, "'We Are Black Mind Jockeys': Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater, and the Search for a Second Line Literary Aesthetic," explores the unique encounter in New Orleans between the city's working-class African American cultural traditions and the national Black Arts movement. I argue that poet and activist Tom Dent's interest in black working-class cultural traditions in New Orleans allowed him to use his three-year directorship of the Free Southern Theater to produce new and lasting interconnections between African American street performances and African American theatre and literature in the city. Chapter Three, "Story Circles, Educational Resistance, and the Students at the Center Program Before and After Hurricane Katrina," outlines how Students at the Center (SAC), a writing and digital media program in the New Orleans public schools, worked in the years just before Hurricane Katrina to re-make public schools as places that facilitated the collaborative sounding and expression of second-line knowledges and geographies and engaged youth and families in dis-privileged local neighborhoods in generating new democratic visions for the city. This chapter contrasts SAC's pre-Katrina work with their post-Katrina struggles to reformulate their philosophies in the face of the privatization of New Orleans's public schools in order to highlight the role that educational organizing in New Orleans has played in rising conversations throughout the US about the impact of neo-liberal school reform on urban social formations, public memory, and possibilities for organized resistance. Chapter Four, "'Running and Jumping to Join the Parade': Race and Gender in Post-Katrina Second Line Literature" shows how authors during the post-Katrina crisis era sought to manipulate mass market publication methods in order to critically reflect on, advocate for, and spread second-line knowledges. My analysis of the fiction of Tom Piazza and Mike Molina, the non-fiction work of Dan Baum, and the grassroots publications of the Neighborhood Story Project asks how these authors' divergent interrogations of the novel and non-fiction book forms with the form of the second line parade enable them to question, with varying degrees of success, the role of white patriarchy on shaping prevailing media and literary forms for imagining and narrating the city. Finally, Chapter Five, "Cross-Racial Storytelling and Second-Line Theatre Making After the Deluge," analyzes how New Orleans's community-based theatre makers have drawn on second-line knowledges and geographies to build a theatre-based racial healing movement in the post-Katrina city. Because they were unable and unwilling, after the Flood, to continue to "do" theatre in privatized sites removed from the lives and daily spatial practices of local residents, the network of theater companies and community centers whose work I describe (such as John O'Neal's Junebug Productions, Mondo Bizarro Productions, ArtSpot Productions, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center) have made New Orleans's theatrical landscape into a central site for trans-national scholarly and practitioner dialogues about the relationship of community-engaged theatre making to the construction of just and sustainable urban democracies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / Addressing a gathering of social scientists at Boston’s Lowell Institute in 1870, Frederic Law Olmsted worried that the "restraining and confining conditions" of the American city compelled its inhabitants to "walk circumspectly, watchfully, jealously" and to "look closely upon others without sympathy." Olmsted was telling his audience what many had already been saying, and would continue to say, about urban life: sympathy was hard to come by in the city. The urban intellectuals that I examine in this study view with greater optimism the affective possibilities of the city’s social landscape. Rather than describe the city as a place that necessarily precludes or interferes with the sympathetic process, late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban intellectuals such as Stephen Crane, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling and Jane Jacobs attempt to redefine the nature of that process. Their descriptions of urban relationships reconfigure the affective patterns that lay at the heart of a sentimental culture of sympathy—patterns that had remained, in many ways, deeply connected to those described by Adam Smith and other eighteenth-century moral philosophers. This study traces the development of what I call "urban sympathy" by demonstrating how observers of city life translate received literary and nonliterary idioms into cultural forms that capture the everyday emotions and obligations arising in the city’s small-scale contact zones—its streets, sidewalks, front stoops, theaters, cafes and corner stores. Urban Sympathy calls attention to the ways in which urban intellectuals with different religious, racial, economic, scientific and professional commitments urbanize the social project of a nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Rather than view the sympathetic exchange as dependent upon access to another’s private feelings, these writers describe an affective process that deals in publicly traded emotions. Where many see the act of identification as sympathy’s inevitable product, these observers of city life tend to characterize an awareness and preservation of differences as urban sympathy’s outcome. While scholars traditionally criticize the sympathetic process for ignoring the larger social structures in which its participants are entangled, several of these writers cultivate a sympathetic style that attempts to account for individuals and the larger social, economic and political forces that shape them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This study investigates the social function of reading Urban Literature and the role the genre serves in the lives of a family of African American women. This investigation discovered that their talk about a particular Urban Literature text reveals intertextual links among multiple "texts" and that these links relate to elements of their lived worlds and cultural models. Using a case study portrait methodology, grounded in a sociocultural approach to language and literacy, this study focuses on the following questions: 1. What do the women in an all-female African American family read? Why do they read? 2. How are these African American women's self-perceptions and identities related to their family's reading practices? 3. How do the women in an all-female African American family engage and talk to one another about books as readers, individuals, and as a family? 4. How are the intertextual links they use during their talk socially constructed as they interact and react to one another? To address the first two questions, I conducted two in-depth individual interviews of the participants and analyzed their responses for evidence that reading Urban Literature is part of larger social and cultural practices related to their self-perception and their lived worlds and cultural models. In this case, reading Urban Literature serves a larger purpose than just pure entertainment. Specifically, I found that the women in this family read Urban Literature for the following social functions: (1) as a connection to urban life; (2) as a form of entertainment; (3) as a collaborative activity; and (4) as a means of constructing and defining their own identities. To address the second two questions, I joined the family for a discussion of an Urban Literature book called Rage Times Fury (2004). After documenting the conversation on video, I analyzed a 6 min 16 sec segment of the 1 hr 17 min 11 sec discussion to explore the ways the family members' talk collaboratively constructs meaning through intertextual links. The collaborative nature of their talk about Rage Times Fury reveals that this family uses intertextual links to: (1) define themselves as readers, particularly as readers of Urban Literature, and as students; (2) strengthen their bonds as members of the same family through strategies such as repetition; and (3) identify and validate their cultural models and prior lived experiences based on their shared social and historical perspectives. The analysis within this study suggests researchers can conduct more extensive studies of how African American families with adolescents engage in various literacy practices and how those practices are embedded in their social and cultural lived worlds. This study also recommends that educators should strive more to connect family literacy skills, practices, and cultural models in students' homes to instructional skills, practices, and cultural models employed in classrooms.

<p>In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from early-nineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory. Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early 1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de Paris, so central to panoramic literature.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the literary archives of three Ontario cities – Windsor, Hamilton, and Toronto – to discover and enfold urban nature in our everyday lives. Beginning with a refusal to accept the popular notion that there is no nature in the city or that the city is separate from the natural world, I seek to engage with writers in these three cities to find representations of and engagements with the natural world in an urban setting. In the light of a growing environmental crisis marked by fossil fuel shortages, climate change, biodiversity decline, and habitat loss, this project is an attempt to craft a meaningful response from an ecocritical perspective. Central to this response are two key contentions: one, that the natural world is in the city, but we need to find ways to recognize it there; and, two, that the most efficacious and ethical way to respond to environmental crisis is to make this urban nature a part of our everyday lives by fostering attachments to it and protecting it, or, to put it differently, enfolding it into our human lives. Using literature, my project shows how the natural world is present in three Ontario cities and how writers like Di Brandt, John Terpstra, Phyllis Brett Young, and others are already including urban nature in their work. This work also addresses significant gaps in Canadian literary discourse which has tended to focus on wilderness or rural spaces and in ecocritical discourse which has also tended to eschew urban locations. This project adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to read a wide range of texts including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, educational material, scientific publications, and others in order to encourage readers and citizens of Windsor, Hamilton, and Toronto to discover and enfold the urban nature present in those cities. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation examines the ways in which Ferréz Sacolinha, Junot Díaz and Ernesto Quiñonez negotiate the global subordination of diasporic subjects in São Paulo and New York. Through a street aesthetic of the urban underworld, these four writers explore social inequalities tied to race and social class in the urban periphery. In São Paulo, Ferréz and Sacolinha use the public transit system to examine the contained mobility of residents of the periferia. Through encounters with criminality, Ferréz critiques the image of the criminoso associated with the marginal space of the periferia. Sacolinha analyzes systemic inequalities through the cobrador's use of the perua, which functions as a subversive tactic against governmental organizations. In New York, Junot Díaz and Ernesto Quiñonez address the marginalization of urban Latino youth on the streets of the inner city. Díaz complicates the fractured identity of Dominican American youth who experience stigma in relation to the U.S.'s black-white racial binary. By dissecting the relationship between crime and hegemonic social structures, Quiñonez traces Spanish Harlem residents' colonized, racialized status as Puerto Ricans in New York. In the literary works of the four authors, young protagonists roam the streets, maintaining a macho demeanor to conceal their insecurities and to appear to others -- and more importantly to themselves -- as tough individuals who will not crack under pressure. The aggressive, fearless attitude that they embody allows them to survive the inner city streets. They face an endless cycle of suspicion, racial discrimination and lack of resources, which limits their chances for social mobility.

[pt] O objetivo desta tese é investigar as relações entre certas representações de malandros e malandragens e a construção do imaginário da nação. O presente texto ensaia responder às seguintes questões: como e por quais motivos a malandragem é regularmente acessada por nossos intelectuais, políticos, músicos, jornalistas etc, como elemento constituidor, por afirmação ou negação, da imaginada nação brasileira? E como também, nós, os membros dessa comunidade, nos identificamos com a imagem desse brasileiro malandro? Para tanto, à análise das obras literárias e musicais propriamente dita é adicionada uma perspectiva focada nas mediações entre os diversos grupos étnicos, sociais, religiosos etc constituintes da singular cultura carioca. A malandragem é vista, assim, como um procedimento dinâmico, não fixo, e o malandro carioca como a representação de um sujeito ao mesmo tempo marginal e capaz de negociar com as instâncias da ordem. / [en] The purpose of this study is to look into certain portrayals of the local malandros and their particular behavior, as well as the construction of the nation's imagery. This essay is intended to answer the following questions: - Why - and how - is the typical conduct of our malandros so commonly referred to, in different ways of affirmation or denial, by our intelligentsia, our politicians, musicians and journalists ( among many others ) as a constituent item of a supposed Brazilian nation? - how do we, as part of such a community, identify with the depiction of this Brazilian malando? To arrive at suitable answers, a new perspective focused on relations weaved by various ethnic, social and religious groups integrating Rio de Jnaeiros's peculiar culture was added to the academic analysis of the nation's literary and musical production. The behavior of our malandros is therefore seen as a dynamic and changeable procedure, and the malandro carioca is deemed as the representation of an individual who is an outsider, though one who is simultaneously capable of dealing with the establishment.

Submitted by Fabiano Vassallo (fabianovassallo2127@gmail.com) on 2017-05-05T19:03:50Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) dissertação do mestrado pronta (enviar para Stefania) PDF.pdf: 771556 bytes, checksum: 25340d529bd6a56e2db886f17ad88ee1 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-06-12T17:55:55Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) dissertação do mestrado pronta (enviar para Stefania) PDF.pdf: 771556 bytes, checksum: 25340d529bd6a56e2db886f17ad88ee1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-12T17:55:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) dissertação do mestrado pronta (enviar para Stefania) PDF.pdf: 771556 bytes, checksum: 25340d529bd6a56e2db886f17ad88ee1 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A partir da análise do romance Passageiro do fim do dia (2010), de Rubens Figueiredo, este trabalho propõe pensar o lugar dos sujeitos, sobretudo aqueles que se encontram à margem nos centros urbanos, dentro da dinâmica social brasileira. O autor da narrativa, ao problematizar os conflitos presentes nas metrópoles contemporâneas, busca se relacionar com o seu contexto atual, a fim de tentar apreendê-lo e de colocar em evidência a recepção e aceitação de um discurso produzido pelo sistema vigente. Assim, temas como a desigualdade social, a violência, a fragmentação da cidade e a marginalidade são levantados. Além disso, pretendo discutir a relação do sujeito itinerante com o outro e com a paisagem que o cerca, com base nas modificações trazidas por valores inseridos pelo mercado de consumo e pelo mundo globalizado. Por último, o presente trabalho irá pensar a relação entre memória e identidade no romance, mediada também pela experiência da leitura, enquanto um ponto importante para tentar compreender a própria construção da identificação do sujeito com o contexto no qual se encontra. As ideias apresentadas por Rubens Figueiredo serão, por conseguinte, molas propulsoras para a elaboração desta pesquisa, que procura assimilar, com mais cuidado, o funcionamento dos centros urbanos brasileiros / From the analysis of the novel Passenger of the end of the day (2010), Rubens Figueiredo, reflects upon the place of subjects, especially those who are on the margins in urban centers, within the Brazilian social dynamic. The author of the narrative, to discuss conflicts in the contemporary metropolis, seeks to relate to your current context in order to try to seize it and to put in evidence the receipt and acceptance of a speech produced by the current system. Thus, issues such as social inequality, violence, fragmentation and marginalization of the city are raised. In addition, I intend to discuss the relationship of the itinerant subject with the other and with the landscape that surrounds it, based on the changes introduced by values entered by the consumer market and the globalized world. Finally, this paper will think about the relationship between memory and identity in the novel, also mediated by the experience of reading as an important point to try to understand the actual construction of the identification of subject with the context in which he is. The ideas presented by Rubens Figueiredo will therefore boost the development of this project, which seeks to assimilate, more carefully, the operation of the Brazilian urban centers