Early twentieth-century Europe witnessed a particularly intense moment in the long debate concerning the relationship between the dramatic text and performance. Modernists asserted the predominance of the text, which is easily assimilated to the printed page and incorporated into the institution of literature. The avant-gardes proclaimed the primacy of the live theatrical event, and they worked to liberate performance from its association with literature. At stake was the definition of the theatre as a medium--and its power to re-enchant the modern world. This dissertation reveals that even as the avant-gardes rejected the print genre of drama, they fiercely embraced print, producing some of the century's most extraordinary publications. Focusing on the material aspects of performance-related texts from Symbolism to Surrealism, I show that the avant-gardes not only maintained but amplified the centuries-old relationship between the theatre and print. They did so in ways that profoundly altered the conventions of performance and of the visual and graphic arts, expanding our sense of what is possible onstage and on the page. Under pressure from the insurgent cinema and also from a pervasive print culture that had absorbed, and been absorbed by, realist and naturalist drama, the theatre was a medium particularly in need of formal reassessment. In response to these conditions, the avant-gardes declared (to varying degrees) that literary plays should give way to ultra-physical performance; print-friendly playwrights to stage-steeped directors; dialogue to dance, song, or non-verbal sound. Because print was still the mass medium of the early twentieth century, the avant-gardes also produced performance texts--texts which embodied their theatricalist agendas through typography, page design, and illustration. In chapters on Edward Gordon Craig, Francesco Cangiullo, Lothar Schreyer, and Antonin Artaud, I argue that print was crucial to the avant-garde attempt to redefine, renew, and revolutionize the theatre.

This dissertation explores highly influential constructions of the past at a key turning point in Chinese history by mapping out what I term a poetics of memory in the more than four hundred poems written by Du Fu (712-770) during his two-year stay in the remote town of Kuizhou (modern Fengjie). A survivor of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion (756-763), which transformed Tang Dynasty (618-906) politics and culture, Du Fu was among the first to write in the twilight of the Chinese medieval period. His most prescient anticipation of mid-Tang concerns was his restless preoccupation with memory and its mediations, which drove his prolific output in Kuizhou. For Du Fu, memory held the promise of salvaging and creatively reimagining personal, social, and cultural identities under conditions of displacement and sweeping social change. The poetics of his late work is characterized by an acute attentiveness to the material supports--monuments, rituals, images, and texts--that enabled and structured connections to the past. The organization of the study attempts to capture the range of Du Fu's engagement with memory's frameworks and media. It begins by examining commemorative poems that read Kuizhou's historical memory in local landmarks, decoding and rhetorically emulating great deeds of classical exemplars. The second chapter explores the shifting boundaries Du Fu draws between the customs of Kuizhou's local people and the orthodox ritual practices that defined his identity as a scholar-official. This is followed by an interlude that discusses poems on housework, in which domesticating projects spur reflection on poetry's capacity to create cultural value through commemoration. Chapter three turns to poems on paintings, arguing that for Du Fu painted images served as a vital support for memory of pre-rebellion court society, and that in writing on them he both drew upon and redefined a medieval visual aesthetic of craft and pictorial illusionism. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the rhetoric of narrative autobiographical poems, traditionally approached as non-figurative factual records, in order to elucidate Du Fu's retrospective construction of a self. A picture thus emerges of a body of work in which memory, mediated through material objects and practices, functioned to envision and rebuild frameworks of identity in an age of upheaval and transition. This study will contribute to a more critical understanding of a major poet, of the representation and uses of memory in traditional Chinese poetry, and of the emergence of new forms of expression and literati identity in late medieval China.

This dissertation is about friendship and rivalry and, particularly, about the connection between them. The main argument of the dissertation is that friendship, philia, and rivalry, eris, are interconnected and that the failure to recognize this interconnection leads to violence and destruction. More specifically, I argue that every philia, friendship, contains elements of eris, of difference and disagreement, and that the failure to provide a space for these elements within the philia relationship results in the collapse of the friendship. Similarly, I argue that every eris, rivalry, contains elements of philia, of similarity and communality, and that the failure to recognize these elements leads to violent and destructive results. I use the term `philia' here in a broad sense that includes different interpersonal relations like love, friendship, cooperation, solidarity, sympathy, etc., which are endowed with some gravity force that draws individuals close to each other and links them together. Likewise, I use the term `eris' here in a wide-ranging sense that includes various interpersonal relations like hate, rivalry, hostility antipathy, etc., which are endowed with a sort of repulsive force that draws individuals away from each other and divides them. I argue that somewhat similarly to Newton's third law of motion in the physical world - "To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction." - also in the interpersonal world every interaction implies `opposite reaction'. So that, for example, friendship implies rivalry, cooperation entails competition, peace contains conflict, and trust presumes suspicion. To use William Blake's words: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence."

This dissertation is about adolescents in European literature between 1900 and the First World War who shy away from maturity. The authors discussed are Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Georg Büchner, J. M. Barrie, Robert Walser, Rudyard Kipling and Witold Gombrowicz. The main argument is that the remarkable proliferation around 1900 of novels whose protagonists, by some means or other, avoid growing up is not due to a somewhat twisted affiliation to the genre of the late and ultimately failed Bildungsroman, but rather to an underestimated branch of modernism. At first glance, their strategy of retreat looks like a flinching from societal responsibility, yet the opposite turns out to be true. Instead of representing an early instance of the prolonged adolescence that has nowadays become proverbial, their recoiling from maturity entails a critique of the totalizing tendencies inherent to the ideals of Bildung and Enlighten­ment.

In this dissertation, I identify a conspicuous shift in the formal articulation of time and space in modernist literature and film of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This “transformation of chronotopes,” I argue, has important historical, political, and aesthetic implications that have to do with a critical negotiation of our – and art’s – being-in-history in late modernity. In case studies on the work of Theo Angelopoulos, Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge, I demonstrate that literary and cinematic time-space articulations function as both formal sedimentations of and antagonistic aesthetic responses to a transformed understanding of time, space and the historical process in the wake of the world-historical transformations around and after 1989 as well as in an age of globalization. All three authors are centrally concerned with the precarious status of modernity and futurity today – with the question, that is, of what happens to the constitutively modern promise about an “open future” amid a wide-spread exhaustion of the historical imagination in European societies, amid hyper-acceleration in the fields of technology and the economy, and amid manifold processes of systemic autonomization that undermine concepts of human praxis and self-determination. Interrogating the conditions of possibility for a contemporary political aesthetic – can there be a conjunction of art and politics today? – Angelopoulos, Müller and Kluge are informed by and draw on different forms of modernist political aesthetics of the early 20th century in their engagement with the present and thus also pose the question about the continued relevance, the legacy and timeliness of political modernism today.

This dissertation examines how after decolonization the philosophical concept of universality was reimagined in European and Chinese literary and visual culture. My central argument is that, in the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference and the Afro-Asian solidarity it embodied, writers and intellectuals from both sides of the Iron Curtain proposed alternative notions of universal culture and World Literature. While traditional Eurocentric conceptions of the universal were lodged in an exclusionary logic rooted in colonial violence and racism, after decolonization it became possible to imagine postcolonial claims to universality. I show how the Non-Alignment Movement imagined at Bandung inspired artists and intellectuals from both sides of the bipolar divide to voice new modes of solidarity in their work. I focus on three specific contexts: Italy, the Francophone world, and China. In the Italian context the writers I study include thinkers of a distinctively Gramscian lineage, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi. Conversely, the French and Francophone writers that I discuss, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Patrice Lumumba, were reconfiguring universality chiefly from a Hegelian perspective. Finally, in the Chinese context, I show how the Chinese contributions to the Bandung-era reinvention of universal culture and the ulterior art practice of the post-Mao 1980s were both rooted in the Marxist tradition. I conclude with a discussion of how postcolonial claims to universality, such as those imagined at Bandung, relate to “globalized” conceptions of the universal. My work contributes to major recent debates in the fields of Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies by engaging with the theoretical questions of universality and translatability. Scholars like Emily Apter have recently published critical studies of what has been dubbed the “translatability assumption” at the heart of the burgeoning field of World Literature. My research discusses how an overt emphasis on reading works of literature in translation in the name of ease of access and universal circulation can gloss over the cultural and linguistic diversity of the world’s languages and literatures. My research also relies on Judith Butler’s notion of “competing universalities.” In her text of the same title, Butler draws from Hegel, Gramsci, and others as she sets out to think the conditions of possibility for political hegemony. She arrives at an open-ended conclusion. Since many political constructs claim universality from within their located particularity, Butler argues that the intellectual’s task is to “adjudicate among competing notions of universality.” In line with these recent debates on the question of universality, my dissertation navigates between the different competing universals at stake during and after the Cold War. My dissertation is original in the sense that it is one of the first multilingual and interdisciplinary studies that elucidate how current geopolitical changes on the world stage—from China’s expansionist politics to the rise of formerly Third World nations as global economic players—are embedded in a cultural history. While globalization is commonly seen as a phenomenon that expanded after the historical shifts of 1989, my project shows how the “postcolonial universalities” imagined in the wake of decolonization by Western and non-Western writers and artists constituted the groundwork for this history.

This dissertation is a study of experimental retranslations of ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Chinese lyric poetry by contemporary Anglophone poets. It is a contribution to the field of Translation Studies and the developing study and practice of Retranslation. The emerging field of Translation Studies has only begun to consider critically the phenomenon of retranslation, but these existing studies address retranslations of ancient Classical texts in passing, and only as far as to consider their role in canon formation, re-animating an older retranslation’s outdated language, correcting a previous version’s textual errors, and replacing an old version with a superior one. Studies of the useful contributions that experimental retranslations of Classical texts offer for re-evaluating the ancient originals have been altogether absent. A cross-cultural study such as my own acknowledges the recent surge in interest in Western Classics from Chinese readers and the globalization of Greco-Roman Classics as evidenced by efforts to translate the corpora of Vergil and Ovid into Chinese for the first time. My dissertation focuses on the 85 project’s experimental retranslations of Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) poetry by Wang Wei 王維 (699–759 CE), Li Bai 李白 (701–762 CE), and Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770 CE), Brandon Brown’s retranslations of poems 85 and 99 by Republican Roman poet Catullus (85–54 BCE), and Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” (5th c. BCE). My chapters each perform close readings and textual analysis, identify the unconventional retranslation strategies at work, and demonstrate how these strategies retain some core gestures of the original poem in retranslation. I project a future direction of experimental retranslation practice in a rapidly changing field, and a re-evaluation of how readers and writers might think about the possibilities in retranslating ancient Classical texts. I propose that these experimental retranslations offer the contemporary reader new ways of connecting with and appreciating the original text by expanding conventional expectations of what is traditionally acceptable in the practice of translation. Traditional Classical translation strategies favour focusing on a poem’s content and subject matter, usually including some representation of meter and form in a word-for-word and sense-for-sense production. The experimental retranslations I address in my study retranslate something other than the words and sense, going so far as to bring into English such elements as the vertical reading orientation of Classical Chinese poetry and a poem’s structural, rhetorical features, not its words or subject matter. Ultimately, this study shows how contemporary readers can be surprised by antiquity via fresh retranslations, and calls for collaboration among translators, creative writers, and academic scholars.

<p> This thesis explores Derrida&rsquo;s engagement with Plato, primarily in the texts &ldquo;How to Avoid Speaking: Denials&rdquo; and <i>On the Name.</i> The themes of participation and performance are focused on through an analysis of the concepts of <i>mystery</i> and <i> metaxy</i> (&mu;&epsi;&tau;&alpha;&xi;&nu;). The crucial performative aspects of Plato and Derrida&rsquo;s texts are often under appreciated. Neither author simply <i>says</i> what he means; rather their texts are meant to <i>do</i> something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation&mdash;instead of its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors&rsquo; projects than has been traditionally considered.</p>

<p> This study analyzes "culture" in late colonial Korea, 1937 to 1945, with the methodology of worldly repetition. By embedding culture between quotation marks, I intend to clarify that the object of this study is not an object per se. Korean "culture" is constructed around the three names that the present researcher is barred from objectifying. The names Yi Sang, Ch'oe Chaeso&caron;, and Mun Yebong are not mere indexes of three persons with their particular intrinsic qualities. They are names that represent the Korean culture of the time. However, their representativeness does not mean that they enable the present researcher to reconstruct a general view of Korean culture of the time through them. They are representative to the extent that they allow the present researcher to reflect his own positionality in his research on a past event in history. This reflexive return is induced by the names' essential self-reflexivity; reflections on them are not to be objective if they are aiming at others through the names. The three names are representative of Korean culture of the time to the extent that they are the "origin" of the "culture" that is being formed within the present researcher's time.</p>

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