This dissertation seeks to contribute to the understanding of the formation of collective memory of State violence in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. By comparing these three cases, I pursue to discern how citizens can challenge the silence and amnesia that the groups in power want to impose on society after a period of State terrorism. In order to examine the process of formation of collective memory, this dissertation highlights two important figures from which citizens have been able to build counter-hegemonic narratives, that is, los exiliados and los desaparecidos. I will highlight how they become lenses through which citizens can construct the memory of State repression. They become the evidence of the repression that the State wants to conceal, and have the potential of becoming important symbolic figures, and sources of knowledge, from which society can challenge silence and oblivion about State terrorism. The unfolding of the objectives and arguments of this dissertation are based on the analysis of literary texts from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico; and on photography of Argentinian and Mexican photographers. I draw on performance studies, anthropological approaches to ritual, and literary criticism to examine how citizens create counter-hegemonic narratives of State repression, and how they incorporate them in the collective memory of their societies.

In La Communauté desoeuvrée (1983) French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes how a community is creating by bringing its members together under a collective identity. The invention of myths, such as the myth of racial superiority and the mythic revolutionary community, functions to sustain the hegemonic dominance wielded in Haiti by the United States and later by François Duvalier, the Porfiriato and its aftermath in Mexico, and white society in the United States Deep South. These myths often engender policies founded in the inhospitable treatment of those who are deemed lesser or other. Nancys conception of being singular plural posits that our exposure to the other remedies the mythic community, because such a configuration requires the perpetual exposure of the self to others, which maintains the fluidity of interpersonal relations and in turn keeps the community future-oriented. Jacques Derridas De la grammatologie (1967), Force de loi (1990), and Politiques de lamitié (1994) offer a reconceptualization of the political implications of subjectivity, community, and responsibility allows us to identify individual behaviors that can foster the development of a democracy to come and which also align with Nancys re-inscription of community. This project examines how the mythic community is portrayed in René Depestres Le Mât de cocagne and Un arc-en-ciel pour lOccident chrétien, Mariano Azuelas Los de abajo, Carlos Fuentess La región más transparente del aire and Gringo viejo, and Ernest Gainess A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. The authors representations of racial disharmony, marginalization, and violence function as a critique of colonialism, the mythic multicultural American community, and of imperialist capitalist hegemonic patriarchy to paraphrase bell hookss term. This project explores how the reverence for certain myths is linked to a rigid conception of hegemonic masculinity in which manhood is synonymous with domination. Thus, it is necessary to identify the conditions that marginalized men cultivate to achieve masculine subjectivity, and how patriarchal hegemonic masculinity may be challenged by new formulations of masculinities, which may allow such marginalized men to resist totalitarian powers and foster the sort of communal existence founded upon peace and tolerance of the Other.

This dissertation analyzes the role that female ghosts play in recuperating memory and filling the gaps of official history in the following four contemporary novels: Erna Brodbers Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdéss Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneross Caramelo: or, Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condés Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The ghosts in these novels disrupt a linear temporality and present a matriarchal mode of remembering, leading readers to reconsider the past outside of the dominant historical discourse. In this way, the novels become alternative histories that oppose the monologic historical paradigm and recuperate marginalized voices silenced by History with a capital H. The novels trouble the boundary between truth and fiction, asking the reader to consider the moral value of art. The reader is obliged to relinquish certain assumptions about history and its creation and processes in order to understand how fiction can be an alternative history. My introduction explores the historical paradigm that these novels destabilize, including a Hegelian concept of history that is based on reason. The introduction also sets up the feminist methodology that drives my analysis and presents the geographic scope of my dissertation. Chapter One explores the tradition of the ghost in the literature of the Americas, especially how ghosts confront traumatic pasts and destabilize a linear temporality. In Chapter Two I analyze Brodbers Louisiana, which employs two female ghosts to resist hegemonic historical discourse via spirit possession. In the third chapter I discuss ghosts affective nature in Valdéss Te di la vida entera and Cisneross Caramelo. The spirit narrators in these novels recreate memory via nostalgia and the affective nature of music. Chapter Four explores imaginations role in filling the gaps of history through an analysis of Condés Victoire, whose narrator is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother and compelled to reconstruct her history. My conclusion draws out the specific similarities between the four novels and further explores the way in which these novels not only use the ghost figure to comment on the past, but also employ it to initiate healing within individual relationships between women.

Love, lust, and power are themes that fill the pages of literature, are enacted upon the silver screen, and presented on stage. Such themes evoke courtship and the places where courtship occurs, such as the garden, balcony, and tower. Each of these settings has unique spatial dynamics, as well as distinctive representational and symbolic significance. A woman, while present in such places, uses both physical and metaphorical spatial dynamics to create a source of power and control over a man who courts her. By regulating the amount of space between them, she rules her body; in ruling her body, she determines her own fate. As the amount of vertical space between a woman and her suitor increases, so too does her control over her own body and destiny. When the authors presented in this study create a space in which a woman can make her own choices, such creators transgress societal norms, but, in order to escape censorship, they must provide a punishment for such a womans behavior, and that punitive measure often involves either actual or metaphorical death. These authors are, in fact, writing subversive material without the appearance of doing so. By combining theoretical elements from sociology, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies, I analyze the ways in which women use spatial dynamics to transgress societal mores and carve out areas of power for themselves. Although such transgressive women are found in patriarchal societies all over the world, I chose works from Europe, America, and Latin America that were both representative of the motifs explored in this study and well-known within their respective national traditions. I begin each chapter with a parent text from which later works borrowed, and in order to demonstrate the prevalence of these places in texts, the works chosen derive from different genres written over the last five and a half centuries.

"Tolstoy and Zola" juxtaposes the two writers to examine the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century. The juxtaposition is justified by the literary critical debates that were taking place in Russian and French journals during the 1870s and 1880s, concerning Tolstoy and Zola. In both France and Russia, heated arguments arose over the future of realism, and opposing factions held up either Tolstoy's brand of realism or Zola's naturalism as more promising. This dissertation uses the differences between Tolstoy and Zola to make more prominent a commonality in their respective novels Anna Karenina (1877) and La Bête humaine (1890): the railways. But rather than interpret the railways in these two novels as a symbol of modernity or as an engine for narrative, I concentrate on one particular aspect of the railway experience, known as motion parallax, which is a depth cue that enables a person to detect depth while in motion. Stationary objects close to a travelling train appear to be moving faster than objects in the distance, such as a mountain range, and moreover they appear to be moving backward. By examining motion parallax in both novels, as well as in some of Tolstoy's other works, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886), this dissertation attempts to address an intriguing question: what, if any, is the relationship between the advent of trains and the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century? Motion parallax triggers in a traveller the sensation of going backward even though one is travelling forward. This cognitive dissonance relates to Tolstoy's and Zola's depictions of Darwinism in their works. Despite their differences, both writers subscribed to a belief in the "fallacy of progress" and thought that technology was causing man, contrary to expectations, to regress. This dissertation explores the relationships between Darwinism, trains, and nineteenth-century notions of progress and degeneration in not only Anna Karenina and La Bête humaine, but also in The Kreutzer Sonata, and Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Germinal (1885). The goal of this multi-disciplinary dissertation, which interweaves literary analysis with sociology, history of science, and visual cultural history, is to provide a new perspective on the relationship between technology and narrative.

This dissertation explores the central place of semiotic interpretation in the instruction of several medieval genres--Latin and vernacular religious drama, French fabliaux, and Spanish exempla--encompassing both the lesson that is taught and the method for teaching it. It is my contention that teaching the proper way to interpret signs is the didactic focus in these genres and that their authors were also deeply concerned with scrutinizing their own use of signs in conveying this instruction. As medieval sign theory finds its origin in Augustinian semiotics, Chapter 1 of my dissertation raises key considerations in Augustine's discussions of signa that would continue to inform later treatments of interpretation. I establish the intrinsic connection between teaching and the interpretation of signs in his writings as well as his frequent ambivalence on the subject. For the Bishop of Hippo, the proper understanding of sacred signs is the paramount lesson of Christian instruction, with misreading Jews as the primary emblem of faulty interpretation. Signs are also a concern for the pedagogical process (doctrina in its second sense) because the success of any lesson is dependent on the effectiveness of its signs to communicate. Yet, Augustine also places the burden of understanding squarely on the learner who must labor with interpretation and attain personal enlightenment. Augustine clearly admires the pagan classics and acknowledges the dominant role of words in instruction, but, for him, the falsified verbal signs of fiction have no value for teaching. Moreover, non-verbal communication--through inner inspiration and visually apprehended signs or res significandi--is vastly superior to fallen language in transmitting meaning as well as creating memory of what is learned. Yet, Augustine also evinces a suspicion of sensory data. These ideas, including doubts about vision and the value of learning through fictive works, would continue to inform the instruction present in later medieval texts. Chapter 2 examines the persistence of Augustinian concepts in medieval religious plays from early church drama through the Middle English cycles. These texts are mainly concerned with teaching the proper interpretation of sacred signa, following Augustine, particularly through the characterization of Jews who fail to read signs correctly. Medieval religious drama also endorses the value of non-verbal communication--through a reliance on individual faith as a precursor to comprehension and through dramatic res such as setting, gesture, and costume--both in conveying semiotic instruction and rendering it memorable. Jewish characters are further portrayed as working against these ideas, representatives of a failure to learn by seeing and believing, who seek instead to force interpretation through violence. Chapter 3 examines a genre in which the presence of doctrinal instruction is debatable, the French fabliaux, and identifies a consistent emphasis on the risks of interpretation across the vast corpus. All signs, verbal and visual, are potentially insufficient in constructing meaning and open to manipulation, emblematized primarily by the actions of deceptive women. Fabliaux evince a self-consciousness about their ability to present these hazards both because they do so through the medium of poetry and because they must rely on signs to make their point. However, the genre ultimately flaunts the insufficiency of its own signs as part of its message, using laughter and mnemonic imagery to promote understanding. Chapter 4 extends the findings on fabliaux to the Spanish Sendebar or Libro de los engaños, a text of questionable didacticism that also emphasizes the role of women in manipulating signs. The practical wisdom derived from the collection--its interest in good counsel and prudence--can likewise be simplified to the need for careful interpretation of signs in a post-lapsarian world. However, through the didactic insufficiency of its tale-telling enterprise, it ultimately affirms the limits of teaching using signs. My dissertation concludes by examining the persistence of many of these ideas in twenty-first-century pedagogy. Recent emphasis on equipping contemporary students with the tools for interpreting signs in an increasingly image-based culture and on promoting the expanded use of visuals in the classroom reiterate longstanding concerns of doctrina. Assessing the instructional role of signs first raised by Augustine and its reconsideration in medieval texts thus sheds new light on didactic content and purpose that continue to inform our endeavors as teachers today.

This dissertation reads examples of early and contemporary documentary theatre in order to show that, while documentary theatre is often presumed to be an essentially realist practice, its history, methods, and conceptual underpinnings are closely tied to the historical and contemporary avant-garde theatre. The dissertation begins by examining the works of the Viennese satirist and performer Karl Kraus and the German stage director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s. The second half moves on to contemporary artists Handspring Puppet Company, Ping Chong, and Charles L. Mee. Ultimately, in illustrating the documentary theatre's close relationship with avant-gardism, this dissertation supports a broadened perspective on what documentary theatre can be and do and reframes discussion of the practice's political efficacy by focusing on how documentaries enact ideological critiques through form and seek to reeducate the senses of audiences through pedagogies of reception.

This dissertation offers a study of proper names and naming as a conceptual and thematic anchor in the work of S.Y. Agnon. Proper names, I argue, constitute an underexplored and highly fruitful prism through which to read literature, and specifically Agnon's fiction. My study consists of a series of readings in several of Agnon's major and most interpreted texts, all considered milestones of Modern Hebrew literature. Reading these works through the lens of proper names exposes facets of the texts that went largely unobserved by earlier readers, and yields a new understanding of them. The study's primary concern is to determine what names are capable of telling us about Agnon's texts. A secondary concern that emanates from my readings is the converse question, namely, what can Agnon's texts tell us about names? Agnon's literary preoccupations with proper names often line up with the major theoretical issues that concern them: the name as index and as description, the difficulties related to the translation of names, the arbitrariness versus motivation of names, their interpellative potential, and more. Drawing on various disciplines and theoretical dispositions - analytical philosophy of language, post-structuralism, literary theory, and the traditional Jewish corpus - I explore these theoretical issues and examine them vis-à -vis Agnon's literary texts. Given the name's unique status, across these disciplines, as a sign whose singularity derives primarily from the nature of its link with its extra-linguistic referent, I propose that asking questions about names is crucial to the understanding of language and especially its relation with the extra linguistic world, subjects with which Agnon's work is overtly engaged. In many of Agnon's works, and especially those I discuss in my dissertation, naming and names function as a full-blown thematic and conceptual element. I contend that, more than merely giving his characters `meaningful', `interpretable' names, Agnon undertakes an ongoing investigation of proper names and the questions and problems they breed. Within his literary world, names are by no means signifiers whose sole purpose is to point to those who bear them, or at most, also to describe them. Names act: they transform and engender transformation; they operate in the fictive world, and their operation often turns out to be deeply consequential. Acts of naming occur frequently in Agnon's works. Babies are named (and sometimes not-named), and their naming is cause for internal and external conflict. Naming does not end with the single initial act whose subject is a newborn baby. Names constantly change, they are forgotten, supplemented by nicknames, substituted by other names. In Agnon's fiction, names are often encountered at moments of extreme failure or distortion, and the radical effect of the name on its bearer cannot be revoked. Names can change lives - for better or worse, although Agnon chooses mostly to contemplate the latter. In Agnon's literary world, they are ultimately a site of catastrophe.

This study is concerned with the Indian "romance" (qissah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and "occult" sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as "romances," via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq).

This dissertation argues that the modernist doctrine of medium specificity, the idea that the autonomy of the arts arises from artworks' investigation of the properties and limits of their materials, grounds artistic production in the place where it was produced. The identity of artistic mediums (writing, painting, sculpture, and land art) depends on their literal placement in physical, geographic environments. Medium specificity requires site specificity. In the aesthetic, art-historical discourses I consider -- Gertrude Stein's account of Cubism, Soviet avant-garde writings on Constructivism, Robert Smithson's texts on landscape, earth art, and Minimalism -- the mediums of art-making are located in places that serve simultaneously as construction sites, sources of raw materials, and models of aesthetic form. They are both the subject of representation and the representational means, the work's content, form, and substance. Art derives its physical properties, its subject matter, and its formal laws from the geography, topography, and geology of the sites at which it is made. Stein retroactively models Picasso's Cubism (and her own plays) on the spatial juxtaposition of houses and mountains in the Spanish landscape. Shklovsky discovers Constructivist principles (and those of his own formalist aesthetics) in the daily life of post-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Smithson finds a model for earth art and for the recovery of history from universal entropy in the "dialectical landscape" of Central Park. For all three of these aesthetic theorists and practitioners, natural processes are entangled with social history, reciprocally modifying each other at the intersections of the built and the found. The specific site is constituted by such intersections and models site-specific art as a legible composition of modern life. By literally taking place, the site-specific artworks these writers describe, theorize, and propose acquire historical specificity, an identity that both indexes the social order that gave rise to them and resists or revises it. This autonomy of the artwork is the stake of site-specificity. An artwork's capacity to resist its present, to be autonomous from or non-identical with the dominant mode of production of its time, is a function of its localization in a socially determined site. A site-specific work is made from materials that are arranged in real space and organized by the laws governing this space. By turning social materials and social laws into its own constructive principle, such a work makes them perceivable and reveals the historical processes at work in them. Manifesting history in its material composition and formal arrangement, the site-specific artwork both remembers and remakes it.