Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on April 27, 2009) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Not available

Zugl.: Tübingen, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2004

No description available.

December 1989, Romania – a culture steeped in secrecy-fuelled paranoia is reflected in the family of six-year-old Adam Stan, whose father is missing and no one concedes to even talk about it. In the first of two sections of 2, a novel, through the eyes of Adam the child, the narrative explores the fall of Ceaușescu's regime and the incandescent bouts of hope brought on by the first Romanian democratic summer, but overshadowed by the presence of an absent father. Adam keenly experiences the joys and injustices of private and public life in both urban and rural Romanian landscapes, before he is forced to emigrate with his mother to the United States. The latter half of the novel sees the adult Adam return to his native Romania after an absence of over two decades, having been reunited with his father and fully assimilated into American life. Adam’s first impressions are of a country still in social and political turmoil, but his Romanian senses are dulled, his outlook cynical, his father’s prohibitive voice never far from his mind. However, the seemingly new scenery and the people he meets end up exposing forbidden memories which prompt Adam’s curiosity for coming to terms with his family’s past. Dualities construct the framework of Adam’s journey: innocence and experience, child- and adulthood, nationhood and otherness, (post)communism and capitalism, personal and national trauma, culture and identity. 2, a novel is a story about family, displacement, language, but most of all about finding a sense of self despite the ambivalent responsibility that comes with inheriting one’s history.

Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 300-315) and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed May 23, 2007). PDF text: 70 p. UMI publication number: AAT 3250371. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in paper, microfilm and microfiche formats.