Thesis advisors: Kevin Kopelson, Priya Kumar. Includes bibliographic references (p. 182-188).

This dissertation is a report on how Tom Lanoye, a contemporary Flemish author who explores themes of social relevance, deconstructs the sexual identity of his characters within the context of a postmodernist culture. The manifestation of this deconstruction process is described within those theoretical paradigms of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler that link sexual identity and social mores. For the purpose of this research Tom Lanoye‘s ‘Monster’ Trilogy was selected. Set against the backdrop of Belgium society during the late nineties of the twentieth century and highlighting the moral downfall of the Deschryver patriarchy, Lanoye’s novels address an assortment of contemporary gender and social political issues in his trilogy. These include the following: political corruption; incest; homosexuality; racism; the sexual abuse of minors; the relation between language and identity, volatile childrenparent relationships; the subversion of gender norms and sexual transformation. / In hierdie verhandeling word verslag gedoen van die wyse waarop Tom Lanoye as hedendaagse eksponent van die Vlaamse versetprosa die seksuele identiteit van sy karakters binne die konteks van 'n postmodernistiese verwysingsraam dekonstrueer. Die manifestasie van hierdie dekonstruksieproses word beskryf binne die teoretiese paradigmas met betrekking tot die verband tussen seksuele identiteit en maatskappy van Michel Foucault en Judith Butler. Vir die doel van hierdie ondersoek is Lanoye se 'Monstertrilogie' geselekteer. Gesitueer teen die agtergrond van die Belgiese maatskappy in die laat negentigerjare van die twintigste eeu en gefokus op die morele ondergang van die Deschryver-patriargie, sny Lanoye se trilogie 'n verskeidenheid van aktuele gender-en sosio-politieke kwessies aan. Hierdie kwessies sluit in: politieke korrupsie; bloedskande; homoseksualiteit, rassisme; die seksuele misbruik van minderjariges; die verhouding tussen taal en identiteit; onbestendige ouer-kind-verhoudings; die ondermyning van gendernorme en die kwessie van seksuele transformasie. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)

This thesis looks at literature by two South Asian, diasporic writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali, as a space where creative, cross-­cultural and independent identities for diasporic women might be created. The central claim of the thesis is that diasporic migration affects South Asian women in particular ways. The most positive outcome is that these women adopt new trans-­border identities but that these remain shaped by class, culture and gender. Hence a working class milieu such as the one depicted by Monica Ali, leads to an immigrant, ghetto-­ised, community-­based identity, located solely in the land of adoption, with return or travel to the homeland no longer possible. However, the milieu imagined in Jhumpa Lahiri’s text, a middle-class, suburban environment, creates a solitary, transnational identity, lived between countries, where travel between the land of birth and the land of adoption remains accessible. / English / M.A. (English)

Literary Dependents focuses on diverse discourses on childhood that informed and impacted Japanese literature and society in the modern era. Through an analysis of magazines, literary works, and related media, this dissertation traces the ways childhood has been constructed and utilized in literary, social, political, and cultural discourse from the late nineteenth century to the present. As Japan strove to establish itself as a modern nation in the late nineteenth century, children and youth became a focal point of development as future citizens and leaders of the nation. Hence, images of children in print media were directly tied to Japan’s national identity in the modern world. The development did not stop in the twentieth century, and the concept of childhood underwent many shifts and changes. Taishō Democracy, the Second World War, the Allied Occupation, and the economic boom all brought about changes in the meaning and value of childhood to society, and in each period, new depictions of childhood abounded in print media. By exploring these developments, Literary Dependents seeks to understand how modern Japanese society has represented and utilized childhood as a way of shaping its visions and ideals regarding gender, family, life, art, and the future. The materials covered in Literary Dependents are publications that were intended for both children and adults, in which complex relationships between children and adults played out. The first chapter analyzes the Meiji period (1868-1912) women’s magazine Jogaku zasshi (Women’s Education Magazine, 1885-1904), showing how notions of the wise mother, hardworking wife, as well as a model language for women were constructed through its reading material for children. Chapter 2 centers around the translation of the American children’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885-1886) by Wakamatsu Shizuko, serialized from 1890 to 1892 in Jogaku zasshi, which provided an idealized image of the child, mother, and family, and was meant to show young women, rather than children, how to be mothers and how to create an ideal family. Chapter 3 discusses the literary space shared by children and adults in the children’s magazine Akai tori (Red Bird, 1918-1936), in which about one fifth of the pages were allotted to writings in prose and verse by children from across the empire. This chapter discusses the unique kind of authorship that arose from the collaboration between adults and children as the child writers themselves strove to fit the standards established by Akai tori. Chapter 4 further explores the issue of child authorship through the example of Toyoda Masako (1922-2010), whose elementary school compositions were repeatedly published in Akai tori, and in 1937, were published in a book titled Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu (Composition Class). This chapter rereads Toyoda’s writing in Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu intertextually, juxtaposing her own expressions with the critique and interpretations by educators and literary writers, as well as referencing her autobiographical writings from the postwar period. The juxtaposition elucidates the arbitrariness of the ideals that were attributed to children’s writing in 1920s and 30s Japan. Chapter 5 deals with the depiction of children with disabilities during the Second World War through an analysis of Kawabata Yasunari’s Utsukushii tabi (A Beautiful Journey), serialized in Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend, 1908-1955) from 1939 to 1942. The serialization took place during a time of significant political change, which impacted the contents of Shōjo no tomo and the novel. The difficulty of continuing to write about a deaf-blind girl at such a time is evident in the abrupt turns in direction that the novel took during this time, moving away from depicting the disabled child and ultimately expressing colonialist and nationalist ideals. The sixth and last chapter explores the role of children in systems of distribution and consumption. In the immediate post-WWII period, reading material for children were scarce, not only because it was a general time of lack even for food, but also because strong nationalist/militarist sentiments found in wartime publications needed to be eliminated, or at least repackaged to fit the new environment. Yoshino Genzaburō’s Kimitachi wa dō ikiru ka (How Will You Guys Live?, 1937) was one text that underwent multiple “repackagings” in the postwar period. This chapter examines the different ways an “ethics” book was promoted under the changing historical conditions of post-WWII Japan. Although the materials covered in Literary Dependents center around those published in Japan, they are inextricably tied to other cultures and traverse national boundaries, not only through translation and adaptation, but also through intercultural interaction, collaboration, or travel. Furthermore, the dissertation connects childhood to other identities of gender, sexuality, disability, race, and class. Publications for children are often a coalescence of society’s myriad of networks as well as its most pressing issues, packaged and issued to an imagined child reader, which is itself an idealized image of the members of that society. The child and all of the ways it is imagined in print media can provide a unique window onto society and history. Hence, this dissertation explores the topic of the child in publishing culture, not to arrive at some definition of the child, but to better understand history through it. As much as children are dependent on adults and encounter publications through the mediation of adults, many aspects of the publishing industry are also dependent on children as readers, writers, consumers, images in marketing, or ideological figures. Literary Dependents is an investigation of mutual dependencies between the child and adult, publishing and literature, and print media and society.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The fragmented bodies and lives of postcolonial Caribbean women examined in Caribbean literature beget struggle and psychological ruin. The characters portrayed in novels by postcolonial Caribbean writers Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo are marginalized as “Other” by a Western patriarchal discourse that works to silence them because of their gender, color, class, and sexuality. Marginalization participates in the act of fragmentation of these characters because it challenges their sense of identity. Fragmentation means fractured; in terms of these fictive characters, fragmentation results from multiple traumas, each trauma causing another break in their wholeness. Postcolonial scholars have identified the causes and effects of fragmentation on the postcolonial subject, and they argue one’s need to heal because of it. Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo prove that wholeness is not possible for the postcolonial Caribbean woman, so rather than ruminate on that truth, they examine the journey of the postcolonial Caribbean woman as a way of making meaning of the pieces of her life. This project contends that fragmentation – and the fracture it produces – does not bind these women to negative existences; in fact, the female subjects of Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo locate power in their fragmentation. The texts studied include Danticat’s "Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994) and "The Farming of Bones" (1999), Cliff’s "Abeng" (1984) and "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), and Mootoo’s "Cereus Blooms at Night" (1996) and "He Drown She in the Sea" (2005).