The purpose of this article is to establish a textual parallel between Hunter S. Thompson`s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Ernest Hemingway`s Green Hills of Africa. Thompson took Hemingway’s novel as a challenge to write under extreme duress. Thompson twisted many passages from Green Hills to fit his own text. He used bitter irony to translate Hemingway`s text into his own “Gonzo” reportage. Thompson`s friend and traveling companion, Oscar Z. Acosta, is used as an example of how Thompson rewrote Hemingway. Acosta`s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is referenced as the nexus of the two novels, making Acosta the primary focus of Thompson`s rewrite. These men, their methods, and their works fit together under Thompson`s pen. Hemingway`s religious, racial, and bestial imagery are included in Thompson`s narrative. However, these images are made ironic and do not plagiarize the original copy.

In my research, I will examine James Joyce’s Dubliners as a collection of stories that is unified by an ongoing theme; escape or the desire to escape. In the collection, the want or need to escape serves a major purpose throughout the characters and their lives. This thesis explores five stories that share this theme in particular: “The Sisters,” “Eveline,” “Araby,” “An Encounter,” and “The Dead.” Each story will be discussed in the context of how each story progresses from a want to an actual escape. In addition, the thesis also considers how these stories exhibit a progression towards isolation and paralysis in the living until the final story, “The Dead.” “The Dead” can be interpreted as a positive, hopeful ending to the bleak collection, but I will argue its ending is anything but optimistic along with its crucial role as a conclusion to Dubliners.

ME WITHOUT YOU is an interlinked collection of short stories set in the blight of an urban housing project in San Bernardino, California. The stories follow the lives of three students in their year of fourth grade at a low performing school. Narrated from these points of view, the collection amplifies the voices of a community wrought with violence, poverty, and crime while also exploring how children brave the consequences of a world they cannot control. Mesmerizing in its simplicity, and gripping in its detail, ME WITHOUT YOU intertwines themes of identity, family, loss, poverty, and longing for what is just out of reach. It begs the reader to question how one survives a world of violence and disillusionment. The story behind my stories is this: in my nine years in San Bernardino, I have learned that it isn’t just the origin of one’s story that matters, but what one does with it. In this way, ME WITHOUT YOU tells the stories of this region, the dreams of its children, and the journeys they navigate in order to survive.

<p>This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.</p><p>The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.</p><p>Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.</p> / Dissertation

This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

In the twenty-first century, as in the sixteenth, a blindfolded woman holding a sword and scales personifies justice; her blindfold conveys impartiality, her scales evenhandedness, and her sword the authority to compel obedience. In pre-democratic early modern England, Justice’s iconography was often used to legitimate the pain that the state imposed on those who broke the common peace. Simultaneously, the creative and cultural narratives within which the penal code was embedded often complicated and contradicted the state’s legally violent precepts. The relationship between legal violence and justice is at the center of this project: Must the law be violent to control violence? Does the law’s violence promote justice or disrupt it? How do the formal mechanisms of law and social control operate within the complex world of art, sermons, and literature? This project maps the late Elizabethan and early Stuart engagement with those questions. I examine a continuum of responses to legal violence embedded in the judicial institutions of Parliament, the Star Chamber, and the Queen’s Bench as well as in poetry, plays, sermons, broadsides, iconography, utopian narratives, paintings, and engravings. Often drawing on the metaphoric force of Justice’s symbols, the early modern response to legal violence was not purely semantic but strongly aesthetic, defending, mediating, reflecting, and refracting the state’s formal mechanisms of law. Reading case law along with works by Thomas More, Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Edward Coke, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish, I trace law as a cultural practice, expressed and understood aesthetically through both codified and creative means.

<p>This dissertation argues that the literary, intellectual, and cultural borders of Victorian Britain extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, and that the tradition of nation-based literary criticism inherited from the Victorians has blinded Victorian Studies to that possibility. Building upon the nineteenth century concept of "Greater Britain," a term invoking the expansion of the British nation through settler colonization, I demonstrate that literary forms did not simply diffuse from the core to the periphery of the empire, but instead were able to circulate within the space of Greater Britain. That process of circulation shaped Victorian literature and culture, as local colonial circumstances led writers to modify literary forms and knowledge formations; those modifications were then able to be further disseminated through the empire by way of the networks that constituted Greater Britain.</p><p>My argument focuses on the novel, because its formal allegiance to the imagined national community made it a valuable testing ground for the multi-centered nation that was being formed by settlement. I specifically locate the Victorian novel in the context of Britain's relations with the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, which were unique in that their transition from initial settlement to independent nations occurred almost entirely during the Victorian period. The chapters of <italic>Unsettled Nation</italic> focus on realism, romance and political economy's interest in settlement; the bildungsroman and theories of discipline developed in the penal colonies; the theorization of imperial spatiality in utopian and invasion fiction; and the legacy of the Waverley novel in the portrayal of colonization in temporal terms. Each chapter presents a specific example of how knowledge formations and literary forms were modified as a result of their circulation through the archipelagic nation space of Greater Britain.</p><p>Working at the intersection between Victorian Studies and Australian and New Zealand literary criticism, I seek to recover and reconsider the geographical mobility of nineteenth century Britons and their literature. Thus, more than merely trying to cast light on a dimension of imperialism largely ignored by critics of Victorian literature, I use the specific example of Australasia to make the broader claim that the very idea of Victorian Britain can and must be profitably expanded to include its settler colonies.</p> / Dissertation

<p>"What Can Philosophical Literature Do? The Contribution of Simone de Beauvoir" examines Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist aesthetic theory of the philosophical novel alongside two fictional works, L'invitée (1943) and Le sang des autres (1945), which constitute Beauvoir's first experiments in writing works of this hybrid genre. Throughout this dissertation, I mobilize Beauvoir's theoretical and literary writing to challenge implied notions that literature somehow acts as a supplement to philosophy and that philosophical literature does not offer distinct advantages to the philosophical system.</p><p>In her theoretical writings on philosophical literature - including "Littérature et métaphysique" (1945), her auto-analysis of her novels in La Force de l'âge (1960), her contribution to the forum, Que peut la littérature? (1965), and her lecture, "Mon expérience d'écrivain" (1966) - Beauvoir confronts a potential impasse in the conception of the philosophical novel, which risks devolving into being either a roman à thèse or a concrete example of a pre-existing philosophical system. This aesthetic impasse becomes particularly acute when Beauvoir begins to write ethical fiction after WWII. This dissertation catalogs Beauvoir's unique philosophical solutions to this aesthetic problem, and in turning to L'invitée and Le sang des autres, demonstrates that Beauvoir's aesthetic innovations open up readings of her novels to new insights about her contributions to twentieth-century literary and philosophical thought, including her thought on separation from the other - solipsism and skepticism - and on connection to the other - love, Mitsein, and reciprocal recognition. </p><p>In chapter one, I point to Beauvoir's formulation of the philosophical-literary impasse in "Littérature et métaphysique" and enumerate how this impasse has worked its way into the critical reception of L'invitée. Beauvoir resolves this aesthetic problem through her concept of the philosophical-literary work as a particularly strong appeal to the reader's freedom. In chapter two, I read L'invitée with Beauvoir's aesthetic insights in mind, which has the effect of freeing Beauvoir's novel from the philosophical binds of Sartre's theory of the Look in L'être et le néant. In L'invitée, Beauvoir accounts for and also goes beyond conflict and domination by building a multiplicity of looks through her theme of spectacle in her novel (dance, theater). In chapter three, I show how Beauvoir's turn to ethics and engaged literature after WWII once again raises the specter of the roman à thèse. I thus delineate the differences between engaged literature and the roman à thèse, differences which rely upon the existentialist notion of engaged literature as a dévoilement or unveiling of ethical issues. Finally, in chapter four I show the ways in which Le sang des autres both falls into the traps of the roman à thèse on the one hand and on the other resists that trap through its unveiling of her characters' world as Mitsein and the ambiguous ethical problem of empathy within Mitsein.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Nelson H. Vieira. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 172-185).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-09, Section: A, page: 3375. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.