Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 1960. Adviser: Elena Delgado. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-251) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4725. Adviser: L. Elena Delgado. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-394) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2010. / Adviser: Seth Moglen.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2007. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 46-03, page: 1242. Adviser: A. K. Kelly.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1776. Adviser: Jed Esty. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-302) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

abstract: In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2013

abstract: Set in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Midwest America, the collection of short stories follows the complicated trajectory of war-survivor to refugee and, then, immigrant. These stories---about religious prisoners who are not at all religious, about young, philosophizing boys tempting the bullets of snipers, about men retracing their fathers' steps over bridges that no longer exist---grapple with memory, imagination, and the nature of art, and explore the notion of writer as witness. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2013

<p> This dissertation is meant to be the scene of an experiment. It is meant to be a scene of observation and auscultation striving to fathom the work of <i>poiesis</i> as it manifests itself in select pieces of experimental poetry created by artists and writers of the 20^th-century avant-gardes. Our study notably poses the question of how <i>poiesis</i> draws on, and seeks to incorporate the experience of sensible things, examining also how this accentuation of perception in the making of a poem feeds into, viz. falls in line with the accentuation of the poem's sensible thing-ness. We will investigate how the abovementioned artists undertake to "make sense" of their experience of the things of the life-world, namely by grounding the signifying of their poetry in the mattering of <i>poietic</i> matter. We will investigate how their poems come to produce sense qua their mere being sensible, i.e. qua their being sensible as visual and/or aural matter that matters to us by virtue of its very visual and/or aural phenomenality.</p><p> As we will argue, with this emphasis on the production of a sensible presence, these poetic experiments not only establish the primacy of perception, but &ndash; more important &ndash; they also prove to loosen, and oftentimes even cut the close ties that <i>poiesis</i> is commonly considered to have with the semiotic order. Thus, instead of fabricating a communicational language, the experiment called <i>poiesis</i> giving rise to these works is in the first place destined to create the poem as a material thing. We will show that, as such a material thing, the experimental poem interpellates the senses via a language of materiality that, for its part, translates the materiality of the things of the life-world. We will show that, in lieu of straightforwardly abiding by the laws of semioticity, the poietic language of the works we are about to encounter rather emanates from the poems' very physique; i.e., that this "physical" language forged in defiance of the semiotic order thus rather proves to be consubstantial with the mattering of the matter that gives shape to the body of the poem.</p><p> In the course of our study, we will pay particular attention to how the work of <i>poiesis</i> &ndash; as it comes to crystallize and persist in the bodiliness of the respective poem &ndash; is, namely, pregnant with the gestures and the flesh of the body that conceived it. Beginning with the surface analysis of the physiognomy of a work by Man Ray, we will then turn to delving into the depths of the poems' corporeality. Anatomizing pieces from the oeuvres of Henri Chopin and Gerhard R&uuml;hm, we will discover &ndash; step-by-step and layer-by-layer &ndash; how both the scriptural and the oral practices constituting their work are infused with the pulsating of the human body. As we will suggest, the sensing of the scriptural and aural anatomies that build the body of Chopin's and R&uuml;hm's works always involves the sensing of the displaced and disfigured human body. This turn of <i> poiesis</i> to the human senses thus allows for a sensitization of the works themselves &ndash; in the sense that they become sensible bodies whose very bodiliness embraces, re-appropriates, and exudes the materiality of the life-world.</p><p>

<p> My dissertation shows how two women writers, Marie NDiaye and Bessora articulate the <i>experience</i> of being black in France, while, at the same time affirming the French Republican tenet that racial identification does violence to individuals, communities, and the nation itself. Despite their similar backgrounds, despite the fact that they reside in the same country, and that they write about a similar cast of characters in a similar milieu, Bessora and NDiaye are not typically seen as belonging to a shared literary category or tradition. NDiaye is categorized as a "French" author and Bessora as "Francophone." Although their novels might not be found in the same section of a French bookstore, when considered together, their works create a dialogue on race in today's France that cannot be overlooked.</p><p> In chapter one I focus on NDiaye's 1999 novella <i>La Naufrag&eacute;e </i>. This work combines art and fiction, featuring paintings by English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, most notably The Slave Ship (1840). In this chapter, I show how the narrator, a meilnaid, functions as an allegory for racial mixing. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's ideas on allegory, I demonstrate how the novella links the author's own non-white body to the historical bodies of human chattel drowned in the Middle Passage. This novella challenges the notion that France can ever be blind to race, given its history of chattel slavery.</p><p> Paradoxically, it is through allegory that NDiaye demonstrates the real violence and pain inflicted on the black body by the ideology of race-blindness. I build on these ideas in chapter two, examining the effects that the particular allegorical significance of the black body has on black subjects. Here I uncover a powerful intertextual thread running through NDiaye's 2012 novel <i> Ladivine</i>. Though NDiaye's understanding of race is undeniably French, she looks to the United States, to the Harlem Rennaissance and the passing novel to articulate the experience of being both black and entirely culturally French. I explore the dissociative effect produced when an individual, who sees herself as "universal," i.e. French like "everyone else," inhabits a nonwhite body. I extended my analysis beyond <i>Ladivine</i> to touch on <i>Rosie Carpe</i> (2001) and <i>Trois Femmes Puissantes </i> (2009). My analysis of these works reveals the ways in which French universalism is, paradoxically, geographically conscripted. The historical realities of slavery and of colonialism continue to impact the ways in which black bodies are seen in the metropole and in Overseas Departments, and profoundly influence the ways in which black subjects conceive of themselves.</p><p> In Chapter three I turned to Bessora, analyzing her first two novels, <i> 53 cm</i> (1999) and <i>Les taches d'encre</i> (2000). Bessora wrote both of these while pursuing a doctorate in anthropology. However, current scholarship tends to interpret her literary output as standing in direct conflict with her academic pursuits;that her novels, so rich in satire and pastiche, serve to reject or simply "write back" against the fields she was studying at the time. These analyses assume a necessarily conflictual relationship between black writers and the social sciences. I argue that in the tradition of many French anthropologists and authors before her, Bessora should be seen as both a literary author and a social scientist. By handing the tools of anthropological analysis to characters of color in these novels, Bessora does not invalidate a social scientific way of viewing the world; rather, she universalizes the anthropological gaze. She combines postmodern and anthropological narrative techniques to critique the way that race is constructed in France; she exposes the ways in which Republican values work to reinforce nationalism and white supremacy, and fall short of their universalist ambitions.</p><p> Chapter four builds on the ideas established in chapter three by comparing Bessora's dissertation, "M&eacute;mories P&eacute;troli&egrave;res au Gabon," (2002) with her novel <i>Petroleum</i> (2004), on the same subject. As an author of Gabonese descent who was raised and educated primarily in Europe, Bessora offers a complex insider/outsider perspective on her father's country (a country that was also her home for ten years), its history, and its memories of colonization. Reading these two texts side by side reveals both the interdependency between literature and the social sciences in both Bessora's fiction and in the French literary scene more generally. She writes from a vexed position of privilege, for which she has not yet fully accounted. Bessora's own stance towards universalism, her post-national identity which ironically gathers up identitarian labels and categories, obfuscates a more fraught relationship to the national history of Gabon, and to French neo-colonialism there.</p><p>