Wondrous Love (public domain) is an old American hymn tune that I have known for a long time, and I have used it as the primary source material for my Chamber Symphony, trying throughout the piece to vary the texture and mood of the music. The piece opens with a sort of static texture, which gives way to a section where veiled references to the hymn tune become gradually more apparent. This veiled section almost dies away when the next section begins with a clear woodwind choir announcement of the first part of Wondrous Love. This short section, which is primarily transitional in nature, then moves through the strings, brass, and other instruments to effect a modulation into the next section. The next section is the first full announcement of the Wondrous Love hymn tune. While the music itself does not really change for the next two iterations of the tune in the section, the instrumentation is varied, and there is a modulation. This rather transparent music then dies away to a single note in the violins; this serves as a transition into a dreamlike section. This dreamlike music ends rather suddenly with an explosive tutti moment of which augmentation and open sonorities are the most salient features. The piece then comes to a close shortly thereafter with music that gradually dies away. / text

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Arnoia, Arnoia, do escritor galego Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, recorre a estruturas literárias arquetípicas do Maravilhoso, ressignificando-as. O herói, diante de provações que vivencia, sai em viagem na busca de um lugar ideal, sendo acompanhado de um personagem e variados objetos mágicos. Um passeio pelas sendas de Arnoia, Arnoia obriga a reler criticamente elementos de construção literária que retomam a tradição mítica, em especial a céltica medieval, uma vez que a literatura galega tem recorrido, em muito, à cultura celta para expressar o seu imaginário. Arnoia, Arnoia traz para a contemporaneidade variados elementos próprios do Maravilhoso, valendo-se deles para construir novos sentidos. Dessa maneira, o insólito, pacificamente esperado e mesmo demandado no Maravilhoso, surpreende na narrativa ferriniana / Arnoia, Arnoia, of the Galician writer Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, uses literary structures of the archetypal Wonderful, giving new resignification to them. The hero, in front of trials that he experiences, goes out of town in search of a ideal, being accompanied by a character and various magical objects. A stroll along the paths of Arnoia, Arnoia obliges to critically reread elements of literary construction, since the Galician has incorporated the mythic tradition, in especially the Celtic medieval literature, the Galician has appeal, too, for the Celtic culture to express their imagination. Arnoia, Arnoia brings to various factors peculiar to the contemporary Wonderful, availing himself of them to build new senses. Thus, the unusual, peacefully expected and even demanded in the Wonderful, surprises in ferrinian`s narrative

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Arnoia, Arnoia, do escritor galego Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, recorre a estruturas literárias arquetípicas do Maravilhoso, ressignificando-as. O herói, diante de provações que vivencia, sai em viagem na busca de um lugar ideal, sendo acompanhado de um personagem e variados objetos mágicos. Um passeio pelas sendas de Arnoia, Arnoia obriga a reler criticamente elementos de construção literária que retomam a tradição mítica, em especial a céltica medieval, uma vez que a literatura galega tem recorrido, em muito, à cultura celta para expressar o seu imaginário. Arnoia, Arnoia traz para a contemporaneidade variados elementos próprios do Maravilhoso, valendo-se deles para construir novos sentidos. Dessa maneira, o insólito, pacificamente esperado e mesmo demandado no Maravilhoso, surpreende na narrativa ferriniana / Arnoia, Arnoia, of the Galician writer Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, uses literary structures of the archetypal Wonderful, giving new resignification to them. The hero, in front of trials that he experiences, goes out of town in search of a ideal, being accompanied by a character and various magical objects. A stroll along the paths of Arnoia, Arnoia obliges to critically reread elements of literary construction, since the Galician has incorporated the mythic tradition, in especially the Celtic medieval literature, the Galician has appeal, too, for the Celtic culture to express their imagination. Arnoia, Arnoia brings to various factors peculiar to the contemporary Wonderful, availing himself of them to build new senses. Thus, the unusual, peacefully expected and even demanded in the Wonderful, surprises in ferrinian`s narrative

In this thesis, depending on Benedict Anderson’s Studies of nationalism in his book The Imagined Communities, I will prove that in her historical fiction for children, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, the Palestinian writer Sonia Nimr is reviving and reforming Arab national identity. Anderson identifies the nation as a group imagined by its members; the people who perceive and identify themselves as equal members in this group. For the people to imagine their nation, Anderson states three tools: the map as a representation of the geographical space, the census as a representation of population identity categories that live in a particular land, and the museum as the representation of historical and the legal continuity of certain ethnicities in a certain geographical space. The three tools are thoroughly abstracted and used in Nimr’s book as we follow the footsteps of Nimr’s heroine in her travels, we see her drawing Arab historical map, when Palestine was a canton in the great Arab State. The social fabric Nimr weaves by the characters in her book reflects the real and the reformed census of Arab ethnicities and their social classes with the highlighting of the essential role of Arabic women in society. The narrated society of Nimr’s work reforms nation’s census which accords with the extended pan Arab geography of Arab nation. The nation imagining requirements are completed by visiting the history and wandering in the historical Arabic cantons and cities which materialize Nimr’s trail to perpetuate those important places in her textual museum, which she builds in her addressed work to children to answer their question about who we are and how we are the most eligible ethnicities to live on this land. Nimr does not promote a certain political agenda nor casts a holy cover on the past; by contrast, she teaches Arab children past lessons to revive and reform their modern Arab national identity as a remedy for the catastrophic national present.

This creative thesis is comprised of stories that present characters who deal with guilt and betrayal and explores various points of view. My work is informed by Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which contains these themes and investigates narration. “Surviving Fog” centers around survivor’s guilt, while “Coming Full Circle, No Detour in Sight” demonstrates how a person can exert expectations on herself due to a religious background and personal values. Perhaps my most provocative story, “Beyond the Apple Orchard” delves into the emotional and physical betrayal of a father and the daughter’s struggles to overcome it. “Photographic Memories” embraces the surreal with a woman who can “read” photographs, whose story blends past transgressions that bleed into current ones, while “Send in the Clowns, Send in the Mob” explores herd mentality that stems from fear. Ultimately, each story contains kernels of truth that readers can grasp.

Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.