Civil War literature and the prospect of America

Howell, John William Cheairs The University of Chicago 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation reconsiders and reframes the longstanding critical discourse on the subject of American Civil War literature, and it does so from the disciplinary vantage of Religion and Literature. Arguing that Civil War literature should be understood as a problematic rather than as a genre with readily identifiable representational demands, the dissertation contends that the animating dynamic of the discourse on Civil War literature is an aporia: on the one hand, the discourse's early exponents (e.g. Walt Whitman, John Weiss, John William De Forest) insist that the events of the war will prove seminal for the creation of a robust American literature, which will evince America's spiritual unity. On the other hand, their critical musings betray the worry that an honest accounting of the war's traumas troubles the postwar predication of that same unity. The individual chapters characterize the dissertation's intervention relative to the discourse on Civil War literature and offer close readings of texts (novels, photographs, one volume surveys of American religious history, and the discourse on American civil religion) that negotiate the aporetic logic of Civil War literature in differential ways. Classing both narratives of complementarity (i.e. texts that occlude the war's disorders in the service of mitigating the war's disjunctive force) and contrarian narratives (i.e. texts that highlight the war's traumas and interrogate, thereby, the complementarity of the war and a providential reading of American history) as instances of Civil War literature, the dissertation argues that the historical neglect of contrarian texts (especially the literary efforts of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James) is bound up with an insistence upon the war's apocalyptic efficacy. The project's constructive wager, framed in terms of the ethics of historical memory, is that convoking and recommending a contrarian strand of Civil War memory might function as a ground for the contemporary ethical eschewal of millennial nationalist presuppositions that gain momentum in the postwar epoch and that continue to structure American cultural and political life and rhetoric.

Digital modernism: Making it new in new media

Pressman, Jessica Brie University of California, Los Angeles 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

What happens to literature, the literary, and the cultural value of both when text moves from page to screen? What can these shifts teach us about the traditions, practices, and discourses that shape the ways in which we read, study, and engage with print and electronic literature? Digital Modernism reads digital literature within a modernist tradition of making it new, a history that is both experimental and canonical. Across literary genres and programming platforms, I examine a shared strategy in some of the most innovative works of electronic literature online. These works adopt, adapt, and allude to the seminal aesthetic practices, principles, and texts of literary modernism. Digital Modernism analyzes these consciously crafted ties to modernism as part of a larger strategy and cultural situation. These works challenge common assumptions about digital literature, such as associations with hypertext and expectations of reader-controlled interactivity. They use modernism to construct immanent critiques about a culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The results are works of web-based literature that are text-based, aesthetically difficult, and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital Modernism examines how and why contemporary works of online literature employ this modernist modus operandi and what this trend exposes about the role of the "literary" in our digital culture and reading practices. Reading electronic literature through modernism also provides an opportunity to reread modernism through perspectives made visible and vital because of contemporary media and culture. Digital Modernism thus pursues a dual perspective: it illuminates the role of modernism in contemporary literature and, in so doing, reflects back on modernist literature. Addressing the question "What is new about new media?," Digital Modernism reads works of electronic literature that follow Ezra Pound's mantra and "MAKE IT NEW" by renovating a literary past.

Memory and destruction: A psychiatric approach to understanding literary depictions of air raids in World War II

Vees-Gulani, Susanne Heike University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

After fifty years of relative silence, the end of the twentieth century brought renewed interest in the subject of the bombings of German cities in World War II, when the writer W. G. Sebald sparked a debate about the paucity of literary works describing the air raids among German authors. This thesis grew out of the debate, and seeks to explore the available literature in more detail. The literature about the bombings reveals the traumatizing effects of the events both on the population and on the writers who struggle to depict it. It is thus essential to take into account the effects that trauma exerts on the authors and their works. Yet a review of the existing theories on trauma in the humanities displays several deficiencies. Most particularly, the humanistic approach does not make full use of the psychiatric literature. A study of the literary texts about the bombings and their authors shows, however, that psychiatric theory, particularly about Acute Stress Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, can be very useful in assessing trauma within literature. Additionally, the subject is mired in not only psychological issues, but also politics. The study of post-war literature in Germany on such a controversial topic always also needs to reflect on the role of German guilt, shame, and responsibility. It is in the context of these psychiatric and political issues that this dissertation explores the bombing literature and their authors. Contrary to Sebald's assertions, the air raids have indeed been a topic of German literature and several narratives are discussed in the thesis (Nossack, Borchert, Ledig, Kluge, Kempowski, Forte). In addition, German-Jewish accounts of the bombings (Kemperer, Biermann), displaying the mixed view of them as both horror and signs of freedom, reveal the complexity of the issue. Interestingly, some of the best literature about the air raids comes from non-German authors (Vonnegut, Mulisch, Coulonges), who offer artistically and intellectually challenging texts, exploring both German guilt and psychological trauma. This dissertation offers new insight into an important period of German history and literature, and provides new pathways for exploring war and trauma literature in general.

Representations of virginity in modern Japanese literature

Cullen, Jennifer University of California, Los Angeles 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation explores representations of virginity in Japanese literature from the turn of the century until the early 1930s. During this period of rapid modernization, discourses on Japanese literature, culture, and the Japanese citizen emerged that often centered around a "pure" ideal and its other. Definitions of virginity vary widely over time and by culture, but virginity is most frequently linked to "purity," a quality of blankness that simultaneously invites and forbids completion. This was true in Japan as well. The rapid importation of foreign ideologies to Japan brought about great social changes and new conceptions of love and marriage. Virginity first became an important element of love during the mid-Meiji period. Depending on the ideology of the critic, the virgin's "purity" was the result of Western enlightenment or a manifestation of traditional Japanese virtue. The virgin's other could be "polluted" by foreign influence, by barbaric native tradition, or by the natural urges of the body. Similarly, the literature of these decades is marked by the struggle to incorporate foreign literary styles into a Japanese literary tradition. The often conflicting demands for development and literary "purity" correspond to the new emphasis placed on virginity and sexual morality. I analyze representations of virginity in the works of a variety of authors, such as Mori Ogai, Tayama Katai, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, contributors to the feminist journal Seito, and Kikuchi Kan to demonstrate the ways in which the concept of virginity was appropriated by authors of differing viewpoints. These writers created new systems of morality that either facilitated or resisted the ongoing construction of Japanese tradition and culture, and often related these concepts to artistic "purity" and ideal literature. In my final chapter, I examine the canonization of Higuchi Ichiyo, the quintessential virgin of modern Japanese literature, in whose figure we can see a graphic demonstration of the appropriation of "virginity" in order to construct a Japanese ideal of literature and behavior, as well as criticism of Ichiyo as critique of tradition.

Algiers - Vilnius - Algiers: A study in minor literature (Algeria, Lithuania, Assia Djebar, Icchokas Meras)

Sukys, Julija Vida University of Toronto (Canada) 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The works of Algerian author Assia Djebar and Litvak writer Icchokas Meras lie at the centre of this study. In it I consider the texts of Djebar and Meras as texts of minor literature, using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's <italic>Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature</italic> as my starting point. Both Djebar and Meras write in the language of the other, and I argue that it is their simultaneous being inside and outside of language (and community) that defines them as writers of minor literature. These writers deform and disrupt language, making it stutter and infusing it with new meaning. While stuttering language is one result of the ever-present tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization that is at the heart of minor literature, I have tried to show that this process happens not only in language (as in Djebar), but in the narratives that communities tell about themselves (as in Meras) as well. The collectivity of minor literature—the fact that minor literature is always written by many hands—has led me to a reading of its texts as rhizomes and as assemblages. This rhizomorphous reading is a reading across texts and genres. It is a reading process that allows for multiform texts, as rhizomes are always multiple and continually becoming. In addition to the adoption of language, another common thread ties the texts of this study together: the memory of war, violence, and loss. It is the simultaneous struggle to honour the memory of disappeared loved ones, and to free oneself from the past in order to let old wounds heal that links not only Djebar and Meras, but which opens their texts out to a much larger assemblage, or collection of rhizomes. It is this contradictory impulse—to hang on while letting go (to reterritorialize while deterritorializing)—that is at the centre of minor literature.

Through the hospital gates: Hansen's Disease and modern Japanese literature

Tanaka, Kathryn Marie The University of Chicago 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Through the Hospital Gates: Hansen's Disease and Modern Japanese Literature analyzes the significance of the genre of "leprosy literature," written by patients diagnosed with Hansen's Disease and quarantined for treatment under Japan's Hansen's Disease-prevention legislation. Broadly, this project focuses on the implications of this genre for patients, doctors, and society during a key period in Japan's history: the early decades of the 20th century. The genre of "leprosy literature" has often been analyzed through the lens of the hospital and patient subjectivity. This project challenges this narrow view of patient writing and explores the functions of patient literature both for the hospital and the patients themselves. Examining the ways the genre created communities and represented patient experience to a broad public outside the hospital reveals the complicated and contested nature of "leprosy literature" and traces the myriad ways patients used literature to create connections to a world outside the hospital. It also argues literature allowed patients to define their trauma and experiences in narratives that countered government and hospital representations of the disease and their life in quarantine. Each chapter takes a different hospital and writer as its subject and examines the ways in which that writer gave their personal illness and quarantine experience social significance. The first chapter argues that the poems of Shimada Shakuso on everyday life within the hospital represent not only personal trauma but also a collective narrative of patient experience. Chapter Two examines how Nagata Honami uses his nationalistic and Christian writings to make himself a vital part of religious and patriotic movements outside the hospital. The final chapter takes up Hojo Tamio and the consequences of the popularization of his work beyond the hospital. I argue that Hojo, in his frank depictions of life in the hospital, offered a powerful counter narrative to official hospital representations of the illness and its treatment. As a whole, the dissertation underscores the diversity and multiple functions of the genre of "leprosy literature" and questions what literature does and how it responds to the social, medical and legal realities of illness and isolation. This in turn reveals the complex relationship between trauma, society, literature, and the hospital.

Music and letters: Correspondances of notes and narrative from Berlioz to Proust (Hector Berlioz, Marcel Proust, France)

Skorupa, Candace Kirsten Yale University 2000 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The dissertation examines certain thematic and structural connections between nineteenth-century literature and music: how literature and narrative influenced musical compositions and, most importantly, how music inspired and shaped works of literature. Baudelaire's poem, “Correspondances,” serves as a thematic <italic>leitmotif</italic> throughout the dissertation for focusing the investigation of thematic and structural crossover between the sister arts of literature and music. First examining a programmatic symphony and a work of music criticism as two important nineteenth-century predecessors of musically-inspired literary production, the dissertation considers several examples in French literature of “verbal music,” the literary representation and description of music in words. The thesis ultimately suggests the importance of music as a literary structuring device and a functional analogy and model for literary narrative. In comparing the narrative role of a literary program for instrumental music and of a musical program in literature, the thesis asks several crucial questions: what music in a literary narrative accomplishes; how verbal music profoundly reshapes the literary text; how analogous structures emerge from literary and musical narratives; and, finally, how verbal music in a literary text suggests a model for narrative structure. The first chapter presents two nineteenth-century cultural influences on musically-inspired French literature: the narrative program of Berlioz's <italic> Symphonie fantastique</italic> and Baudelaire's essay “Richard Wagner et <italic>Tannhäuser</italic> à Paris.” The second chapter studies the verbal music, of both thematic and structural interest, in Mallarmé's poem, <italic>L'Après-midi d'un faune</italic>, as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration between the musically-influenced poet and Debussy, who composed a <italic>Prélude</italic> for the poem. The third chapter presents Proust's narrative description of the Vinteuil sonata and septet in <italic> A la recherche du temps perdu</italic> as the culminating stage of an authorial search for voice and of the literary realization of the semantic potential of instrumental music. Through these examples of creative connections between music and literature, I suggest the formative role of these complementary sister arts in defining nineteenth-century European literary aesthetics and culture from the wake of Romanticism through the <italic>fin-de-siècle </italic> period.

Beyond the refugee experience: Redefining exile, metissage, and the aesthetics of representation in Vietnamese diasporic literature from France and North America

Trouilloud, Lise-Helene University of California, Davis 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation defines the emergence of Vietnamese diasporic literature through a detailed analysis of the complex, transnational literary contacts that obtain between France, Canada, the United States, and Vie&dotbelow;t Nam. Within this context, I am particularly interested in showing the evolution of Vietnamese overseas literature from refugee to diasporic literature. As Vietnamese overseas authors stop merely retelling the war, they show a clearer desire to claim the United States, Canada and France as their adoptive home even while they refuse to be either assimilated or marginalized. As a result, there is particular meaning to be found in the ways Vietnamese overseas writers choose to represent themselves and what relationship they entertain with the act of writing. While a profound sense of homelessness predominates in the Vietnamese overseas community, this very homelessness is counteracted by writers in that community for whom the function of writing issues in the creation of literary space as an alternative "home.". The first chapter presents the genesis of Franco-Vietnamese literature as it originated in colonial Vie&dotbelow;t Nam, before accounting for the relocation of its writers to North America and France. The five remaining chapters present readings of fourteen contemporary diasporic Vietnamese works to identify and define a canon of Vietnamese overseas literature written in European languages. These readings are organized by location (France, Canada, the United States) and by theme: biracial/bicultural identity; the situation of flight and exile; the experience of returning to the homeland. Whether it be one of celebration or contention, the space of writing created by Vietnamese overseas writers enables a courageous exploration of racial, cultural and literary metissage that is an intermixing that serves to express intercultural identity and to negotiate a more self-affirming position vis-a-vis both homeland and host culture. It is thus by examining how these writers choose to represent their hybrid identity at the intersection of writing, memory and art, that their experience of migration is best understood.

Sirens of the western shore: Westernesque women and translation in modern Japanese literature

Levy, Indra A Columbia University 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

By introducing the new concept of the “Westernesque woman,” this study explores the relationship between translation, gender representation, and literary production in the cultural cross-fertilization that gave birth to modern Japanese literature. The “Westernesque woman” names a distinct lineage of femmes fatales in modern Japanese literature who are neither ethnically nor culturally “Western” per se, yet are distinguished by physical appearances, personal mannerisms, lifestyles, behaviors, and ways of thinking that were perceived within the Japanese context as particularly evocative of the West. As femmes fatales, they function as the dangerously alluring embodiments of Japan's cultural assimilation of the modern West. The landmark Westernesque women in modern Japanese literature not only represent the cultural vanguard as female other, but also mark a particular interest in the constantly disputed status of media within literature itself. From Futabatei Shimei's creation of a new vernacular style in <italic>Ukigumo </italic> and Tayama Katai's attempt at Naturalist “raw description” in <italic>Futon</italic> to Shimamura Hôgetsu's call for Naturalist acting, vernacular speech, and gender representation on the stage, Westernesque female figures were repeatedly invoked as proof of a given media's ability to represent the latest arrival on the modern scene. As a favored mechanism for marking one's place on the battlefield of literary styles and representational modes, the Westernesque woman also reflects the mediation of these disputes by the consumption—reading, translation, and adaptation—of modern Western literatures. In order to show that the exotic value of the Westernesque woman in modern Japanese literature is inextricably tied to the exotic appeal of Western literary styles, concepts, and representational modes, this study expands the parameters of exoticism to include not only the exotic sexual other, but also the exotic <italic> textual</italic> other as an object of fascination. Sustained attention to the profound effects of translation on the development of modern Japanese literary production reveals Westernesque women to be sirens who personify the dangers of spanning the gap between reading Western literatures and writing in Japanese.

The legitimacy of literature: Metaliterary reflection in Hermann Broch's "The Death of Virgil" and Peter Weiss's "The Aesthetics of Resistance"

Jenkins, Jennifer Lynne The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation examines how Hermann Broch and Peter Weiss treat the question of the legitimacy of literature. It presents an analysis of metaliterary reflections---contemplations on literature conveyed through literature---in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) (1945) and Weiss's Die Asthetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) (1975--1981) and examines theoretical and personal positions articulated in these authors' non-fiction works, notes and correspondence. The question of the legitimacy of literature occupied writers such as Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann und Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who concluded that the legitimacy question functions as much as a foundation for literature in the twentieth century as it simultaneously challenges it. The question of whether literature is a legitimate expressive form must be carried in literature and expressed as literature. This is what Der Tod des Vergil and Die Asthetik des Widerstands offer: a literary investigation into the question as to literature's own legitimacy. In both works, the autonomous nature of art---its freedom from all constraints imposed from outside the mechanisms of its own existence---is played out against the expectation of its participation in human reality while at the same time being shown to complement it. Broch and Weiss saw in literature a means to access fundamental knowledge about reality. What Weiss characterizes as a 'revealing,' or rational learning process through which one can recognize inherently inhumane power structures (acquiring the means with which to counter them), takes place in Broch's conception as a metaphysical breakthrough into new spheres of knowledge. Here, the acquisition of knowledge is a transcendent experience, an overcoming of death [via "Todeserkenntnis"] and the symbolic realization of the eternal. Despite momentary (Weiss) or longer-lasting (Broch) bouts of doubt as to whether writing literature might be considered a worthwhile, legitimate pursuit, both authors wrote literature until the end of their lives. Their distinct humanity and their drive to aid mankind in inhuman times allowed them no other possibility than to search for the humane and to nurture it where they found it most highly concentrated; this was and remained for them literature.