Dissertations / Theses: '200508 Other Literatures in English'

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Robson, Julia Caroline. "The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4372/.

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This thesis investigates the construction of identity in relation to an other. It considers three writers who, working at moments when the nature of selfhood was an urgent issue, conduct profound and original enquiries into the question of self- construction, and seeks both to reassess their contributions to this debate, and, in bringing their preoccupations and methods to bear upon each other, to open up new ways of approaching and reading their work. Considering a range of socio-cultural and religious forms of otherness -- the cannibal, the witch, the Jew, the aristocrat, the woman, the divine -- it embraces material from a number of important modem critical fields, and suggests how these topics might be combined to offer a coherent statement about the enduring issue of s elf- fashioning. The thesis seeks to map out a trajectory of decreasing investment in external communities, and an increasing perception of the self as a source and agent in the construction of identity. Looking in turn at the work of Montaigne, Proust and Woolf, it argues that where the Essais construct complex orders which appropriate the other to reinforce the identity of the self, Proust and Woolf increasingly, although gradually, and by no means always successfully, attempt to negotiate a less precisely- engaged relationship between other and self, and to assign the other a less constitutive role in the realization and expression of identity. The thesis also considers more briefly contexts in which this trajectory is reversed. To the extent that they examine modernist subjectivity, Proust and Woolf articulate an anxiety about the separation of self and world which leads to an attempted recuperation of the integrated orders depicted by Montaigne.

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Chen, Chia-Hwan. "Images of the other, images of the self : reciprocal representations of the British and the Chinese from the 1750s to the 1840s." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/63281/.

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During the interactions between the Chinese and the English from the 1750s to the 1840s, writers from both countries have created many distinctive images to represent "the Other" in their own discourses. Imagologists like Jean-Marc Moura (1992) and Daniel-Henri Pageaux (1994) indicated that every image of an "Other" de facto corresponds to an image of "Self." Consequently, the reciprocal images of the British and the Chinese may not only reflect individual writer's attitude towards "the Other" but also refract the self-images of each writer's own people and society. As writers are more or less conditioned by their immediate society, their images of "the Other" tend to reflect the collective ideology of a society. A study of reciprocal images in their own historical milieus will enable one to see why both parties were conditioned to produce certain images to represent "the Other" and why certain images may last longer than the others or even become stereotypes in different discourses. This thesis argues that neither the British nor the Chinese had unanimous images for each other from the 1750s to the 1840s, a century prior to the first Opium War. Instead, writers of both countries had created various negative and positive images of "the Other" to meet their own intentions during this period. By discussing the political, psychological and sociological meanings of the reciprocal images of the British and the Chinese diachronically and synchronically, this thesis suggests that writers might follow certain principles and rules to formulate their own images of other people as "the Other."

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Mattar, Karim. "The Middle Eastern novel in English : literary transnationalism after Orientalism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dae20213-59d9-4889-9cc2-e64c66668115.

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This thesis focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary Middle Eastern literatures in Britain and the United States. I'm particularly interested in the novel form, and in assessing how both translated Middle Eastern novels and anglophone novels by migrant writers engage with dominant Anglo-American discourses of politics, gender, and religion in the region. In negotiation with Edward Said's Orientalism, I develop a materialist postcolonial critical model to analyse how such discourses undergird publishing and marketing strategies towards novels by Ibrahim Nasrallah, Hisham Matar, Yasmin Crowther, Orhan Pamuk, and others. I argue that as Middle Eastern novels travel, whether via translation or authorial acts of migration, across cultures and languages, they are reshaped according to dominant audience expectations. But, I continue, they also retain traces of their source cultures which must be brought to the surface in critical readings. Drawing on the work of David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and Aamir Mufti, I thus develop a reading practice, what I call 'post-Orientalist comparatism', that allows me to read past the domesticating strategies framing these novels and to newly reveal their more local, thus potentially transgressive, takes on Middle Eastern socio-political issues. I cumulatively suggest that Middle Eastern novels in English formally embody a dialectic of 'East' and 'West', of the local and the global, thus have important implications for our understanding of the English and world novel traditions. I conceive of my thesis as a dual intervention into the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I am primarily concerned to reorient postcolonial theory around questions of Middle Eastern literary and cultural production, areas that have been traditionally neglected due to an entrenched, but unsustainable, anglophone bias. To do so, I turn to the work of Edward Said, and rethink the foundational problematic of Orientalism with an eye towards political, material, and cultural developments since 1978, the year in which Orientalism was first published, and towards the unique transnational positionality of the genre of the Middle Eastern novel in English. I also turn to theorists of world literature such as David Damrosch in order to develop a reading practice thoroughly attentive to issues of circulation, but, along the lines set out by Aamir Mufti, seek to interrogate their work for its occlusions of the impact of orientalist discourse in the historical development of the category of 'World Literature'. My thesis thus not only draws on postcolonial and world literary theory to analyse its object, the Middle Eastern novel in English, but also demonstrates how proper attention to this object necessitates a theoretical recalibration of these fields.

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Segal, Emily J. "Making Nobody Matter: Performance and Vision in Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games (2008)." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1861.

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The development of the novel cannot be separated from discussions about literary history, gender relations, performance, and the power literature has to instruct its audience. Women and young people have always comprised a substantial part of the novel’s readership, and this makes them powerful. The history of the novel is the history of dangerous literature; it is the history of works that have enchanted readers with “the power of example,” as Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century, that can lead them to change their behavior. This thesis explores how women in young adult literature—in the eighteenth century through Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and today through Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008)—use performance and vision to reveal and resist the social systems that try to define them. Evelina and Katniss, the heroines of these novels, provide their readers with examples of behaving in ways different than the normative model. Their stories, and the young women who read their stories, threaten the established social order of their worlds. The creative addition to this thesis provides readers with another young heroine who uses her powers, in a fantastical world, to reveal and resist the structures in her life.

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Puello, Alfonso Sarah L. "Poetics of the urban, poetics of the self : a comparative study of selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4316585d-51c1-4b79-ae46-f5cdaf4c55d5.

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This thesis explores the poetic representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda respectively. Its primary aim is to analyse the relational phenomenon between the construction of these poets' personal maps of the city and the concomitant formation of the poetic self. The principal point of departure is Jacques Réda's Ferveur de Borges (1987), a collection of essays and poems published individually between 1957 and 1986, where the author expresses his admiration for Borges, shows his broad and critical knowledge of Borges's works and establishes the similarities between their poetics of the urban and poetics of the self. Another important aim of this thesis is therefore to ascertain the extent of Borges's influential role in Réda's poetics, but also how reading Borges through Réda enhances our understanding of Borges's urban poetry. This comparison reveals that Borges and Réda gravitate towards places within the city, but mostly its periphery, characterised by their unpretentious, soulful and heterotopic qualities — places where the poets feel a sense of belonging. Their objective is to restore, through the prism of their minds and their physical investment in space, the provincial spirit of Buenos Aires and Paris, hidden behind the dynamism of the modern metropolises they have become. As a consequence of this communion between self and place they explore the possibility of being on the brink of a revelatory experience that speaks to the enigma of life. The wider scope of the thesis addresses the historical and cultural relationship between Buenos Aires and Paris, Borges's and Réda's redefinition of the centre/periphery dichotomy, the evening as a temporal locale and the distinction between poetic destiny and aesthetic experience.

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Allen, Jason D. "Le theatre d'Aime Cesaire et de Derek Walcott et le 'probleme de la Relation'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7c5d322e-12e9-426a-bd7f-411f75fb515a.

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This thesis considers crucial questions relating to the theatrical works of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott and argues that the authors' quest for identity is framed by a dialectic which Édouard Glissant has termed "philosophy of Relation". I show that it is this "philosophy of Relation" which helps the authors formulate a theatrical vision that transcends the chaotic aspects of Antillean history. By examining the dialectical thrust of Walcott's and Césaire's theatre, the study seeks to develop an overarching theory of modern West Indian drama that accounts for its specific Antillean nature.

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Goodman, Jessica Mary. "La gloire et le malentendu : Goldoni and the Comédie-Italienne, 1760-93." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ec5ab3e3-812e-49f7-92e6-b1eea488cad5.

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Eighteenth-century Paris was the cultural capital of Europe and home to a vibrant network of theatres, not all of which are equally present in modern scholarship. The Comédie-Italienne in particular has frequently been downplayed in historical accounts, and there is no existing work outlining its relationship with its authors. This thesis aims to address this gap through a case study of the Italian author Carlo Goldoni, who began work for the Comédie-Italienne in 1762. His thirty years in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career: the preface to his autobiography draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but his work for the Comédie-Italienne is dismissed as a failure; a view echoed by many modern critics. This study therefore also sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. Substantial original work on the Comédie-Italienne archives sheds new light on the administration of this theatre, building up the most comprehensive existing account of its finances, audiences and author relations in the 1760s, and situating it in the contemporary cultural field. Dramatic authors are revealed to be at the heart of tensions between symbolic and financial concerns across eighteenth-century theatrical Paris. This re-evaluation also provides a new context for understanding Goldoni’s equivocal account of his Parisian career. He desired a glorious image in posterity, yet the Comédie-Italienne’s collaborative production and lack of publication thwarted the reputation-shaping tactics he had developed in Italy. The only weapon that remained was his French Mémoires (1787), in which he consciously constructed his image and the claim of Parisian glory. Goldoni’s case also raises broader questions about the creation of literary gloire, and the fate of the cosmopolitan artist in a strange land. In modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the Frenchman he believed he had become. The thesis concludes that this failure in posterity stems from his misunderstanding of how to achieve gloire in his French context: to rely on artificially created image alone is not enough, and yet Goldoni had no choice.

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Reuter, Victoria. "Penelope differently : feminist re-visions of myth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4f1ffe10-d690-441d-8726-7fe1df896cb4.

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This thesis examines feminist rewritings of the Penelope myth and the intersections between poetry, myth, and feminist theory. The theoretical framework develops from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of memory and subjectivity which has its roots in the work of Michel Foucault. In Braidotti’s understanding, subjectivity is constructed through narratives of the past including myth. In order to support new, minority, and dissident subjectivities, a re-remembering of mythical narratives needs to happen. This process is linked to Judith Butler’s recent work on narrating the self and to Adrienne Rich’s idea of “Re-vision”. What Butler’s theory adds to Braidotti’s is the notion of dispossession: that as subjects we do not own our identities. We are, instead, dependent on others for recognition. This co-dependence based notion of subjectivity has ethical implications for how we interact with one another and what kind of narratives we iterate and reiterate. The writers discussed in this thesis, namely, Francisca Aguirre, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Margaret Atwood, not only rewrite Penelope, but perform Re-visions of the myth. They look back at it with a critical eye and remake it. This thesis further contends that Re-vision provides contemporary feminist writers with a reading and writing strategy that allows them to engage with myth in a way that parallels feminist theory’s efforts to construct new forms of subjectivity. Chapter 1 frames feminist appropriations of myth in a contemporary context and discusses Adrienne Rich’s theory of Re- vision. The next four chapters focus on specific writers who carry out a sustained dialogue with Penelope; they each take an element of the myth and tease it out towards a modern relevance. In looking at how Penelope is revised, this thesis demonstrates that women writers are engaged in a process of remaking canonical, mythic texts in such a way that speaks to contemporary issues of ethical subjectivity and self-making.

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Rogozhina, Anna. "'And from his side came blood and milk' : the martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch in Coptic Egypt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:35b8fd5c-5c85-4b5f-81c8-77e0b66a165d.

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My thesis examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically - the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This thesis examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint. Another aim of this work is to stress the entertainment value of such texts. I explore the sources used by Coptic hagiographers for creating such entertaining stories, as well as the methods they used to re-work certain theological concepts and make them more accessible to the audience. The thesis begins with description of the manuscript tradition of Philotheus and a brief outline and comparison of its main versions. The second chapter discusses the place of the Martyrdom of Philotheus in Coptic hagiography and its connection to the so-called cycles. The next two chapters explore the motifs and topoi characteristic of Coptic martyr passions, especially the legend of Diocletian the Persecutor and the image of Antioch as the Holy City in Coptic hagiography, as these two motifs appear in one way or another in the majority of the martyr passions. Chapter 5 is dedicated to one of the focal points in the Martyrdom - the miracle of resurrection and the tour of hell – and its literary and theological background. Chapter 6 discusses representations of magic and paganism in Coptic hagiography and some of the concerns of Coptic hagiographers. In the last chapter I explore the geography of the cult, its iconographic and hymnographic dimensions and the transformation of the perception of the saint; the second part of this chapter discusses the questions of performance, authorship and audience.

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Demosthenous, Annika Coralia. "Poetry and national identity in Cyprus and Scotland." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ad65856c-fba7-4a7f-89be-73ddef0c5522.

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This thesis aims to engage with the poetry of Scotland and Greek-speaking Cyprus, and examine the relationship between poetry defined as high culture and articulations of national identity in the two places. Scotland and Cyprus share characteristics that make the establishment of a single, coherent national identity with the appearance of permanence challenging, including their relationships with culturally dominant neighbours, competition between local and official languages, and the insecurity of their status as nations. Both Scotland and Cyprus have historically had hybrid identities; in Scotland, British identity is made problematic by England's cultural dominance, while in Cyprus Greek-speakers have a conflicted relationship with Greece. This is made more complex by the fact that Scotland's political union with England may be ending, while Cyprus is divided in half as a result of tensions between Christian and Muslim populations and the unsubtle past involvement of Greece and Turkey in the island's affairs. This thesis aims to locate trends of national identity through the analysis of poetry and its reception in three distinct contexts. Part 1 analyses the evolution of Scottish and Greek-speaking Cypriot 'national character' through the poetry of national poets Robert Burns and Vasilis Michailidis, and the poets Walter Scott and Dimitris Lipertis. Part 2 explores the effects of modernity on the expression of national identities in literature through the lens of the Modernist movement, and how this was adopted and modified in Scotland and Cyprus. This is discussed with reference to three poets, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kostas Montis and Edwin Morgan, and their treatment of the national past and search for a national literary language. Finally, Part 3 analyses deliberate engagements of poets with national identity and issues of national importance, using Seamus Heaney's idea of 'adequate' poetry as a guide. Two functions of poetry are considered: the role it can play in transforming the landscape into the national homeland, and its potential to address communal trauma, and transform it into a unifying experience.

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Salmi, Charlotta. "Bloodlines, borderlines, shadowlines : forms of belonging in contemporary literature from partition areas." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8c26fce5-8454-4864-95dc-8a3f07fe29e4.

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This thesis explores cosmopolitan and humanist literary interventions by Palestinian, Israeli, Indian and Pakistani writers to the rise of ‘ethnically’ defined cultural and political narratives of community. It uses a comparative framework to look at contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Raja Shehadeh, Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan and David Grossman, who deconstruct the biologically defined border as a repressive literary, cultural and political metaphor in favour of more open-ended categories of identity and community. I argue that in deconstructing the epistemology of the exclusive boundary through cosmopolitan and humanist philosophies, these international writers demonstrate the impossibility of shedding all borders in their own work. Their ‘borderless’ aesthetic that constantly conjures the border is thus indicative of the interrelated nature of cosmopolitan and sectarian identities in a globalized modernity. Moreover, it is suggestive of the ambivalent relationship between politically-conscious postcolonial texts (which draw political lines) and the emerging field of World literature that is coming to be defined by its ability to appeal to the 'universal'.

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Williams, Simon J. "Reading between the lines : Arabic fiction in Israel after 1967." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:23a6d929-e16b-4f14-b240-c5cdd2d27933.

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Arabic literature in Israel has evaded critical attention, or has been treated as an uncomplicated part of Palestinian national culture, on a quest for unification and an identity that was devastated in 1948. This dissertation complicates that narrative through close readings of short stories by five Arab citizens of Israel—Imil Habibi, Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, Muhammad Naffa‘, Hanna Ibrahim, and Zaki Darwish—between 1967 and 1983. Focusing on the relationship between geography and fiction, I suggest that literary constructions of “place” and “space” by these authors reveal a range of cultural negotiations that break down entrenched dyads: Palestinian yet Israeli; Palestinian on the one hand, Israeli on the other; spared exile, but suffering occupation. Instead, these writers evoke the hybrid and ambivalent experiences produced in the paradoxical spaces of Israeli-Palestinian life. I develop an analytical framework that incorporates geographic and literary theory. I use the work of humanists such as Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey to suggest that literature mediates geography in a way that communicates belonging, alienation, or personal and collective meaning. The framework is bolstered with the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, along with historical and political sources, to capture the contextual resonance of the texts. After laying out these theoretical guidelines, I offer a historical account of Arabic literature in Israel and embark on four analytical chapters. Chapter Two explores Imil Habibi’s portrayals of anxiety around post-1967 Palestinian reunions. Chapter Three focuses on the themes of Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s Palestinian collective identity in Israel. Chapter Four takes up the theme of “the land” in the works of Muhammad Naffa‘ and Hanna Ibrahim, in the context of 1970s land expropriations. Chapter Five explores a long story by Zaki Darwish and its depiction of the body’s phenomenological relation to the homeland. Rather than portraying counter-narratives that suggest a binary of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” always at odds, these authors portray the spaces and characters in between. They disclose the anxieties of finding a sense of place in the context of a dispersed Palestinian nation, geopolitical uncertainty, social marginalization within the state, and the subtle geographies of a historic homeland that both is—and is not—one’s own.

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Brook, Madeleine E. "Popular history and fiction : the myth of August the Strong in German literature, art, and media." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cb7df46e-ab52-4f27-a084-41d7fab5b54e.

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This thesis concerns the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses that that myth is put to in a number of periods and differing régimes. Its case study is the popular myth of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, as a man of extraordinary sexual prowess and the ruler over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. It examines the origins of this myth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its development up to the twenty-first century in German history writing, fiction, art, and media. The image August created for himself in the art, literature, and festivities of his court as an ideal ruler of extremely broad cultural and intellectual interests and high political ambitions and abilities linked him closely with eighteenth-century notions of galanterie. This narrowed the scope of his image later, especially as nineteenth-century historians selected fictional sources and interpreted them as historical sources to present August as an immoral political failure. Although nineteenth-century popular writers exhibited a more varied response to August’s historical role, the negative historiography continued to resonate in later history writing. Ironically, the myth of August the Strong represented an opportunity in the GDR in creating and fostering a sense of identity, first as a socialist state with historical and cultural links to the east, and then by examining Prusso-Saxon history as a uniquely (East) German issue. Finally, the thesis examines the practice of historical re-enactment as it is currently employed in a number of variations on German TV and in literature, and its impact on historical knowledge. The thesis concludes that, while narrative forms are necessary to history and fiction, and fiction is a necessary part of presenting history, inconsistent combinations of the two can undermine the projects of both.

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Nakamura, Rika. "Attending the languages of the other recuperating "Asia, " abject, other in Asian North American literature /." 2009. http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000051057.

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(5929859), Carrie A. Kancilia. "Modernists and Middle Age: How Age Anxiety Shaped the Works of Joyce, Rhys and Orwell." 2021.

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This project is a literature-focused investigation of age-related discourse in the Modernist texts of James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and George Orwell. This study locates anxiety about ageing as a consistent trope of Modernist literature in reaction to the shifting and uncertain landscape of the period. Despite the meaningful differences in perspective, gender, nationality, and chronological placement of these authors within the spectrum of the Modernist period, each foregrounds age anxiety as a central theme and tension in their works. Incorporating dread around ageing in distinct manners, these authors expose the irreconcilable disconnect between a cultural call for newness and the inevitable ageing of the authors themselves. This study highlights the largely unexamined motif of age anxiety in the work of Modernism’s most esteemed and compelling authors.

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(11186181), Christina M. McCarter. "HINGED, BOUND, COVERED: THE SIGNIFYING POTENTIAL OF THE MATERIAL CODEX." Thesis, 2021.

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The idea of “the book” overflows with extraneous significance: books are presented as windows, gateways, vessels, lighthouses, and gardens. Books speak to us and feed us, and they are a method of escape. The book has long represented much more than a static, hinged, bound, covered object inscribed with words. Even when a book is not performing an elaborate, imaginative function, the word “book” very often signifies the text it holds or even the text’s author: You can open The Bluest Eye or carry Toni Morrison in your bag. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer invokes a “book” by “Lollius” as authoritative source of his Troilus and Criseyde, though no person exists; likewise, to conclude the same text, Chaucer asks directs his project to “go, litel bok, go.” When a book makes an appearance in narrative, it is rarely just a book—without legs, the book moves, and without breath, it lives. This dissertation asks what about the shape of the codex has helped the book become such a metaphorically rich signifier.

This dissertation attempts to unravel the various threads of meaning that make up the complex “idea of the book.” I focus on one of these threads: the book as a material object. By focusing on how the book as object—not the book as idea—functions within narrative, I argue that we can identify what about the book object enables its metaphorical range. I analyze moments in literature, television, and film when metaphorical functions are assigned, not to an ephemeral, complex idea of the book, but rather to the material realities of the book as an object. In these moments, the codex’s essential, material shape (what I am calling its bookishness) enables metaphorical functioning; I show that, by examining when mundanely physical bindings, pages, covers, and spines initiate metaphorical action, we can identify how the material book has come to mean so much more than itself.

Indeed, despite a renewed appreciation for the book as both material and cultural object, books have become so significantly meaningful that attempts to define “the book” evade simplicity, rendering books as everything and nothing at the same time. My inquire explores this complexity by starting with a simple premise: Metaphors are based on some element of physical truth. Though the book has sprouted in a variety of metaphorical directions, many of those metaphors are grounded in the book’s material realities. Acknowledging this, especially in an age of fast-evolving media and bookish fetishism, offers a valuable and novel perspective on how and why books are both semantically rich and culturally valued objects.

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(8850251), Ghaleb Alomaish. "“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY." Thesis, 2020.

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This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic '200508 Other Literatures in English'

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