Teses / dissertações sobre o tema "Greek American literature"

I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a poeta doctus, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit.

Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, The Cabala, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. The Skin of Our Teeth exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor.

Vergil’s expression, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: Aeneid 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase lacrimae rerum is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding lacrimae rerum as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker and Emily Webb in Our Town, Wilder transforms Vergil’s lacrimae rerum into “Our Tears.”

This dissertation analyses the recurrent theme of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone in third-generation Italian American women’s memoirs. I argue that these women appropriate their Italian ethnic roots through a creative and compelling rereading and reworking of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. To develop my argument, I explore the interlacing of myth and memory in three contemporary Italian American memoirs: No Pictures in my Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (1992), The Skin between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006), and The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America (2011), respectively written by Susan Caperna Lloyd, Kym Ragusa, and Joanna Clapps Herman. These texts belong to the hybrid genre of memoir; a genre that combines imagination with individual and collective memory. Through the genre of memoir and the practice of self-writing, these authors turn to the myth as a source for female empowerment and ethnic assertion. The myth of Persephone in these Italian American women’s memoirs epitomizes the archetype of origin so it becomes a treasure to be sought and rediscovered. These texts offer insightful perspective on myth while also posing questions of difference, gender, race, ethnicity, self-representation, and post-modern identity. Through an eclectic approach, including literary criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology, I argue that these three memoirs show how the authors’ physical and/or psychological journeys between Italy and America have helped them to overcome the anxieties experienced in relation to their Italian American hybrid identity. This thesis explores the themes of liminality, ethnicity, race, and hybridity to understand how the Persephone myth is used by the authors to articulate their condition as dwellers of the limen, and to help them come to terms with the trauma of loss, separation, and reunion.

The present thesis examines the way E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill appropriated C.P. Cavafy in writings that were disseminated and consumed amongst culturally dominant literary circles, and which eventually determined the Greek-Alexandrian poet’s international reputation. I aim to contribute a new perspective on Cavafy, by evading the text-based tradition of reception studies, and proposing an alternative method of discussing the production of Cavafy's canonical status. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory, I view literary canonization as involving a variety of factors at play beyond creative achievement: in particular, relationships of 'authorial consecration' whereby writers create and circulate cultural capital through their power to legitimize other artists. The critical and fictional texts I analyse perform readings of Cavafy's poetry alongside imaginative portrayals of the poet's life and personality. I take this complementary relationship - between the image of the poet each author projects and their reading of his work - as a starting point to explore the broader ideas of aesthetics and authorial subjectivity that inform the renderings of Cavafy generated by prominent literary figures. Rather than passive recipients of influence, these figures are considered as active agents in the production of 'Cavafy narratives', appropriating the poet according to their own agendas, while also projecting onto him their own position within the cultural field. Eventually, Cavafy becomes a point of insight into the multiplicity of networks and practices involved in the production of cultural currency; in turn, the study of the construction of Cavafy's authorial identity sheds light on the cumulative processes that have defined the way the poet is read and perceived to the present day. This duality of perspective is essential to a study concerned with the cultural contexts framing the poet's steady rise to international fame throughout the 20th century.

The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.

This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.

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.

O objetivo desta dissertação é o de investigar as disputas pelo poder subjacentes no texto literário do autor cherokee/canadense Thomas King, mais especificamente em seu romance publicado em 1993 intitulado Green Grass, Running Water. Serão destacadas as estratégias performáticas empregadas na desconstrução de representações opressivas de nativo-americanos por discursos ocidentais que compõem um complexo campo de batalha onde vozes em conflito disputam por direitos discursivos nas relações de poder. Se por um lado temos a tradição epistemológica positivista/cartesiana que trabalha há cinco séculos no sentido de exercer controle sobre as representações simbólicas dos nativo-americanos, a fim de que poder executivo e discursivo possa ser exercido sobre eles, por outro lado temos que Thomas King proporciona ao leitor o acesso a uma estrutura cíclica, não hierarquizada da narrativa e do epistêmio nativo-americanos. Esta investigação irá apontar os momentos de conflito entre essas vozes e analisará uma potencial interpretação democrática, de terceira via para esses encontros aparentemente binários. Espera-se ser possível indicar que Green Grass, Running Water propicia um privilegiado campo simbólico para que conflitos culturais e epistemológicos possam ocorrer e ser resolvidos com alguma espécie de resolução positiva em relação ao aspecto frequentemente belicoso dos engajamentos nativos e ocidentais. Para tanto, investigaremos a tradição bíblica e judaico-cristã de hierarquização e como o processo de nomeação de indivíduos e categorias permite que ocorra uma relação de dominação. Discutiremos a estrutura organizacional das comunidades, baseando-nos nas proposições de Zygmunt Bauman, com o intuito de averiguar de que forma o texto literário lida com questões como o pertencimento a grupos que possuem critérios subjetivos de aceitação, permitindo-nos responder se tais critérios permitem uma opção de filiação ou se representam uma demanda coletiva opressiva sobre o indivíduo. Uma análise dos discursos científicos de verdade também será feita, contrastando-os com a construção mítica coletiva das narrativas nativo-americanas como construções alternativas de verdade. Finalmente, teremos um capítulo sobre o poder narrativo da fotografia (mídia presente no romance em diversos momentos), no qual os usos da câmera serão descritos e analisados em seus potenciais de malícia e de narração distorcida.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the power struggles underlying the literary text of Canadian/Cherokee author Thomas King in the novel Green Grass, Running Water, published in 1993. We will highlight the performative strategies employed in the deconstruction of oppressive representations of the Native American by Western discursive and mediatic voices. The novel offers an interweaved narrative of Native and Western cultural materials that, together, will compose a complex battlefield of contentious voices that, ultimately, weigh on the balance of power relations to claim discursive rights. On the one hand, we have the epistemological tradition of a Positivist/Cartesian logic that has been working for five centuries to hold sway over the symbolic representations of the Native Americans in order to exert executive and discursive power over them; on the other hand, Thomas King provides the reader a glimpse of the cyclical, non-hierarchized structure of Native narrative and episteme. This investigation will point out the moments of conflict between these two voices and attempt to elaborate on the potential democratic/third-way interpretation of these seemingly binary encounters. We hope to be able to indicate that Green Grass, Running Water provides a privileged symbolic battleground for cultural and epistemological clashes to occur and be settled with some sort of positive resolution to the long-lasting contentious nature of Native and Western engagements. In order to accomplish that, we will delve into the biblical and Judeo-Christian tradition of hierachization and how the process of naming of individuals and categories allows for domination to occur. We will elaborate on the structural organization of communities, based on the propositions of Zygmunt Bauman, in order to assess how the literary text handles issues such as belonging to groups that have subjective criteria for acceptance, aiming at answering whether these criteria allow for an option of membership or if they pose as oppressive collective demands over the individual. An analysis of the scientific discourses of truth will also be provided, contrasting them with the collective mythmaking of Native American narratives as alternative constructors of truths. Finally, we will have a chapter on the narrative power of photography (a medium present in the novel at various moments), in which the uses of the camera are described and analyzed in their guileful and (mis)narrating potentials.

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.

English
Ph.D.
The “dialogue novel” is best understood as an ongoing novelistic experiment that replaces narration with dialogue, so that such basic narrative constituents as character, setting, chronology, and plot find expression not through the mediation of an external or character-bound narrative consciousness, but through the presented verbal exchange between characters. Despite sustained critical attention to the variety and “openness” of the novel form, dialogue novels have been largely ignored within English studies— treated as neither a sustained tradition within, nor a perverse manifestation of, the novel. This study seeks to address that absence and to situate the dialogue novel within narrative and novel studies. Drawing from analytic philosophy, narratology, literary theory, and the dialogue novels themselves, this study demonstrates how the unique formal texture of the dialogue novel opens onto valuable discussions about such topics as cooperative language communities, narrative desire, the power dynamics implicit in talk, and the relationship between time and narrative. Overriding these concerns is an attention to how the social nature of conversation determines how the dialogue novel represents institutional power and character agency, as well as how the dialogue novel establishes a dynamic between reader and text for the refiguration of meaning and the reconstruction of fictional worlds. Chapter One uses Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle as a baseline for delineating how communities are formed and maintained through dialogue in Henry James’s The Awkward Age. Chapter Two considers Henry Green’s late dialogue novels alongside his novel theory and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to illustrate how both character and readerly desire function as imitative practices. Chapter Three considers the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett through Aaron Fogel’s theory of “forced dialogue” to argue that dialogue’s constraints can offer liberative structure to the novel form and those who are subject to these strictures. And Chapter Four reads dialogue novels by William Gaddis and Nicholson Baker through Paul Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and Lubomír Doležel’s possible-worlds theory to argue that the dialogue novel presents an ideal form for examining the complex intersection of formal texture and history, as well as the dialectic between narrative configuration and human time.
Temple University--Theses

In Fred Chappell’s Kirkman tetralogy, narrator Jess Kirkman synthesizes a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding the nature of truth. Blurring the distinction between art and life, Jess's narrative structure mirrors the imaginative reconstruction of experience; the novels are largely non-chronological emotive interactions with and reflections of his most salient memories and imaginings. Synthesizing an impressive cacophony of voices, Jess's stories both describe and apply the wisdom and tales Jess acquires from and with his family members. Each story informs the prior and the next, and the rhizomatic interaction between language, narrative, and reader explores Jess's numerous identities and understandings as narratives venture through space, time, and imagination.

Defence date: 29 May 1998
Examining board: Prof. John Brewer, European University Institute ; Prof. Richard Johnson, The Nottingham Trent University ; Prof. Mark Mazower, University of Sussex ; Prof. Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Supervisor
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Steven Millhauser has been recognized for his abilities as both a novelist and a writer of short fiction. Yet, he has evaded definitive categorization because his fiction does not fit into any one category. Millhauser’s fiction has defied clean categorization specifically because of his regular oscillation between the modes of realism and fantasy. Much of Millhauser’s short fiction contains images of labyrinths: wandering narratives that appear to split off or come to a dead end, massive structures of branching, winding paths and complex mysteries that are as deep and impenetrable as the labyrinth itself. This project aims to specifically explore the presence of labyrinthine elements throughout Steven Millhauser’s short fiction. Millhauser’s labyrinths are either described spatially and/or suggested in his narrative form; they are, in other words, spatial and/or discursive. Millhauser’s spatial labyrinths (which I refer to as ‘architecture’ stories) involve the lengthy description of some immense or underground structure. The structures are fantastic in their size and often seem infinite in scale. These labyrinths are quite literal. Millhauser’s discursive labyrinths demonstrate the labyrinthine primarily through a forking, branching and repetitive narrative form. Millhauser’s use of the labyrinth is at once the same and different than preceding generations of short fiction. Postmodern short fiction in the 1960’s and 70’s used labyrinthine elements to draw the reader’s attention to the story’s textuality. Millhauser, too, writes in the experimental/fantastic mode, but to different ends. The devices of metafiction and realism are employed in his short fiction as agents of investigating and expressing two competing visions of reality. Using the ‘tricks’ and techniques of postmodern metafiction in tandem with realistic detail, Steven Millhauser’s labyrinthine fiction adjusts and reapplies the experimental short story to new ends: real-world applications and thematic expression.

La forêt a été, et reste encore, un sujet clé de la littérature hispano-américaine. Ce travail étudie les images de la forêt dans le roman hispano-américain du dernier siècle, tout en mettant l’accent sur l’analyse d’ouvrages dont l’action se situe dans la forêt amazonienne, le milieu sylvestre latino-américain par excellence. Quelles sont les visions de la forêt qui priment dans la production narrative ? Comment la crise écologique mondiale a-t-elle influencé les manières de « raconter la forêt » ? De quelle façon reflètent-elles la tournure prise par la situation environnementale aujourd’hui ? Quelles sortes de rapports entre les sociétés humaines et les écosystèmes forestiers sont représentés dans ces ouvrages ? Quelle est la participation des peuples autochtones dans les faits racontés ? Et celle des animaux, des plantes et d’autres entités non humaines ? Est-ce que les œuvres expriment des notions de « nature » et de « culture » différentes de celles de l’Occident moderne, ou des besoins et regards différents de ceux des humains ? Pour trouver une réponse à ces questions, le travail se focalise sur quatre sujets clés de la production romancière : la construction d’une conscience historique des images de la nature, les rapports entre les peuples de la forêt et les colonisateurs occidentaux, la vision de la forêt comme un écosystème complexe et fragile, et la quête de façons coopératives de bâtir notre relation avec l’environnement. Bien que la méthodologie choisie favorise les outils de l’écocritique et de l’écologie politique, le travail s’appuie aussi sur l’essor récent de la philosophie environnementale, la biogéographie des forêts tropicales et l’anthropologie culturelle. Par le truchement d’une telle approche, nous misons sur la possibilité d’ouvrir une plateforme de dialogue entre la critique littéraire et d’autres champs du savoir. L’objectif est d’utiliser les textes littéraires comme des fenêtres pour explorer la dimension environnementale de la condition humaine, en fournissant des idées et des points de vue féconds pour les débats actuels autour du changement de paradigme qu’il faut opérer afin que la civilisation humaine soit capable de créer un nouveau rapport, symbiotique et non simplement extractif, avec les écosystèmes naturels.
The forest has been, and remains, a key theme in Hispanic American literature. This research examines images of the forest in the Hispanic American narrative of the last century, stressing the analysis of works of writing set in the Amazon rainforest, Latin America’s quintessential natural setting. What are the most common imaginaries of the rainforest in this narrative production? What impact has the global ecological crisis had on different ways of “narrating the forest”? What types of relationships between human societies and rainforest ecosystems are represented in this corpus? What environmental and ecological problems are thematized in the texts? What role do Indigenous peoples play in the stories? And what role do animals, plants, and other nonhuman entities play? Do these works give a voice to notions of “nature” and “culture” that are different from Western ones? Do they give a voice to needs and perspectives that are different from human ones? To answer these questions, my work delves into four key issues of canonical rainforest narratives: the cultural perceptions of a tropical rainforest setting, the relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers, the development of a historical consciousness of images of nature, and the search for new forms of relating to the natural environment. Although the proposed methodology favors the tools of ecocriticism and political ecology, the work also draws on current developments in environmental philosophy, rainforest biogeography, and cultural anthropology. By means of such an interdisciplinary approach, my work seeks to create a suitable setting for dialogue between literary criticism and other areas of knowledge. Ultimately, I aim to use these chosen literary texts as a window to exploring the human condition’s environmental dimension, providing ideas and viewpoints that could contribute to building a distinct, symbiotic and not merely extractive relationship between human societies and natural ecosystems.
La selva ha sido, y sigue siendo, un tema central de la literatura hispanoamericana. Este trabajo estudia las imágenes de la selva en la narrativa hispanoamericana durante el último siglo, enfatizando el análisis de obras cuya acción se sitúa en la selva amazónica, el entorno natural latinoamericano por excelencia. ¿Cuáles son los imaginarios de la selva más comunes en la producción novelística y cuentística? ¿Cuál ha sido el impacto de la crisis ecológica global en las formas de «contar la selva»? ¿Qué tipos de relación entre las sociedades humanas y los ecosistemas selváticos aparecen representados en estas obras? ¿Qué problemas ambientales y ecológicos son tematizados en ellas? ¿Qué papel desempeñan en los hechos narrados las poblaciones autóctonas? ¿Y cuál desempeñan, a su vez, los animales, las plantas y otras entidades no-humanas? ¿Las obras le dan voz a nociones de «naturaleza» y «cultura» distintas a las de Occidente, o a necesidades u ópticas distintas a las de los humanos? Para responder estas preguntas, el trabajo profundiza en temas claves del canon de las narrativas de la selva, como las percepciones culturales del ambiente selvático, las relaciones entre los pobladores indígenas de la selva y los colonizadores, el desarrollo de una conciencia histórica de las imágenes de la naturaleza y la búsqueda de nuevas formas de relación con el entorno ambiental, entre otros. Si bien la metodología escogida privilegia las herramientas del ecocriticismo y la ecología política, el trabajo se apoya igualmente en desarrollos recientes de la filosofía ambiental, la biogeografía de las selvas tropicales y la antropología cultural. Mediante este enfoque pluridisciplinar, el trabajo procura abrir un escenario de diálogo fecundo entre la crítica literaria y otras áreas del conocimiento. El objetivo último es aprovechar los textos literarios seleccionados como una ventana para explorar la dimensión ambiental de la condición humana, proveyendo ideas y puntos de vista que contribuyan en la construcción de una relación distinta, simbiótica y no simplemente extractiva, entre las sociedades humanas y los ecosistemas naturales.