Browsing by Subject "Literature"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 106

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(2011) Rapoport, Bernard
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(Saturday Review, 2011) Rapoport, Bernard
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(2011) Rapoport, Bernard
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(The New York Review, 1979) Rapoport, Bernard
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(2011) Rapoport, Bernard
A cultural history beneath the left : politics, art, and the emergence of the underground during the Cold War
(2016-04-13) Cashbaugh, Sean Francis; Lewis, Randolph, 1966-; Bremen, Brian; Hartigan, John; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Kornhaber, Donna; Mickenberg, Julia
When critics use “underground” to describe cultural matters today, its meaning is clear: it describes something obscure, transgressive, and opposed to the “mainstream.” This is a relatively recent understanding of the term. It was not used to describe cultural practices until after World War II. Before then, it denoted an imagined space linked to allegedly deviant ways of life. After the war, artists claimed this imagined space as one of political and creative possibility. By the mid-1960s, underground film, music, comics, literature, and newspapers were recognizable cultural forms with their own institutions of production and exchange, a multifaceted alternative culture known as “the underground.” Both the history of “the underground” as a distinct cultural formation and the history of the idea of “underground culture” have received inadequate attention by scholars. In response, this dissertation traces the cultural history of the underground, detailing its emergence, consolidation, and collapse. In chapter one, I argue its appearance must be understood as the irruption of a political-aesthetic imaginary that valued radical social exteriority and the historical agency attributed to criminality. Chapter two explains how it first appeared in the postwar era among black ex-Communists, anti-totalitarians, and amateur psychoanalysts who rejected Marxist proletarianism and celebrated the historical agency of criminals. Chapter three explores how white hipsters of the 1950s imagined the underground as an alternative nation organized around identities the Cold War imaginary rendered deviant: non-whites, queer people, and the allegedly mad. As detailed in chapter four, they inspired artists of the 1960s to reject dominant cultural institutions and aesthetic ideologies in the name of subterranean autonomy. They established independent institutions committed to exploring taboo subjects, resulting in their prosecution under various obscenity laws. This reoriented the underground around obscenity, and led many to embrace the obscene as an aesthetic principle. As explored in chapter five, by the late 1960s, underground institutions expanded so much that its claims to radical exteriority became untenable, leading many to question the notion and ultimately reject it. I conclude with a discussion of how the collapse of the underground enabled the emergence of the generic idea of underground culture.
A Journey Through Mexico in Writing
(2006) Muñoz, Jennifer
A Mission of Two: The Process of Prophecy in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda and Cecilia Vicuña
(2009-02-07) Clark, Meredith
A Tapestry of Mexico and Peru through Multicultural Children's Literature
(2008) Greenberg, Gail
Aesthetic suicide in avant-garde literature of the 1920s : portraits of self-destruction by Breton, Gide, and Cocteau
(2020-05-04) Brynes, Stephanie Alexis; Picherit, Hervé G.; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Coffin, Judith; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth
“Aesthetic Suicide in Avant-Garde Literature of the 1920s” explores the connection between portraits of suicide and reflections on art and its production in select avant-garde works by André Breton, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. I suggest more specifically that each author used portraits of suicide as a vehicle to articulate their artistic principles in the early twentieth century. These principles are visible, for instance, in Breton’s construction of the Vaché suicide myth from 1919 to 1924, in Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), and in Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants terribles (1929). The ambiguity that clouds the act of suicide served each author’s representation of art and its production in various ways: by modeling a form of artistic abstention from life as poetry in line with an avant-garde rejection of literary ambition; by holding a mirror to the ways in which counterfeit infiltrates the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, or by expressing the imperfect coalescence of content and form in the production of the work of art. Given the diversity of the select authors’ thematic concerns, their use of diverse forms and mediums, as well as their personal and profession disputes, this project provides a window to a shared attribute across three otherwise discordant oeuvres. In this comparative, thematic study, I suggest the unanticipated link between Breton, Gide, and Cocteau implies suicide’s broader association with art and its production within varying factions of the avant-garde during the 1920s. In this way, this project situates itself in the fields of modernist studies and literary suicidology through its evaluation of the suicide as an allegory for the fragmentation of the work of art. To the existing body of research on suicide in modernist literature, which primarily addresses the psychological narrative of the suicidal individual, this project contributes a reading of suicide as a vehicle for the avant-garde criticism of art in French literature from 1919 to 1929.
After Paula: An Interview with Isabel Allende
(1999) Rodden, John
Air-borne bards : Anglo-Irish writers and the BBC, 1931-1968
(2012-08) Bloom, Emily Catherine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Friedman, Alan W; Hutchison, Coleman; Savage, Robert J
This dissertation defines and explores “radiogenic aesthetics” in late modernism that emerged alongside radio broadcasting, World War II era propaganda, censorship, and paper shortages, and the transnational networks forming in the shadow of British imperial collapse. The Anglo-Irish writers in this study—W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—addressed a changing media environment that mapped on to the socio-cultural flux of the period following Irish Independence. Transcending the newly minted national boundaries between Ireland and England, the British Broadcasting Corporation became a locus for shaping transnational literary networks, this in spite of the nationalist rhetoric surrounding broadcasting. By analyzing broadcasts alongside print literature, I identify a circuit of influence coursing between modernism and broadcasting, rather than a unidirectional flow. This body of work, which includes drama (radio and stage), feature broadcasts, poetry, and fiction, offers a counter-narrative to literary historical theories that position modernist aesthetics as a reaction against popular mass media. Motifs of uncanny repetition—returns, echoes, and hauntings—are typical of these radiogenic aesthetics and reveal tensions between orality and literacy, embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, ephemerality and permanence, and tradition and “the now.” These tensions become definitive features of late modernism as the self-assurance of modernism’s first practitioners gives way to troubling questions about the future of literature in the unstable media environments surrounding World War II. Adapting traditional literary forms from the novel, poem, and play for the broadcast medium and incorporating radio’s epistemologies into their literary theories, Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen, and Beckett draw attention to fundamental questions about mediation itself. In so doing, they anticipate the hypermediacy of postmodernism without, however, relinquishing the modernist pursuit of authenticity or the quest for forms capable of transcending the widening distance between author and audience.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca y la sombra del caminante
(2010-02-06) Astorga Poblete, Daniel
Annual Report of the President and Faculties of the University of Texas to the Board of Regents for the Session of 1901-1902
(University of Texas at Austin, 1902) University of Texas at Austin
As representações da violência em Parque Industrial, de Patrícia Galvão
(2008-02-09) Satico Ribeiro Higa, Larissa
Assembling place : Buenos Aires in cultural production (1920-1935)
(2009-12) Poppe, Nicolas Matthew; Shumway, Nicolas; Bernucci, Leopoldo; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Pereiro Otero, José Manuel; Zonn, Leo
In works of cultural production, interpretations of the built, natural, and social environment engage a hierarchy of readings of place. Formed by a totality of interpretations—accepted/unaccepted, dominant/subordinate, normal/abnormal, and everything in between—this hierarchy of readings frames place as a social understanding. Interpretations of place, therefore, are social positionings: kinds of individual delineations of the meaning of place as a social understanding. Collectively, these social positionings compose and comprise our understanding of the meaning of a place. In this study, I examine the different ways in which the understanding of Buenos Aires as a place shapes and is shaped by the avant-garde urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry of the 1920s, the five plays of Armando Discépolo’s dramatic genre of the grotesco criollo, Robert Arlt’s dark and portentous binary novel Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas (1929/1931), and three early Argentine sound films [Tango! (Mogila Barth 1933), Los tres berretines (Equipo Lumiton 1933), and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth 1934)]. To get at the mechanisms that drive the interaction between these works of cultural production, which are social positionings, and the social understanding of Buenos Aires as a place, I draw from Manuel De Landa’s notions of assemblage theory and non-linear history. Wholes such as porteño society of the 1920s and 1930s are assemblages of an almost limitless number of parts whose functions within the greater entity are not always clear. Place, therefore, is an assemblage whose meaning is made up of indeterminable interpretations of space. It is also a non-linear social understanding in that its meaning is irreducible to its components (i.e. social positionings). The mutual interactions and feedback within assemblages such as Buenos Aires are indicative of how meaning is ever changing through processes of destratification, restratification, and stratification in its components, including Borges’ early poetry, Discépolo’s grotesco criollo, Arlt’s Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas, and the films Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo.
Border fiction : fracture and contestation in post-Oslo Palestinian culture
(2013-12) Paul, William Andrew; El-Ariss, Tarek; Grumberg, Karen
This dissertation delves into a body of Palestinian literature, film, and art from the past two decades in order theorize the relationship between borders and their representations. In Israel and Palestine, a region in which negotiating borders has become a way of life, I explore the ways in which ubiquitous boundaries have pervaded cultural production through a process that I term “bordering.” I draw on theoretical contributions from the fields of architecture, geography, anthropology, as well as literature and film studies to develop a conceptual framework for examining the ways in which authors, artists, and filmmakers engage with borders as a space to articulate possibilities of encounter, contestation, and transgression. I argue that in these works, the proliferation of borders has called into question the Palestinian cultural and political consensus that created a shared set of narratives, symbols, and places in Palestinian cultural production until the last decade of the 20th century. In its place has emerged a fragmented body of works that create what Jacques Rancière terms “dissensus,” or a disruption of a cultural, aesthetic, disciplinary, and spatial order. Read together, they constitute what I term a “border aesthetic,” in which literature, film, and art produce new types of spaces, narratives, and texts through the ruptures and fractures of the border. I trace the emergence of this aesthetic and the new genres and forms that distinguish it from earlier Palestinian literary, political, and intellectual projects through analyses of the works of Elia Suleiman, Sayed Kashua, Raba’i al-Madhoun, Emily Jacir, Yazid Anani, and Inass Yassin. In their attempts to grapple artistically with the region’s borders, these authors, directors, and artists create new codes, narratives, vernaculars, and spaces that reflect the fragmentation wrought by pervasive boundaries. These works, fluent in multiple mediums, genres, and languages, reveal both the possibilities and the limits of this aesthetic, as they seek to contest borders but nevertheless remain bound by them.
Building the Puerto Rican Literary Canon: Nilita Vientós Gastón’s Enterprise with the Journal Asomante
(2009-02-07) Gonzalez, Enrique
Caliban y Sab: Entre el Caribe y Africa
(2004-02-14) Nelson, Noah
Carried meaning in the Mahābhārata
(2015-12) Rudmann, Daniel Adam; Selby, Martha Ann; Brereton, Joel P., 1948-; Freiberger, Oliver; Talbot, Cynthia; Hiltebeitel, Alf
The Mahābhārata describes itself as both a comprehensive and exhaustive text, incorporating a range of genres while presenting diverse perspectives through a matrix of interacting narratives. Its main story and subtales are the subject of productive contemporary studies that underscore the significance of the Sanskrit epic, though this scholarship is also famously criticized for overlooking literary inquiry. The following dissertation enacts a close reading of four subtales, Nala’s Tale, Rāma’s Tale, Sāvitrī’s Tale, and The Yakṣa’s Questions, in context with the larger work to uncover the implications of a literary study of the Mahābhārata. By conducting translations of passages from the epic, this dissertation builds sites of alliance among frame and subtale, literary and translation theory, critical analysis and contemporary scholarship, as well as the Mahābhārata and other works of literature in order to consider the ways in which meaning is generated throughout the text. Language, constituent parts, and operative principles are found to reverberate in the epic, eschewing didacticism and stasis for literary vitality. Themes of loss, love, disguise, and discovery veer throughout the subtales as sideshadows that at once collaborate and contradict to continuously redefine one another. The Mahābhārata’s self-conscious and reiterative reinterpretation of its own constructs presents critical insights on translation as dialogical correspondence, occurring within utterances as well as between languages. The act of translation, utilized by the poem itself to develop and proliferate significance, reveals difference and bears legibility within the epic.