Through the looking-glass of prison walls: The reflection of the criminal underworld in contemporary Russian literature

Kutuzov, Svetlana Y Yale University 2006 해외박사(DDOD)

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

My study examines the interrelation between the myths, rituals and practices generated by the criminal world and their literary treatment by both professional and nonprofessional authors. I intend to illustrate the mutual influence of two groups of writers. The first group consists of professional writers with no first-hand experience of imprisonment. The second is made up of individuals who have served time in prison and subsequently produced a literary description of their experience. My research focuses on the interaction between myth and ritual in contemporary prison literature. I invoke certain myths and rituals as a limited segment of the broad literary-historical background from which contemporary prison works draw their material. Within this context, I plan to study how all these elements interpenetrate and influence one another in literary representations of prison behavior. The study brings together literary criticism of prison works and the analysis of prison ritual. I pay particular attention to prison theatricality but not exclusively. As practical research on young convicts proves, the material is closely connected to and inseparable from the 'symbolic'; literary and real-life entities are conceived as belonging to one continuum. The works I choose to analyze take as their starting points various literary trends, from the classics of the nineteenth century to dissident writings from Soviet Russia to writings of post-Communist period. These separate tendencies converged, perhaps due to Russian literature's historical practice of addressing social and ethical issues. This preoccupation resulted in the unique position that prison literature enjoys in the Russian canon. I analyze the authors' use of certain descriptive details, the social structures implicitly projected by their works, the formulaic characterization of their protagonists, and other literary techniques. I demonstrate that, although these features serve a literary purpose, they also explicate and reinforce the unwritten code contained within Russian prison literature of the Soviet era with its own mythic tropes and ritual conceptions. An underlying assumption of my work is that the subject matter of literary works is too vital to be neglected for its scientific shortcomings. To the degree psychology is committed to the importance of the personal subjective world of experience, literature cannot be ignored. Whatever literature's specific functions in psychological study may be, the eventual outcome could be the liberalization of psychology's subject matter and, ultimately, its methods and theories. I hope my study will help in developing the literary analysis of ritual within the larger systemic framework of prison culture.

Soldier speech acts in Greek and Roman literature and society

Popov, Nadejda Vladimir Princeton University 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

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

This dissertation surveys the phenomenon of speech acts of common soldiers in Greek and Roman literature and society from Archaic Greece to Late Antiquity. Examples of soldier speech are found in all periods and genres of Greek and Roman literature. Historical evidence from Classical Athens and all periods of Roman history suggests that soldier speech was not only a literary device, but a historical category of speech as well. Thus the main questions I set out to answer are the following: (1) What was the function of soldier speech in ancient literature and society? Also, what was the relationship of literary and historical soldier speech in Greece and Rome? (2) Why do some soldier speeches in literature succeed in their aim, while others fail? A related question is: why are some soldier speeches presented as problematic in the literary tradition?. Based on the evidence of Greek and Roman literature, law, epigraphy, and speech-act theory, I argue that the strong presence of soldier speech in literary and historical evidence suggests that contrary to communis opinio, soldiers in antiquity did not live silently on the fringes of society. Rather, both in literature and in reality, they were vocal and active participants of both everyday life and crucial historical events. In chapter I, I consider the problem of revolutionary soldier speech---the one category of soldier speech that is uniformly presented in a negative light in ancient literature. The subsequent chapters propose solutions to the problem of revolutionary soldier speech. These solutions are the different ways of integrating soldier speech into the military and social framework of the society, whether in literature or in reality. Chapter II is a case study of soldier speech in Classical Athens. I argue that soldier speech was a historical category of speech in Classical Athens, and that the foundation for this category of speech was the Ephebic Oath. The main forum for soldier speech in Classical Athens was not a military setting, however, but a purely civic on---the courtroom. When appearing as accusers or defendants in court, Athenians preferred to speak as soldiers, rather than as civilians, referring to and sometimes even quoting the Ephebic Oath. This specific type of soldier speech---speech inspired by the Ephebic oath---was, therefore, an integral part of Athenian everyday life, and an invaluable tactic for success in the lawcourts. Chapter III is a case study of soldier speech in the Roman Republic. I consider both the historical types of soldier speech (i.e., the military sacramentum, the acclamatio imperatoris, and the carmina triumphalia), and the historiographic portrayal of soldier speech in the period. I argue that Cato, Sallust, and Livy all use soldier speeches as exempla in their works. Their exempla , however, are not only meant to teach Roman soldiers how to speak or how not to speak, but are primarily intended to serve as models of how to write soldier speech for subsequent authors. Finally, chapter IV considers the effectiveness of soldier-commander dialogues in neutralizing dangerous soldier speech in literature. The attribution of this approach in historiography to major historical commanders of the ancient world---most notably, Alexander the Great and Caesar---suggests that ancient authors considered this literary technique to be a plausible solution for actual commanders, who were facing seditious or revolutionary soldier speech.

Inadequate Politics: Literature and Organic Thought in Borges, Arlt and Cuesta

Szwaja-Franken, Jozef Engel University of California, Irvine 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

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

By analyzing the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, and Jorge Cuesta, I address the relationship between literature and politics in the 1920s and 30s in Argentina and Mexico. Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere, I argue that these writers bring about a change in the visibility of literature by abandoning any hierarchy of styles and genres, and making fit for literature all manner of texts and forms of writing. In rejecting any notion of adequation, this literary politics also entered into conflict with the various nationalisms prominent at the time in Argentina, Mexico, and elsewhere, which sought to ground and define literature's place and possibilities. The politics of literature in these writers consisted therefore in changing its form of visibility, a change which I read as a critique of organic thought. Organic thought presents an image of a reconciled, organized whole, and within this whole gives a place for every person and practice. My analysis of Borges focuses on the question of literary language, and I trace a shift in his essays of the 1920s and early 1930s away from nationalist-inflected organic thought; this shift can be described as moving from philology to genealogy. I read Arlt's Aguafuertes portenas as producing a partial, improper way of looking which challenges the organization of literature and subtracts from images of a social whole. In visibly participating in the construction of literature, the aguafuertes change the visibility of literature as a category. I trace Cuesta's critique of nationalism and Marxism in post-revolutionary Mexico and argue that his essays figure literature as the place for a contingent, improper, inadequate politics. Against the state-centered projects for a cultural nationalism, Cuesta thus reserves literature as a practice incompatible with the arithmetic of the organic whole.

Betwixt and between: Multiple perspectives in ethnic literature of the United States

Martin, Holly Erin Emory University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

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

Since the 1960s, ethnic literature in the United States has attained a significant presence in U.S. American literature as a whole. Ironically, what has contributed to the growth and wide acceptance of ethnic works is not that they are becoming more like mainstream literature, but that they are becoming more ethnic. Ethnic minority writers are using their native and heritage languages, customs and world views to create a literature that reflects their characters' multicultural lives. Authors include more than one perspective in their works, creating occurrences of multiple perspectives, to include aspects of their ethnic culture as well as those of the mainstream U.S. culture. In this manner, ethnic authors resist domination by the majority and present works that allow them to express both sides of their dual cultural environment. This dissertation looks at different ways authors from minority ethnic groups in the United States create these multiple perspectives in their works. It begins with an examination of the concept of ethnic categories, including the construction of the category of “white.” The characteristics of minority literatures as delineated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in <italic>Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature</italic> are applied to show how minority literature in the United States is actually moving away from these characteristics and moving toward a more centralized literature due to the authors' abilities to create multiple, multicultural perspectives within their works. To illustrate how this complex depiction of multiple perspectives is accomplished, a chapter is devoted to each of the following narrative strategies: magical realism, the symbolization of place, the incorporation of mythical and legendary figures from the author's heritage culture, humor, and multilingual aspects of ethnic U.S. literature. Each strategy allows for the presentation of multiple worlds, and in many cases, blurs the borders between what might at first appear to be irreconcilable differences.

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.

The allure of Germanness in modern Ashkenazi literature: 1833--1933

Adler Peckerar, Robert James University of California, Berkeley 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

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

This study elucidates the often troubled relations between German and Jewish culture in East Central and Eastern Europe from the period of the so-called birth of modern Jewish literature until the eve of the destruction of European Jewry in the Nazi genocide. The dissertation examines the complex ways in which German literature, language, and modern culture are implicated in and affected by the formation of a distinctly modern Yiddish literature. Rather than working chronologically, I look at a number of textual junctions that book-end modern Yiddish cultural history, exploring this sometimes fruitful and sometimes destructive symbiosis with German culture. In chapter one, I look at the concept of "Modern Yiddish Literature" and its role as an object of study of the nascent field of Yiddish Studies in the 1920s. Two major schools of Yiddish scholarship developed during this period, a Marxist-Leninist one in the fledgling Soviet Union and a "Yiddishist" one in Poland. Both schools investigated the role of Germanized Jewish Enlighteners ( maskilim) who reluctantly turned to the Yiddish language to proselytize the Jewish masses into German liberalism. Their debates on the impact of pre-modern Yiddish (or Judeo-German) literature on the formation of modern Yiddish culture reflect the growing ideological polarization between these schools. In chapter two, I examine the work of the playwright Salomon Ettinger (1801--1856), a figure central in these debates. Ettinger's play Serkele reveals much about the emergence of a modern Yiddish literary idiom and its relation to German. I focus on how this linguistic relationship is read by the Soviet and Polish schools, with particular attention to the linguistic shifts and blurring of boundaries between Yiddish and German. The politicized discussion of German-Yiddish interlinguistic and intercultural relations continues in the third chapter on the magnum opus of the Soviet avant-garde Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak. His book-length poem, The Childe Harold of Dysna, charts the course of Yiddish literature's attraction to and engagement with German literature leading up to its final rejection as German culture was lurching toward fascism in the 1930s.

Competing ideologies and children's books: The making of a Soviet children's literature, 1918--1935

Olich, Jacqueline Marie The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2000 해외박사(DDOD)

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

After the October Revolution of 1917, the impetus to control authorship, the potential of children's literature as a creative medium, and the desire to communicate their visions to child-readers drew many ideologues to children's literature. Pedagogues, political figures, bureaucrats, authors, and book illustrators entered into a public debate about what form a Soviet children's literature should assume. This interdisciplinary dissertation integrates original Russian archival research, recent work in Soviet cultural and social history, and theoretical studies of children's literature to show how the process of creating Soviet children's literature was a contested one. Chapter One, “Children's Literature in Russia: An Overview,” provides a history of children's literature in Russia before 1917. Chapter Two, “An Ambiguous Foundation: Russian Children's Literature, 1918–1924,” explores how the growing commercialization of children's literature complicated the Party's early efforts to establish controls over the creation and publication of children's books. Chapter Three, “Kornei Chukovskii: Skazka, Invisible Ideologies, and Cultural Inheritance,” looks at the preschool skazka, a genre that incorporated anthropomorphic stories, animal and nature tales, rural themes and Western fairy tales. Chapter Four, “Rush to Adulthood: Precepts for Russian Children's Literature, 1924–1928,” considers the efforts of Party supporters to author and promote children's books that reinforced mom “Soviet” versions of reality, society, and the future. Chapter Five, “A First Five-Year Plan for Children's Books?: Children's Literature, 1927–1933,” discusses how the Party labored to reformulate Soviet children's literature just as it undertook other major construction or engineering projects. Chapter Six, “Cultural Compromise: Soviet Children's Literature, 1932–1935,” reveals how children's literature reflected the Party's shift to a more conciliatory cultural policy. Through the lens of children's literature, cultural revolution in Soviet Russia emerges as an ambitious civilizing or modernizing project rooted in the prevolutionary past, expressed in the defining 1920s, and not just a phenomenon restricted to 1928–29. Ultimately, this dissertation draws on children's literature to view how and why powerful actors attempted to establish cultural uniformity, how the process was contested, and how it failed.

Orthodox Yiddish literature in interwar Poland

Caplan, Beatrice Lang Columbia University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

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

In Poland between the two world wars Yiddish literary works in modern forms appeared in the periodicals of the major Orthodox political party Agudes Yisroel. This study situates this Orthodox literature---which has been all but overlooked in Yiddish literary history---in its historical, social and literary contexts, and analyses a representative sample of its works. The study begins by tracing developments in the nineteenth century that prepared the ground for Orthodox writing in modern literary forms. Only in the interwar period, however, did a group of writers crystallize who consciously strove to create what they themselves termed "Orthodox literature." Besides the founding of the Aguda in 1916 and with it an Orthodox Yiddish press, a major factor in the emergence of Orthodox Yiddish literature at this time was Jewish youth culture in interwar Poland that placed much importance on reading and writing. Indeed, articles published in Aguda youth journals make it clear that Orthodox literature was regarded primarily as a tool with which to combat secular Yiddish literature that was blamed for the defection of large numbers of young people from the traditional way of life. The didactic orientation of Orthodox literature is borne out by analysis of a selection of Orthodox prose and poetry, in which ideological concerns generally trump aesthetic value. On subjects ranging from the shtetl to the lyric self, Orthodox writers were constantly limited by what was considered suitable in the Orthodox context; some topics, such as male-female relationships and criticism of parents or teachers, were effectively taboo. Exceptional is the writer V. Laykhter who achieved remarkable aesthetic sophistication within these limitations. In addition to opening up a little known chapter in Yiddish literary history, this study contributes to current scholarship on the transformation of traditional Jewish life in the modern period. Like the political party and the press, Orthodox Yiddish literature exemplifies the way in which the Orthodox establishment adopted and adapted modern forms in the name of preserving tradition---and thereby, often unconsciously, initiated a process of change in what "tradition" is understood to be.

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.

"Francophonie" and Human Rights: Diasporic Networks Narrate Social Suffering

Livescu, Simona Liliana University of California, Los Angeles 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

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

This dissertation explores exilic human rights literature as the literary genre encompassing under its <italic>aegis</italic> thematic and textual concerns and characteristics contiguous with dissident literature, resistance literature, postcolonial literature, and feminist literature. Departing from the ethics of recognition advanced by literary critics Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, my study explores how human rights and narrated lives generate larger discursive practices and how, in their fight for justice, diasporic intellectual networks in France debate ideas, oppressive institutions, cultural practices, Arab and European Enlightenment legacies, different traditions of philosophical and religious principles, and global transformations. I conceptualize the term <italic> francité d'urgence,</italic> definitory to the literary work and intellectual trajectories of those writers who, forced by the difficult political situation in their home countries, make a paradoxical aesthetic use of France, its territory, or its language to promote local, regional, and global social justice via broader audiences. The first chapter theorizes a comparative analysis of human rights literature produced at a global diasporic site by transnational authors circulating between several locations—Middle East, North Africa, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France and the United States—that inform their cultural identities and goals. The second chapter reframes the works of the Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi and Iraqi-Saudi 'Abd ar-Rahman Munif by exploring the ways in which two renowned Arab writers uniquely give voice to the suffering of the outside while writing from the inside of a Moroccan and Iraqi prison, respectively, under the regimes of Hassan II in Morocco and the Baath Party in Iraq. The analysis of the Cold War literary output of Eastern European and Cuban cultural diasporas in France (based on the works by Paul Goma, Lena Constante, Eduardo Manet, and Reinaldo Arenas) completes this critical excursus. Through the writing of dissident, feminist, resistance, dictatorship and prison literature, world exiles, expatriats, refugees, and former prisoners of conscience in France reconfigure cosmopolitan networks and cultural centralities far away from the native centers that matter to them. These exilic writers propose alternate histories, identities, and modes of interaction and map a critical model of understanding global cultural nodal points that can be applied to other world cultural centers or metropoli as well (London, New York, or Madrid are only several examples). Similarly to postcolonialism, authoritarian political systems and coerced migrations unwittingly create new world systems such as the literary and political <italic>Francophonie </italic> (or <italic>Anglophonie</italic>), through which narratives of abuses and rights are filtrated; by and large, these are systems in motion, regionally and globally inflected, and actively involved in the movements of contemporary history. In this process of Francophone cultural remodeling, the disputed universalism of the French language and space gets surprisingly validated by the universal language of rights that diasporic writers in France advance in their efforts to counteract the <italic> language du bois </italic> of the world republics of fear with the human rights lingo of the republic of letters.