In a new analysis of Renaissance pastoral that draws on ecocriticism, queer theory, and a historicist approach, this dissertation finds a green and inhuman world that opposes the modern view that humans differ significantly from, and enjoy a right of dominion over, nonhuman species and the environment. Through readings of...
This dissertation argues that British and Ottoman literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are linked and mutually informed in their representations of sovereignty. My study of the poetry, fiction, chronicles and travelogues from these periods demonstrates that both literary traditions respond to the rivalry between the British and Ottoman...
“Love’s Limits: In Persian Poetry and Film” explores the unbounded, unruly, anarchic, border-traversing potential of love through the works of Iranian poets and filmmakers spanning a millennium. In each of the works examined in this study, love precipitates a crisis in relation to a different set of questions or problems...
This dissertation examines the impact of sound on the African literary imagination since the 1970s. I posit the sonority of postcolonial African writing in order to draw out the relatively ignored but remarkably rich stylistic innovations and political interventions oriented around sound. While the orality–textuality debate in African literary studies...
This dissertation studies the sense most neglected in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of the senses: olfaction. It argues that modernity has been marked by a tendency towards deodorization that attempts to establish a monosensorial and odorless civilization shaped by ocularcentrism. Against this tendency, the authors studied here (Friedrich...
Concentrating on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, my dissertation explores the complicated role played by plants in post-war and contemporary German-language literature. Reflecting on and engaging with the intricate dynamics of vegetative life without the prejudice that it simply stands for an inferior form of life to...
In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between...
In December 1889, a few weeks after the monarchy in Brazil was replaced by a republican government, seventy-year-old USAmerican poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem called “A Christmas Greeting” to welcome the “Brazilian brother” into democracy. Though filled with hope and excitement for yet another republic born in the Americas,...
In this dissertation I examine the entanglement between female literacy and female sexuality in nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. I investigate the ways in which male authors used literature as a mechanism for policing female sexuality and stabilizing the traditional family. I argue that nineteenth-century Brazilian fiction exhibits a recurring preoccupation with...