This dissertation approaches J. M. Coetzees work through the lens of critical animal studies. Puzzling out the frequent appearances of animals in his work, numerous scholars have attempted to answer the following question: What is Coetzee writing about when he writes about animals? But while many have engaged with the...
Unveiling Baubo” describes how the mythical figure Baubo was constructed in nineteenth-century German. Associated with the act of exposing herself to the goddess Demeter, Baubo came to epitomize questions about concealment and unveiling in the budding fields of archaeology, philology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. As I show in my dissertation,...
This dissertation seeks to make sense of the recurring anachronism of aristocracy within early twentieth-century French culture, especially in literature and film. Most studies present the aristocrat as simply one among many examples of the nostalgia, reaction and fascination with the archaic that constituted an important intellectual and artistic tendency...
My dissertation, entitled "Mobile Islands: Home, Migrancy and Identity in French Caribbean Narratives", examines the representation of home, space and migration in French-Caribbean literature and film. Using original narratives of Guadeloupean and Martinican writers and filmmakers, I demonstrate that the sociological phenomenon of mobility between the Caribbean and France has...
The central analytic concern of this dissertation is the problem of privileging one, true, unified, singular self as the essential focus or goal with respect to contemporary French- and English-language novels by women authors from Africa and the Caribbean. In the past, feminist critics, in particular, have read these texts...
In 2008, the term "remix culture" is widely understood to refer to mash-up videos and movie parodies, distributed on websites such as YouTube and authored primarily by white male teenagers. This dissertation argues that digital remix was invented primarily by African American men, who, in the mid-1980s, began using digital...
This dissertation concentrates on problems of quotation, tradition, and translation in the poetry of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. While examining the nature of poetic inheritance, Celan often refers to Russian poetry and, in particular, to Osip Mandelstam, who, in his turn, understands poetry as an essentially dialogic process. Both...
This dissertation examines and seeks to revitalize the concept of "distraction," through an analysis of the changes it underwent in German-speaking philosophy, critical theory, and literature between the World Wars. Defying the sociological and psychological norms of the period, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin refused to treat distraction...
My work in Comparative Literary Studies and French explores the link between the Mande oral tradition and its literature to reveal the presence and absence of the griots' words and their portrayal in the novel. Authors Amadou Hampaté Bâ (L'Étrange Destin de Wangrin); Massa Makan Diabaté (L'Assemblée de Djinns); D.T....
This dissertation is composed of readings of four novellas: two by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller and two by the English novelist George Eliot. It focuses on the motif and concept of treasure (Schatz). Beginning with the figurative and rhetorical employment of "treasure" in the stories, each reading proceeds to...