Matching Items (14)
Description
Set in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Midwest America, the collection of short stories follows the complicated trajectory of war-survivor to refugee and, then, immigrant. These stories---about religious prisoners who are not at all religious, about young, philosophizing boys tempting the bullets of snipers, about men retracing their fathers' steps over bridges that no longer exist---grapple with memory, imagination, and the nature of art, and explore the notion of writer as witness.
ContributorsHusić, Vedran (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all.
ContributorsKuzmich, Naira (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A collection of eight stories set in American landscapes that are distorted, anachronistic or magical. The characters in these stories are hunting monsters, touring strange museums, dating shapeshifters and performing death-defying illusions, but the greatest mysteries they encounter are the most human: obsession, loneliness, loss. As they struggle to distinguish fantasy and reality, they also strive to transform and transcend the things that haunt them.
ContributorsMartone, Anthony (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
DescriptionThat Would Only Be the Beginning of Eternity is a short novel spanning four days in the life of Dominic Adler: a sarcastic, cocaine-addled young man who lives in New York and sells advertising space. It explores the tension between past and present and the inevitability of miscommunication.
ContributorsSouthey, Kathleen (Author) / Mcnally, Thomas M. (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Kiran Nagarkar, who won the Sahitya Akedemi Award in India for his English language writing, is a man who attracts controversy. Despite the consistent strength of his literary works, his English novels have become a lightning rod - not because they are written in English, but because Nagarkar was a well-respected Marathi writer before he began writing in English. Although there are other writers who have become embroiled in the debate over the politics of discourse, the response to Nagarkar's move from Marathi and his subsequent reactions perfectly illustrate the repercussions that accompany such dialectical decisions. Nagarkar has been accused of myriad crimes against his heritage, from abandoning a dedicated readership to targeting more profitable Western markets. Careful analysis of his writing, however, reveals that his novels are clearly written for a diverse Indian audience and offer few points of accessibility for Western readers. Beyond his English language usage, which is actually intended to provide readability to the most possible Indian nationals, Nagarkar also courts a variegated Indian audience by developing upon traditional Indian literary conceits and allusions. By composing works for a broad Indian audience, which reference cultural elements from an array of Indian ethnic groups, Nagarkar's writing seems to push toward the development of the seemingly impossible: a novel that might unify India, and present such a cohesive cultural face to the world at large.
ContributorsRochester, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, J. Edward (Thesis advisor) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines how contemporary ideologies of race and “colorblind” discourse are reproduced, deployed, and reimagined in Mexican American literature. It demonstrates that the selected narratives foreground inconsistencies in colorblind ideologies and problematize the instability and perennial reformulation of race definitions in the United States. This study also contributes to the discussion of racial formation in Mexican American literary studies from 1970 to 2010. Chapter One provides the critical and literary context of Mexican American literature from 1970 to 2010. Chapter Two details the process of racial formation in the United States according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Simultaneously, this chapter describes the theoretical framework and concepts of experience and epistemic privilege, mestizaje, and intercultural relations as offered respectively by Paula M. L. Moya, Rafael Pérez-Torres, and Marta E. Sánchez. Chapter Three offers an analysis of racial discourse and assimilation via two autobiographical texts: Oscar Acosta’s The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982). Chapter Four examines the colorblind racial ideology in two texts by Mexican American women authors: Erlinda Gonzales-Berry’s Paletitas de guayaba (1991) and Mona Ruiz’s Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1998). Chapter Five explores the rearticulation of colorblind racial discourse in the “postracial” United States. In this chapter, we examine three works of speculative fiction: The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by Alejandro Morales, Texas 2077: A Futuristic Novel (1998) by Carlos Miralejos, and Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009) by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. By combining theories from Chicana/o Studies, Critical Race and Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies in my textual analysis, my dissertation challenges notions of contemporary colorblind or postracial ideologies that regard present day discussions of race as counterproductive to U.S. race relations.
[Text in Spanish]
[Text in Spanish]
ContributorsFlores, José Roberto (Author) / Rosales, Jesus (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W (Committee member) / Gil-Osle, Juan P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This dissertation is a study of place and the ways that place plays a role in the stories we tell about ourselves and the ways we interact with the world. It is also the study of a moment in time and how a moment can impact what came before and all that follows. By taking on the subject of 1920s anglophone modernism in France I explore the way this particular time and place drew upon the past and impacted the future of literary culture. Post World War I France serves as a fluid social, political, and cultural space and the moment is one of plural modernisms. I argue that the interwar period was a transnational moment that laid the groundwork for the kind of global interactions that are both positively and negatively impacting the world today. I maintain that the critical work connected to the influence of 1920s France on Modernism deserves a more interstitial analysis than we have seen, one that expressly challenges the national frameworks that lead to a monolithic focus on the specific identity politics attached to race, gender, class and sexuality. I promote instead a consideration of the articulations between all of these factors by expanding, connecting and providing contingencies for the difference within the unity and the similarities that exist beyond it. I consider the way that the idea, history, social culture and geography of France work as sources of literary innovation and as spaces of literary fantasy for three diverse anglophone modernist writers: Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and William Faulkner. Their interaction with the place and the people make for a complex web of articulated difference that is the very core of transnational modernism. By considering their use of place in modernist fiction, I question the centrality of Paris as a modernist topos that too often replaces any broader understanding of France as a diverse cultural and topographical space, and I question the nation-centric logic of modernist criticism that fails to recognize the complex ways that language in general and the English language in particular function in this particular expatriate modernist moment.
ContributorsDye, Dorothy Jane (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Canovas, Frédéric (Committee member) / Mallot, Jr., Jack (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Hirano Keiichirou is an award-winning, contemporary Japanese author. He experiments with many styles, and his novels explore a broad range of themes and social issues. Unfortunately, little of his work is available in English translation, and he remains largely unknown to English-reading audiences. This thesis includes a brief overview of Hirano's career as well as translations and analyses of two of his short stories, "Tojikomerareta shounen" ("Trapped," 2003) and "Hinshi no gogo to namiutsu iso no osanai kyoudai" ("A Fatal Afternoon and Young Brothers on a Wave-swept Shore," 2003). These two stories are representative of the second period of Hirano's career, in which he focused on short fiction. They integrate experimental literary styles with contemporary, real-life themes to create effective, resonant literature.
ContributorsGeist, Brandon (Author) / Chambers, Anthony H (Thesis advisor) / Creamer, John (Committee member) / Dutoit, Anne-Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In contemporary Indian literature, the question over which sets of Indian identities are granted access to power is highly contested. Critics such as Kathleen Waller and Sara Schotland align power with the identity of the autonomous individual, whose rights and freedoms are supposedly protected by the state, while others like David Ludden and Sandria Freitag place power with those who become a part of group identities, either on the national or communal level. The work of contemporary Indian author Aravind Adiga attempts to address this question. While Adiga's first novel The White Tiger applies the themes and ideology of the worth of the individual from African American novelists Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, Adiga's latest novel, Last Man in Tower, shifts towards a study of the consequences of colonialism, national identity, and the place of the individual within India in order to reveal a changing landscape of power and identity. Through a discussion of Adiga's collective writings, postcolonial theory, American literature, South Asian crime novels, contemporary Indian popular fiction, and some of the challenges facing Mumbai, I track Adiga's shifts and moments of growth between his two novels and evaluate Adiga's ultimate message about who holds power in Indian society: the individual or the community.
ContributorsGlady, Sarah (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Jack (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013